Digital Marketing Mistakes Big Businesses Make

By: Jonathan Stec

Published: September 7th, 2024

I have been in the digital marketing world a long time, from big agencies to niche agencies, consulting projects for major corporations to startups, fractional CMO gigs, and working on marketing projects everyday, I have seen a lot. I have seen and worked with every iteration of the Google Ads interface and even had the displeasure of speaking with Yahoo! reps about “paid inclusion”. I have learned a lot about what to do but have seen plenty of what not to do.

Major digital marketing mistakes that big businesses often make include:

1. Failure to Track and Measure Performance

  • Mistake: Not implementing proper tracking mechanisms or failing to analyze marketing performance effectively.
  • Consequence: Inability to measure success accurately and make informed adjustments.
  • Fix: Implement both direct channel (examples include conversion tracking from Google Ads, Facebook, Snapchat, and any other individual channel tracking) and cross-channel tracking (examples include Google Analytics, Channel Advisor, and any other multi-platform tracking with attribution reporting). Note: In most cases, only use your direct channel tracking for optimizing that channel.

2. Neglecting Data-Driven Decision Making

  • Mistake: Relying on intuition or outdated practices rather than leveraging data and analytics.
  • Consequence: Missed opportunities for optimization, ineffective campaigns, and wasted budget.
  • Fix: Intuition and experience are certainly important, but data and analytics do not lie. For example, if page A used to convert well, that doesn’t mean you should not test page A against a challenger. Always be A/B split testing!

3. Failing to Personalize Customer Experience

  • Mistake: Using generic messaging and not tailoring content to specific audience segments.
  • Consequence: Reduced engagement, lower conversion rates, and diminished customer loyalty.
  • Fix: “Well made jeans that look nice” vs “Jeans reinforced where it counts for wild horse riding yet looking as stylish as the classic cowboy”. See the difference?

4. Ignoring Mobile Optimization

  • Mistake: Not ensuring that digital content and ads are optimized for mobile devices.
  • Consequence: Poor user experience on mobile, leading to higher bounce rates and lost sales.
  • Fix: It is surprising when a well named brand has a poor mobile experience and I still see this happen to this day. How your site performs and looks on desktop will differ than mobile, so ensure that you optimize the site in a mobile environment too.

5. Underestimating Social Media Management

  • Mistake: Inadequate attention to social media engagement, including failing to respond to customer comments or complaints.
  • Consequence: Damaged brand reputation and lost opportunities for building customer relationships.
  • Fix: You can’t be present 100% of the time, but maintain some type of upkeep and interaction on your social platforms. Otherwise, remove them.

6. Overlooking Content Quality

  • Mistake: Prioritizing quantity over quality in content production.
  • Consequence: Low engagement rates and decreased authority and trustworthiness in the industry.
  • Fix: Sure, having a lot of content creates more ranking opportunities but what good is that traffic if the presentation isn’t at least relevant? If you have a choice of splitting your resources into more but lower quality parts or less but higher quality parts (EATT), opt for the latter.

7. Misaligning with Brand Values

  • Mistake: Running campaigns that are inconsistent with the brand’s core values or messaging.
  • Consequence: Alienation of core customers and potential damage to brand integrity.
  • Fix: It is one thing to target users based on your products, but it is another to target the wrong customers for your products. You want to avoid customers that are hard to deal with (habitual low ratings, high return rates, etc) so you must understand who you are targeting. In a world of AI and automation, this is where customer data and lists can be of great value.

8. Lack of Integration Across Channels

  • Mistake: Operating with disjointed marketing efforts across different digital channels.
  • Consequence: Fragmented customer experience and inefficient use of resources.
  • Fix: Ever been on a site and you have multiple pop ups for different promos? Or you are doing SEO for a keyword you are not sure the value yet your paid team is bidding heavily on a different term? This is where a CMO, brand strategist, or someone to align the marketing initiatives can be extremely useful.

9. Ignoring SEO Best Practices

  • Mistake: Failing to optimize content for search engines or neglecting ongoing SEO efforts.
  • Consequence: Lower search engine rankings, reduced visibility, and decreased organic traffic.
  • Fix: Hire an SEO professional, and as a large brand, you should absolutely already have at least one in house full-time, a consultant, and agency on retainer. Do you learn and try every task on your own? Plumbing, electric, car maintenance, and so on? No? Then why even risk it with something as important as your brand’s digital presence?

10. Not Adapting to Changing Trends

  • Mistake: Sticking with outdated strategies and not adapting to new digital marketing trends or technologies.
  • Consequence: Falling behind competitors and missing out on innovative opportunities.
  • Fix: Adapt. The fastest and most efficient way to do this is work with those that have and know how to do this.

11. Inadequate Crisis Management

  • Mistake: Poor handling of negative feedback or public relations crises on digital platforms.
  • Consequence: Escalation of issues and potential long-term damage to brand reputation.
  • Fix: Hire a professional consultancy to talk it through and devise a plan. Ideally, they have done this multiple times and can do it in their sleep.

12. Misallocating Budget

  • Mistake: Inefficient allocation of marketing budget, either overspending on low-return channels or underfunding high-impact strategies.
  • Consequence: Suboptimal return on investment (ROI) and ineffective marketing campaigns.
  • Fix: It all starts at the top: think about what your goal or objective is. If something does not align with it, cut it, reduce it, or redefine the budget being allocated to it (ROI budget vs brand awareness budget).

13. Neglecting User Experience (UX)

  • Mistake: Ignoring the importance of a seamless and intuitive user experience on digital platforms.
  • Consequence: High bounce rates, lower conversion rates, and decreased customer satisfaction.
  • Fix: At GSI Marketing (then to become eBay Marketing Solutions), we had a department for UX because it IS that important! With so much time spent online, users are picky about their experiences (unless if you have a product that is so high demand or necessary they would buy it in a landfill).

14. Over-Reliance on Paid Advertising

  • Mistake: Relying too heavily on paid ads without building a solid organic presence.
  • Consequence: Increased long-term costs and vulnerability if ad budgets are reduced or stopped.
  • Fix: Allocate budget towards your organic optimization efforts. Start with your targets, then strategize.

15. Over-Reliance on Organic

  • Mistake: Relying too heavily on organic without building a solid paid advertising presence.
  • Consequence: Competitors stealing brand searches, uncontrolled messaging, algorithm and landscape volatility.
  • Fix: Have you Googled your brand and seen who is bidding on it lately? Guaranteed all your competitors and some random others. Protect your brand and pay for ads. It isn’t nearly as costly as losing a customers. Additionally, you cannot control the messaging as readily with organic as paid ads. The pluses are way too many to list here.

So there are 15 mistakes and that is it? Hardly. But these are some of the top issues I have seen in my almost 20 year career. Remember why you are doing this, what your goals/objectives are, then build from there. Also, the days of writing a plan and implementing it exactly over a set time period are pretty much dead; it is all about incremental implementation in an agile environment.