8 Biggest Mistakes Digital Marketers Make and How to Avoid Them

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Hello everyone! Welcome to today’s webinar, and thanks for joining! Today Mike Tomita, Director of Online Marketing here at Marketo, is going to be talking to us about the 8 biggest mistakes that digital marketers of all experience levels make and we how we can avoid them!

Before we get started, just wanted to run through a couple of housekeeping items.
This webinar is being recorded, and the slides will be sent to you after the webinar!
If you have questions, please enter them in the chat box in the bottom left and we will get to them after the webinar.
Want to encourage you to post on social using #mktgnation
There’s a short survey at the end of the webinar that we would love if you could spend a few seconds filling out!
And with that, I’m going to hand it over to Mike!

Not knowing your audience (Poor keyword research - not fining all the right terms, finding the wrong terms, not discovering negative terms)

Take some time out to think about you audience
Who are they?
What do they care about?
How do they talk?

If you are selling motorcycles, how will your audience search for this?
What terms will resonate with them? What images and colors?
What about accessories? Will mentioning the model get more clicks?
Writing copy that resonates with your audience shows authenticity and builds credibility

SEO reinforces best practices
What’s good for SEO will benefit all areas of your digital marketing
Think of it as your guiding light to the land of great digital marketing

Good content is essential for SEO, online ads, social media, etc
This content could be ebooks, customer reviews, product reviews, travel tips, etc.
SEO also encourages collaboration across marketing and development/IT
As a digital marketer any time you can get closer with your dev team or IT take it.

What you don’t know CAN hurt you
Many site have serious technical issues, but would never know because they don’t affect the rendering of the site
At least on a desktop browser. You may have serious mobile site issues and not realize it.
Google will actually
While you this may not affect your user experience it will hurt your organic search rankings
Even if organic search rankings are not one of your objectives, and I can’t see how they wouldn’t, they still influence your paid search performance

Some resource to learn SEO include our Blog or sites like Moz, SearchEngineLand, or SearchEngineWatch

Diminishing returns
PPC: expensive, get into bidding war
SEO: time suck, worth it?

It’s a constant moving target on the organic side
Google is constantly moving results up and down in an attempt to see which provides the most value to the end user
This is a snapshot from our Google Search Console account and you can see that even for searches that include our own brand name average position 1.2

Make sure you have a say in your company’s social media strategy
It is more than just a branding and corporate communication channel

The top marketing channels they all expected to engage with their customers the most are all digital channels that are perfectly suited to personalization.
So this is what marketers are predicting will be the future, but what about the consumers they’re trying to reach?

SnapChat views were 10 Billion per day.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-28/snapchat-user-content-fuels-jump-to-10-billion-daily-video-views
Numbers like this this are undeniable
If you’re thinking that this no opportunity for advertising on SnapChat, just remember the same was said about Facebook a few years ago.

In Q1 of 2016 Facebook’s ad revenue was reported at $5.2 billion
In 2016 Facebook is project to claim about 12% of the global digital-advertising market
up from 10.7% last year and 8.6% in 2014
In 2016 Google’s share is projected to decline to 31%
Down from 33% in 2015 and 35% two years ago.
Source: http://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-revenue-soars-on-ad-growth-1461787856

This is an example from our own marketing mix here at Marketo
In this data we can see that our social media campaigns brought in 58% more leads that our paid search campaigns
However the quality of those paid search leads is considerably better and they produced 198% more sales opportunities
The medium should be kept in context though.
In paid search people are actively looking for a product or service
In social media they’re attention is caught by an ad while they scrolling through posts on every subject under the sun

What I’ll a lot is the same ad creative, ad text, and landing page used across paid search, display, retargeting, social media, and email campaigns
While this may be efficient from a time and resource point of view it is leaving a lot on the table in terms of optimization
Digital channels and not created equal and your tactics are not “one size fits all”
There are different mindsets, audiences, tolerance for ads, and device preferences on different channels
You will get the best performance when you match your audience expectations on each channel

Keep in mind how your audience is using each channel
Are they looking at photos on Instagram? Better have a highly visual ad.
Are they on Twitter and therefore probably on a mobile devices? Make sure your post click experience is optimized for mobile.

Focusing on the wrong metrics (are you tracking? If not, shame!)

The biggest mistake is not tracking your programs, but I am going to assume you are all doing that already
Get comfortable with Date
REAL comfortable. Learn to love it.

All Channels are not created equal

Remember this slide from earlier in the presentation?
If I were to focus

Remember this slide from earlier in the presentation?
If I were to put my pirate patch on and focus only on the lead metrics I would miss the most important part of the story
If conversions are your goal then make sure you look past click-through-rate and cost-per-click per click metrics down to conversions and order value.

Testing may seem like a luxury, but it is critical to your success
There is no way to incrementally optimize your campaigns without testing
Without testing you are just taking a shot in the dark and hoping it works out
So how do you get started?

When you are getting started with testing I recommend testing 1 thing at a time
This will give you experience in running your tests and analyzing your data while providing easy to implement results

Images, Call to Actions – Download vs Submit, Headlines – long vs short, questions vs statement, Ad Copy, Ad Sizes and placement, Time of the Day, Day of the week, gadgets and Elements on the landing pages. Don’t forget to also test different channels, some audience might interact more with you on LI vs FB vs Google.

This is not a complete list, the main thing is to start small and then keep building on it

The world of digital advertising is changing at a furious rate
As marketer we need to constantly keep ourselves up to date on the latest changes
It is probably the most important thing we can do

Don’t let the future take you by surprise

Great, thanks so much Mike! We are about to head to questions, but before we do I’d like to remind you that there is a brief survey after this webinar. If you wouldn’t mind taking 30 seconds to complete it to let us know your thoughts, we would really appreciate it!

Now on to the questions!
1. Do you have an SEO agency or do it in house?
2. Which social networks do you recommend trying first?
3. What kinds of tools do you use for testing?
4. How big is your digital marketing team?
5. How much do you spend on paid search compared to social media?

That’s all the time we have for today, but thank you Mike for your valuable insights, and thanks to all of your for joining! Have a great day!