3 ways to avoid making horrible digital marketing mistakes

Are you overwhelmed by all the confusing terms related to digital marketing such as search engine optimisation (SEO), pay per click (PPC), social media marketing (SMM), and online reputation management (ORM)? What happened to good old traditional marketing such as adverts, TV, and radio?

In our busy digital business lifestyle, people have been slowly moving away from old-school, traditional media and more time is now spent online via mobile devices such as smart phones and tablets. So whether you want to accept it or not, knowing how you can market through digital mediums is necessary.

With any new medium, mistakes are bound to happen. Below are a few tips to follow when starting with digital marketing.

Understand your market

There has been a huge stampede of small businesses turning to the web for marketing because they believe it will be the best possible way to advertise their business.

Before you start with your digital marketing campaign, research and check if the people you would like to reach, and your ideal customers, are actually looking online for any service or product that you business provides. If your business is complex or expensive, you may find that digital marketing may work well for you, because this medium allows you to publish relevant, high-quality content easily, quickly, and inexpensively.

Understand how digital marketing works

Before you start overhauling your current website or start developing a new one to start marketing your business on the web, it is vital that you understand how digital marketing works, including the search engines. This is not a complex concept to grasp, but in plain English – Google can be seen as a librarian, indexing and finding all the relevant information and sorting the content so that it can be retrieved quickly. This is where keywords plays a big role.

When one of your potential customers types a series of keywords related to your business into Google search, it finds all the relevant content that has been “indexed” and tagged, and it can then present it to the user doing the search in terms of its relevance to the search query. It is actually a very complex process that goes on behind the scenes to display the correct information to the user, but only understanding information regarding the user searching will help you.

When you fully understand the market you are trying to reach, and the keywords and solutions that your clients are searching for, you can start developing a digital marketing strategy to cater for them so that they can find you online. There are many tools available online that you can use to help you with this process and Google offers a free keyword research tool that will tell you how many people are searching for specific keywords per month. I suggest that before you start marketing your business online, do some research regarding the keywords you are going to target.

Choosing the right strategy

There are many various digital marketing methods that you can use to start promoting your business online. You can use search engine optimisation, social media marketing, email marketing, and pay-per-click to name but a few, but all of these won’t be suitable for every type of business, and all these methods perform different functions. This is where understanding your target marketing and business exceptionally well will determine which of these methods will work best for you before you start with a digital marketing campaign.

It is very important that before you start with a digital marketing strategy, you consider why marketing online may be appropriate for your business. The best way to go about this is to research and learn the basics of how digital marketing works, and to make the connection between traditional marketing and digital marketing, because the underlying concepts are the same.