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It’s safe to say that digital marketing campaigns probably follow a bell curve distribution. There are some outlier marketing campaigns that do extremely well, there are some that #FAIL miserably, but most campaigns are right there in the middle. They’re kind of “meh.” To get your digital marketing campaign into the rightmost tail of the bell curve distribution, you need to avoid the following digital marketing mistakes.
Mistake #1: Not tracking your campaign with detailed metrics
In the old analog days, there weren’t a lot of metrics to track. You basically just counted up the total audience, or the total number of impressions, and your job was done. Newspapers and magazines gave you their circulation numbers, and TV shows gave you their Nielsen ratings.
But it’s a whole new ballgame in the digital marketing era. You need to track everything that you do online. And, preferably, you need to do it in real-time so that you can make changes to your campaign on the fly. You don’t want to spend months running the same campaign, only to find out that it bombed at the end. With Facebook ads, for example, you can constantly track performance of your campaign and make changes to boost overall performance.
Mistake #2: Cross-posting the same content on different social platforms
There’s nothing lazier than just cross-posting the same content across every social media platform. Let’s face it – Twitter is not Facebook is not Instagram is not LinkedIn. You need to be developing content that is meant to be unique for each specific social platform. Otherwise, why exactly should people be following you?
Mistake #3: Focusing too much on going viral
Yes, everyone loves a big viral hit. Everyone wants to be the company with the funny YouTube video, the tweet on Twitter that goes viral, or the Instagram post that’s liked by a celebrity and suddenly is the talk of blogs everywhere. But that just doesn’t happen very often. Remember the bell curve distribution? Well, it’s the rare campaign that really blows up and becomes a viral hit.
Think about the world of sports as an analogy. If you’re playing baseball, you don’t want to try to hit a home run every time you go up to the plate. Any coach will tell you that it’s far better just to focus on “making contact and putting the ball in play.” If you’re playing football, you don’t want your quarterback to try to throw long bombs down the center of the field on every play – it’s far better to focus on methodically marching down the field on a long, controlled drive. From this perspective, obsessing about “going viral” is the same as trying to hit a homerun or throw a Hail Mary pass on every play.
Mistake #4: Not developing a brand voice
In the digital era, people expect brands to act and sound much like people. They want Twitter feeds that feel like a real human being is behind it, not some bland corporate PR hack. So don’t be afraid to inject some humor and personality into your online content.
At the end of the day, the only way to get better at digital mistake is by embracing the potential for failure. That might sound like an oxymoron, except that it’s not. If you’re afraid to fail, you’ll be afraid to post any content that hasn’t been pre-approved by legal. If you’re afraid to fail, you’ll just recycle “what worked on Facebook” for every other social platform.
But, as shown above, those are both classic traps that ensnare digital marketer. If you want to succeed in digital marketing, you have to be savvy enough to avoid them.
