Digital Marketing Strategy: Mistakes to Avoid [Part 2]

As promised, here is the second article in this series, featuring five more common mistakes made in digital marketing strategy and, of course, plenty of tips to help you avoid them in your e-commerce management.

We continue the list we started in the previous post Digital Marketing Strategy: Mistakes to Avoid [Part 1] with material I've taken from the online talk (you can watch the video) I presented at New World Crafts, a virtual event organized by the Hecho a Mano commission of the Guatemalan Exporters Association.

Let's resume this review of the most common mistakes made in digital marketing strategy or planning, from number six to ten.

#6 Doing everything yourself

Avoid this very common mistake in digital marketing strategy by paying attention to these tips:

• Learn to delegate. It's difficult because we know our business, products, and customers better than anyone. But you can't grow while doing everything at once, like an octopus.
• Find a mentor. This means having a role model. In my case, I've always sought out people who have already been mentors or followed the author of a book that fascinated me and researched to understand how they reached their level of expertise.
• Project yourself (where you want to go and how). Knowing the answer will make you realize that you can't do everything alone and that you need the support of a team, even if they are not full-time employees. Not everyone dreams of having a large or medium-sized company, with 50 or 100 people under their charge, and they want to keep their business small, but they still need to seek the support of a consultant, a peer, a partner, etc. Basically, you can't row alone... A rowing team gets there faster when several people are rowing towards the same destination.
• 100% of 0 is less than 50% of something. This means you must be willing to give up a portion of your profits to grow. For example, to reinvest in the business.
• Let go of control. The worst thing about making mistakes is not making decisions. For example, in my own business, a colleague helps me with social media, but sometimes I was the bottleneck that prevented content from being published because I liked to review everything. Now I understand that he should take charge, and if there's a mistake, it's okay; we still move forward and learn something. The worst thing is to do nothing, so you must learn to trust the abilities of other people, because it's better to have complementary skills to yours than to do everything yourself.

#7 Taking courses and not applying anything

Perhaps many are falling into this trap these days, during the pandemic, when courses and certifications have proliferated. To avoid it…

• Learn by doing. Apply this formula: 70% should come from what you learn by doing, 10% from a course, and 20% from what you've researched yourself based on that course. Read and research what motivates you, and you'll learn much more than by participating in every course and talk offered.
• Stop planning. If a course generates 25 tasks you can tackle in your digital marketing strategy, do them one by one. For example, if the first point is that your photos are of poor quality, start by taking the first month to solve only that point and move forward. If you expect your photos to be high quality, your content to be translated, and to post daily on social media, all at once, it will be too overwhelming. You must go step by step.
• Learn to make mistakes and accept them. Our own mistakes are a huge source of learning. Another way to learn is to ensure we are systematizing, meaning I execute an action and record what worked, what I learned, what I can improve, how my processes are, etc.

#8 Working with an agency and not monitoring anything

In mistake #6, we said you should learn to delegate by hiring a consulting team, a collaborator, or a provider. That's perfectly fine, but you can't pay other people to take charge without being aware of what they're doing. How do you avoid making this mistake? Review the following tips:

• Establish a common language through self-education. It's much easier for an agency to work with a client who understands what they do versus someone who disengages and doesn't get involved. Even if you're not an expert in their field, you still need to understand the work they're doing.
• Question the status quo. For example, you've hired an agency for a monthly fee, and they've been running the same social media campaigns for a long time. Ask if that can be modified; don't let it run on autopilot; it's very likely something you can improve. This is a common effort between the provider and the client, something that should be demanded by both parties to achieve good results.
• Measure. You should also measure the results of the digital marketing strategy carried out by an external provider, just as you do with your own actions.
• Document processes. The day the agency stops working with you, you'll have to take over or delegate their responsibilities to someone else, and for that, it's crucial that you understand how they did it, where they were, and why, in order to ensure continuity, improve, stop some actions, incorporate new topics, etc. If you don't know how they were managing the digital marketing strategy and plan, you'll be in trouble because you won't understand, for example, how they defined your audience for mailing campaigns.

#9 Not having access to the accounts managed by the agency

It's still very common for a provider or a designer who created a website and the Analytics account to leave with all the access credentials when the relationship ends. When it's time for the client to take over, they have no way to log in and manage those tools. To avoid such a drama, you must…

Be an administrator of everything. Even if you're not using them daily, you must have access to your hosting, social media accounts, Mailchimp, Google Analytics, etc. If you don't have the administrator usernames and passwords to grant roles to other members of your team working on the digital marketing strategy, everything will go very wrong.

#10 Comparing yourself only to your local and same-industry competitors

Do you only follow your direct competitors on social media to check if your posts have more likes and comments than theirs? Doing only that is not the most correct approach, so follow these suggestions for your digital marketing strategy:

• Understand that the world is a small place and competition comes from everywhere. Therefore, observing your immediate and direct competition is not enough.
• Understand that customers have mental references that come from other industries. You should always keep your eyes wide open because these companies are setting rules that customers have become accustomed to and you should follow, such as, if they make an inquiry or a complaint, the response arrives in less than 24 hours. Ultimately, these become habits that people adopt, regardless of the industry they come from: they can be banks or real estate companies selling apartments.
• Learn to do benchmarking. Compare yourself with your peers (local and in the same industry), but also select international benchmarks and from different sectors than yours. Look at how you're doing with your digital marketing plan and in different areas of the business. Observe who is more advanced in specific topics: for example, companies in the financial world are at the forefront of omnichannel and holistic customer management, while Amazon is a reference with its service style that doesn't question the consumer.

So far, we've covered 10 very common mistakes in digital marketing strategy and several suggestions to help you avoid them. Hopefully, this material will help you reflect, optimize your actions, and find solutions for your e-commerce, in order to take your business to the next level. Soon I will bring the last article with more ideas, so I invite you to follow our social media channels to know when it will be published on our blog.

Keep reading

• Digital Marketing Strategy: Mistakes to Avoid [Part 3]
• Digital Marketing Strategy: Mistakes to Avoid [Part 1]
• What is and why you should care about the Omnichannel Maturity Model for CX management
• Vibe Coding: from idea to digital product in a matter of hours
• The Theranos scam that forced a rethinking of digital marketing agencies' ethics