Marketing mistakes to avoid in 2023

Digital marketing is the future of marketing and continues to grow each year. According to a Forrester report, globally, the digital marketing sector will spend over R2,5 trillion. Although brands and marketers are placing more importance and money on digital marketing, there are still certain mistakes being made that are wasting time and money. Here are the marketing mistakes to avoid in 2023:

• Not defining an audience or having a clear marketing strategy 

  Many brands roll out campaigns each month without having a clear intention to reach their target audience and achieve a specific action. If a brand does not know who its target audience is and what their needs and wants are, the marketing strategy will likely prove to be fruitless. But, if a brand knows its target audience but does not implement an effective plan with realistic goals, the marketing strategy would also be fruitless. To avoid making this mistake, brands and marketers should know their target audience, document their digital marketing strategy, have the specific goals defined, and set a time frame to achieve these goals.

• Avoiding automation
  Adding the human touch to marketing campaigns is important as humans can read the target audience better than technology can. But, neglecting automation as a whole is a big mistake as brands will waste time, energy, and money. Specific tasks, like core communication and marketing tasks, can be handled by software. This would offer more time to employees to handle the human side of marketing, like formulating the business strategy and assisting clients. Using automation also offers the brand insight into the behaviour of their customers, and they can use this information to create more personalised, targeted campaigns. This will increase sales and the brand’s customer base.

• Posting the same content on all platforms 

  At this point, most brands have a social media presence across several online channels and social media platforms. But, many brands make the mistake of posting the same content on all of them. Different platforms attract different crowds. For example, TikTok and Instagram have a younger audience, while Facebook and LinkedIn often have a more mature or professional audience. To avoid making this mistake, marketers should determine who their target audiences are across different social media platforms and curate the content to cater to the specific audience. To ensure that the content created is suitable, marketers can use factors like location, interests, lifestyle, and income levels to influence the content posted.

• Not promoting the content
  Posting the content that has been created is often not enough for most brands. Some brands have the luxury of posting content and having high engagement levels, but this is often due to popularity and large audiences. To reach optimal results, brands should promote their content. For example, if they post blogs on their website, they should share links to the blog on their social media platforms. Brands could also pay to promote their content on social media to reach larger untapped audiences.

• Failing to track performance 

  Posting targeted content and even promoting it correctly is not enough. If brands don’t track the performance of the marketing strategy and campaigns, they will not know if they are successful. They will also not measure the return on investment, leading to the brands wasting time and money. Once the brand has tracked its performance and gained the data, it can turn it into key performance indicators (KPIs). KPIs help brands as it shows which important factors, like new leads/prospects, sales revenue, and cost per lead, must be focused on.

In Conclusion

A marketing strategy and campaign should not be rocket science and is simple to run if brands use the right tools and avoid making the mistakes we’ve mentioned. Remember to focus on the needs and wants of the target market as the customer is the main priority.