Digital Marketing Strategy: Mistakes to Avoid [Part 3]

We continue with the series of articles where we share common mistakes made in digital marketing strategy, along with many suggestions you can follow to avoid them. This way, I bring you the material presented in the online talk (video available) I recently gave for New World Crafts, an event organized by our friends from the Handmade Commission of the Guatemalan Exporters Association.

We have already added 10 mistakes to our list through previous publications titled Digital Marketing Strategy: Mistakes to Avoid Part 1 and Part 2. Let's now look at the last five, from number eleven to fifteen.

#11 Not working on your personal brand

We are referring to you, the professional behind the business. Don't make this mistake by following these tips:

• Show who is behind your products or services. Whether it's a small or large company, you shouldn't let any mistakes you make be reflected in the brand. That should be a crisis management of something personal. You shouldn't mix those two areas.
• Tell your story. Following on from the previous point, this also helps your digital marketing strategy because your customers will know that there is someone like them behind the brand.
• Take care of your social media, even if you don't like to expose your private life. You don't have to display your most personal, family, or home life, but if you feel the need to show your dog because it motivated you to create a new pet product, that could be a very good story. It's also interesting to talk about your beginnings or what motivated you during your student days. Tell what moved you to create your business and what knowledge you used to devise your products. See how you are showing your personal brand, in addition to your company's purpose.

#12 Only talking about your products or services

How boring that sounds. Nobody follows a brand like that on social media. A digital marketing strategy is much more than that:

• Remember the brand's purpose, as this is where the communication pillars emerge. When you build your social media strategy, you need to know how to convey the benefits of using your product or service, how to inspire and motivate your followers, etc. Look for communication elements that are more than just talking about what you sell.
• Focus on your customer and involve them in content creation. In addition to asking directly, also observe what they do on social media to get ideas. What do customers do with your products? What other brands do they follow? How do they interact with those brands? This way, you will be creating people-centric content.

#13 Forgetting to build networks

Having a presence on social media as a brand or company is not building networks. To avoid this mistake in your digital marketing plan, reflect on these ideas:

• Have an active LinkedIn account. This social network is a world apart and goes beyond job searching. It is the right place for the person behind the business to work on their personal brand, regardless of whether they manufacture pharmaceutical products, are a lawyer, or make artisanal items. In other words, entrepreneurs should be on this social network, especially in these days of almost 100% remote life.
• Make sure your close network knows what you are doing and that you know what they are doing. It is a tool to stay up-to-date on what is happening in the industry and with our peers. With the hustle and bustle of daily work, we lose sight of people, and being aware of their current reality allows us to understand how we can help them or how they can help us. If I disconnect from the moment I finished studying or from when I left my last job at a company, by focusing only on my entrepreneurship, I am losing many opportunities to contribute to others and to use the skills of others for my business. Being connected is part of an optimal digital marketing strategy.

#14 Focusing on attracting new customers and forgetting current customers

This is very common, especially when we have a budget for a digital marketing plan. To avoid it...

• Systematize customer information (Excel or CRM, the format doesn't matter). You need to know who they are, where they come from, what they have bought from you, and when. If you only focus on generating greater visibility for more people, so that others learn about your brand and buy from you, and you are forgetting your customers because you think it's difficult for them to buy from you again, that is not building relationships.
• Build presence (branding). You should be concerned about your customers, and this is one way to do it. It is part of the relationship that a brand has with them. For example, if your business is B2B, you can make a call and ask your client how their sales are going, how they have rethought their approach to the crisis, or comment on how interesting their Instagram campaign has been; incidentally, also inquire about who they are doing it with. You can do something similar with your customers in a B2C business, using your social media or mailings to involve them in surveys and thus measure how things are going with them. You have to be open to collaborating and sharing.
• Care about them (what they need, how their purchase went, how they project themselves). Having genuine concern, beyond sales, should be part of your digital marketing strategy. In the end, it is cheaper to retain and build loyalty with an existing customer than to acquire a new one. With them, you can achieve a new sale, get them to recommend you to their friends, or get them involved with your brand.

#15 Believing in magic

Thinking that a successful brand became known overnight is a mistake. There is always an agency behind it that has worked hard to generate value for its client, and after several attempts, it worked out. Look at these tips to avoid this mistake:

• Be disciplined. This means that if you want to have a healthy life, for example, you must take care of your diet, sleep well, and exercise. If you don't do any of those three things, having the purpose is useless. The same goes for your digital marketing strategy: if you want to have the best e-commerce on the market, but you only dedicate half an hour a day and not a single dollar to it, you won't get anywhere with your project.
• Develop habits. Nothing is learned or achieved overnight; it takes years to accomplish.
• Make a sustained effort over time. Good results come from this, although not everything you do will work, which is why...
• Practice a culture of experimentation. If it didn't work today, you might achieve it later.

To conclude

There is no magic recipe. Make things happen, acknowledging your limits and resources, perhaps by stopping doing something to focus on other topics. And, of course, keep learning, don't stop, keep exploring.

With this last article, we have added 15 very common mistakes in a digital marketing strategy and many ideas for you to avoid making them. I hope this material is very useful for improving the actions you take to manage your e-commerce and achieve your goals.

Would you add more mistakes to the list? Do you have more tips to share? Tell us in the comments section.

Keep reading

• Digital Marketing Strategy: Mistakes to Avoid [Part 1]
• Digital Marketing Strategy: Mistakes to Avoid [Part 2]
• Vibe Coding: from idea to digital product in a matter of hours
• The Theranos scam that forced a rethinking of digital marketing agencies' ethics