If you are a business owner, marketing director, solopreneur,  chief marketing officer or a startup, chances are that you have some skin in the game with regards to expanding your branding efforts, website design, running marketing campaigns or undertaking social media marketing activities.

For example, some of the common questions on your mind may be:

• How do I improve my conversion rates?
• How do I drive traffic to my website through the search engines?
• How do I generate more revenues?
• How do I acquire paying customers?
• How do I get them on-board quickly?
• How do I create brand loyalty?

These are all very important questions to consider but a successful digital marketing strategy does not come without its own challenges.

I’m outlining 4 common mistakes that I see and how to avoid it:

1.You dive head first without looking

The first challenge I see that business owners want to dive-in blindly without giving any regard to their approach or an underlying strategy guiding them.

They find the term digital marketing “sexy” and thus, chase the tactics without any regard for the who, the what, the where and the why.

For example, things such as who will be driving your strategy, what are your goals, where do you want to be in near-term vs long-term and why do you need go after content marketing vs social media marketing.

This is why a lot of the times, the digital marketing strategy does not really produce the desired results for companies and they are drifting along without any purpose in the digital space, making little headway.

Instead of just trying to wing it, when businesses open up their eyes and minds, I find they increase their chances of success.

If you’re handling the digital marketing strategy for your organization, make it a point to study how and where your competitors are finding success. Keep a pulse on that.

With an informed approach, you can to formulate better plan to help you boost your traffic and visibility to the relevant customers.

2.You are building your social media presence inconsistently

Sometimes, the business owners take on their marketing activities passively, almost like an afterthought. They post the content every now and then. They do not participate in maintaining consistent social media presence.

When there is no proper stream of content being provided to the customers, business owners lose their chance to create a proper following or managing expectations of their target market. Today’s savvy audience expects consistency from you.

The solution is participating more proactively. Today’s social media management tools (e.g. Buffer, Hootsuite, Socialoomph etc) come handy. You should make it a point to provide content on a consistent basis.

You need to establish the goals of how to produce your content, what type of content to provide and how to create a constant flow of content that’s being provided to your customers.

By setting aside proper resources to your digital marketing strategy instead of taking laid back approach to it, you will find that you can easily deal with this challenge with an ease. It will alls loyal customers can then be incorporated into your strategy as your brand ambassadors, thus, expanding your digital marketing strategy even further.

3.You make accountability an afterthought

The third challenge that I see is around accountability. As business owners develop their digital marketing strategy, they do not pay enough attention to the resource assignment, roles and responsibilities.

Accountability becomes a challenge especially when there is a lack of clarity on who is responsible for what. A lot of the times, businesses place the social media marketing responsibility on an individual’s head. It may work out if you are a small business owner or a solopreneur but it never works out well if the you are leading a bigger organization.

A solution is to agree on organizational goals and objectives, create an overarching strategy, establish responsibilities, set metrics and having consistent checkpoints to track hiccups and wins. Creating such an approach will allow you to make the most of your resources, their efforts and be able to work as a team.

Example of roles are content creator, website SEO, copy writer, social media marketing manager, lead generation specialist, CRM manager etc. It will allow you to foster a better informed digital marketing strategy.

4.You forget the very essence of what digital marketing is all about

Finally, I sometimes find that businesses lack incorporating the real human elements behind the company. Digital marketing and social media is all about making a personal connection with your customers and making them realize that the brands they are interacting with have real people behind it.

When your customers see that the real faces behind your brand, they find it relevant and relatable.

The solution is that a part of your content you provide to your customers should also include the faces behind the brand. Think about incorporating customer success stories, testimonials, employee’s typical day in the company, contests, featuring employees and executives and their stories, driving engagement with hashtags and rewarding for best captions etc.

You will notice significant improvement in engagement.

Final Thoughts

The world is becoming more and more digital. There is an ever-growing need for the businesses and startups to consistently improve your social media presence. Big kudos if you are already committed to building your brand and improving your digital outreach.

Make sure you avoid these 4 common mistakes. It will give you more bang for the buck. Adopt healthier and proactive approaches and enjoy the success the digital marketing, as a discipline, offers to you.