Digital Marketing Mistakes You Should Stop Doing Now

96% of prospective clients I talk to obviously wants to do digital marketing.

There’s curiosity, interest, enthusiasm, wonder, and a sense of fear. Most clients mean well for themselves and for their businesses.

Some of them understand the power of content marketing. Since some clients are already used to traditional paid advertising on newspapers and magazines, PPC advertising looks like the perfect add on to their efforts.

Regardless of what clients think, do, feel, and want, chances are that you are doing digital marketing wrong. So horribly wrong that I am forced to write about it today with the fear that you take the wrong steps and write off the Internet itself as a potential medium to do good for your business.

Here are a few ways you are getting digital marketing wrong. Really, really wrong:

Your expectations are Screwed Up

With the Internet, it’s easy to “expect” what you usually don’t when you do traditional advertising.

Clients who spend on advertising on newspapers, magazines, radio spots, and television are very well aware of sales funnels, the importance of branding, the need to get attention first and then try to push potential customers down the funnel, and the impact of long-term advertising on a continuous basis.

Businesses hire PR firms, advertising agencies, and have full-time departments to make this happen.

On the Internet, however, everything changes. The same client who spends $56,000 on just 4 full page ads on a newspaper and doesn’t expect much (in terms of inbound calls, leads, or sales) now expects his Google Advertising to have a CTR of 9%, get 46% conversion on a landing page (if he has one), and make about 150% ROI on his campaign spend.

Then, there are clients who try to take the organic route with blogging, content marketing, and social media not even knowing what to expect. They also don’t realize just much work organic marketing really is.

The digital marketing spectrum is varied and delivers different results depending on what you are trying to do. Get your expectations right.

You Ignore The Digital Marketing Engine

I always believed that digital marketing is like a naturally aspirating v12 engine – all cylinders have to fire.
Yet, businesses get hung up on any one digital marketing channel that seems to have managed to mesmerize the world at a time. For a full stretch of a few years, businesses only focus on one (or a few) channels to make digital marketing work.

Remember all that craze for SEO? Until Google had to slap, maim, and slaughter a few popular online magazines and well-known businesses, the rage for SEO services never died.

Apparently, it still didn’t die. Even now you might yourself: “Is SEO Dead?”, “Does SEO Work?”, “I took a course and SEO seemed so important”.

SEO is critical for your business. It’s just that you can fuss about it so much that you do more SEO and less of your business.

Then, you had social media, influencer marketing, PPC, landing pages, Native Advertising, and Mobile advertising.

Those are channels. Why do you get so obsessed with one channel over the other? If you want to do digital marketing right, try to touch all of the channels available to you.

You Are a Cheapo

Note: If you aren’t cheap, please ignore this. But there are lots of people out there…

You pay peanuts, you won’t get the bots. Thanks to the rise of freelance job boards and bidding sites along with the rise of a worldwide clutch of freelancers, the real value of “delivering” digital marketing is gradually diminishing.

Content is critical and yet you want to pay shit like $3 for a 1800 word blog post.
You want infographics done but you won’t pay more than $26 per infographic.
Did I hear you ask for a video editor for $150 per month?

You see? You can’t expect quality work without paying a premium for it. That’s just the way it is.

Results aren’t just about 2+2

It’s “expected” that you demand results from your staff, agencies, and freelancers. You are paying for it, so why won’t you? You’ll do well to understand that with digital marketing, results don’t come just because you put 2 and 2 together.

It’s way more complicated than that. Digital marketing is like managing life. Nothing in your life or mine is as straight forward as it might first seem. Think of all the plans you make, the relationships you manage and the complexity of managing people in general. Think about how complex your business is, by itself, to run.

If you buy an office and load it up with fancy furniture, would clients line up at the door?
If you married tomorrow, would you live happily ever after?

Don’t go out expecting that your Facebook campaign will make you millions. There’s work that goes into it and then there’s the concerted effort that goes into every other aspect of digital marketing to make it all work.

Be fair to yourself, the system, the medium, and to people who work for you.

Which of these mistakes are you doing with digital marketing? Tell me what you think.