Digital Marketing Strategy: Mistakes You Should Avoid [Part 2]

As promised, here I bring the second article in this series, with five more mistakes that are made very often in digital marketing strategy and, of course, with many tips for you to avoid making them in the management of your e-commerce.

We continue the list we started in the previous post Digital Marketing Strategy: Mistakes You Should Avoid [Part 1] with material I have taken from the online chat (you can see it on video) that I presented at New World Crafts, a virtual event that was organized by the Handmade of the Association of Exporters of Guatemala commission.

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

# 6 Do everything yourself

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

• Learn to delegate. It's difficult because we know our business, products, and customers better than anyone else. But you can't grow while you're doing everything at once, like an octopus.
• Find a mentor. This means having a referral. In my case, I have always looked among people who have already been mentors as such or I have followed the author of a book that fascinated me and researched to understand how she reached her level of expertise.
• Project yourself (where you want to go and how). Knowing the answer, you will realize that you cannot do everything alone and that you need the support of a team, even if they are not fully dedicated collaborators. Not everyone dreams of having a large or medium-sized company, with 50 or 100 people under their care, and they want to keep their business small, but anyway they have to seek the support of a consultant, a colleague, a partner, etc. Basically, you can't paddle alone ... A rowing team arrives faster when there are several people paddling to the same destination.
• 100% of 0 is less than 50% of something. This means that you must be willing to give up a portion of your earnings to grow. For example, to reinvest in the business.
• Let go of control. The worst thing about being wrong is not making decisions. For example, in my own business, a colleague supports me with social networks, but sometimes I was the funnel that did not allow the content to get published because I liked to review everything. Now I am clear that he must take charge and if there is a mistake, nothing happens, we still move forward and learn something. The worst thing is to do nothing, that's why you must learn to trust the abilities of other people, because it is better to have complementary skills to yours than to be doing everything yourself.

# 7 Take courses and apply nothing

Perhaps many are falling into that error 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 yourself have investigated from that course. Read and research what motivates you and you will learn much more than participating in all the courses and talks they offer you.
• Stop planning. If a course comes up with 25 tasks that 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 on. If you want your photos to be of quality, that your content is translated and publish every day on social networks, all at the same time, it will be too overwhelming. You must go step by step.
• Learn to make mistakes and accept it. Our own mistakes are a huge source of learning. Another way to learn is to make sure that we are systematizing, that is, I execute an action and record what resulted, what I learned, what I can improve, how are my processes, etc.

# 8 Working with an agency and not keeping track of it

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

• Establish a common language through self-education. For an agency it is much easier to work with a client who understands what they are doing versus someone who disengages and does not get involved. Even if you are not an expert in their field, you should still understand the work they are doing.
• Question the status quo. For example, you've hired an agency for a monthly fee and have been running the same social media campaigns for a long time. Ask if that can be modified, do not leave it running on automatic pilot, it is very likely that it is something you can improve. This is a common job between the supplier and the client, something that must be required by both parties to obtain good results.
• Measure. The results of the digital marketing strategy carried out by an external provider must also be measured, just as you do with your own actions.
• Document the processes. The day the agency stops working with you, you will have to take charge or refer their obligations to someone else and for that it is crucial that you understand how they were doing it, at what point they were and why, in order to give continuity, improve, stop doing some actions, incorporate new topics, etc. If you don't know how they were carrying out the digital marketing strategy and plan, you will be in trouble because you will not understand, for example, how they defined your audience for mailing campaigns.

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

It is still very common that a provider or designer who created a website and Analytics account, the day the relationship is terminated, leaves with all access. When it comes time to take care of that, the client has no way in to manage those tools. To avoid drama like this, you must ...

Be an administrator of everything. Even if you are not giving them a specific daily use, you must have access to your hosting, social media accounts, Mailchimp, Google Analytics, etc. If you do not have the users and passwords as administrator to grant roles to other members of your team who work on the digital marketing strategy, everything will go very wrong.

# 10 Compare yourself only with your local and 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 just that is not the right thing to do, so follow these tips for your digital marketing strategy:

• Understand that the world is a handkerchief and that competition comes from anywhere. Therefore, observing your immediate and direct competition is not enough.
• Understand that customers have mental references that come from other industries. You should always be with your eyes wide open because those companies are defining rules that customers have become accustomed to and you should follow as, for example, that if they make a query or a claim, the response arrives in less than 24 hours. In the end, they become habits that people adopt, no matter what industry they come from: it can be banks or real estate companies that sell apartments.
• Learn to do benchmark. Compare yourself with your peers (local and from the same industry), but also select international references and from areas other than yours. See how you are doing with your digital marketing plan and in different areas of the business. See who is more advanced on specific topics: for example, companies in the financial world are at the forefront of omnichannel and holistic customer management, while Amazon is the benchmark with its style of service that does not question the consumer.

So far we have 10 very common mistakes in digital marketing strategy and several suggestions for you to avoid them. Hopefully this material will help you to 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 networks so that you know when it will be published on our blog.