4 digital advertising mistakes to avoid

JG Bezuidenhout, COO, Offernet London, highlights 4 digital advertising mistakes marketers make...

These digital ad mistakes include over-targeting, measuring the wrong metrics and using a poorly designed landing page (among other things). By identifying these digital advertising pitfalls you can avoid wasted spend in your budget.

Digital advertising pitfalls

Stop over targeting

When marketers over-target or "Spray and pray", they face the risk of wasting your marketing budget on inefficient impressions.

There are many ways digital marketers can make less intelligent decisions when targeting a demographic. There are consequences are sending ads to people who have no interest in the product or service being offered, using irrelevant keywords or paying too much attention to social media followers instead of customers.

Advertising to people who are not interested in what you offer is completely fruitless for both the marketer and the consumer. When targeting a specific audience, it is important to pinpoint exactly the type of customer you are aiming at and what they want to get out of your service or product.

Look at those customers already following your account and see what they like or dislike about the product or service offered by studying their social media profiles with tools such as Social Blade or the Offernet Touchpoint platform.

The digital advertising pitfall of using irrelevant search keywords in search campaigns is another mistake to avoid. Keyword and negative keyword research and selection is a very important part of digital ad campaigns since they determine the quality of traffic you receive from search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo.

For example, suppose your digital ad campaign targets users searching for car insurance. In that case, it will be useless to use keywords such as 'cheap windscreen repair' because those people have no interest in what you're offering at the moment. If they want cheap windscreen repair services, then they will seek them out, so doing this digital advertising mistake would be futile for both parties.



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Know how to measure success

Social media marketing is important for any business, but if marketers do not know how to measure its effectiveness properly, they are better off spending their money elsewhere.

One digital advertising pitfall marketers often make is focusing too much on follower numbers. This digital marketing mistake means they are more concerned with growing their account numbers than converting social media followers into paying customers.

Suppose a company creates an account for the sole purpose of digital advertising. In that case, this digital error will be obvious to users, who will then unfollow or mute the account and follow other pages that make their digital advertising experience better.

Focusing on follower numbers is a digital marketing risk because social media accounts with small amounts of followers can be very active without gaining many real customers. Follower counts are also highly affected by bots, which you don't want to attract if digital advertising is the main purpose for having a social media account.

Improve your landing page

Design your landing page in a way that meets the needs of the target group you want to reach. Ensure that every detail is relevant and useful for people who are looking for what you offer so they'll be more likely to sign up or purchase, not get distracted by superfluous information, and experience frustration.

Mobile users now interact with websites more than desktop and tablet users combined. Advertisers should ensure all images and text are responsive and use call-to-action buttons that are TAP properly positioned and sized.



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Re-market to past website visitors

Re-market to prospects who have visited your landing page and assessed the page but not converted. This will give a final chance to convert those visitors that have already interacted with the company's branding for them to go through with the conversion after more thought.

Preventing these digital marketing errors will lead your efforts in a better direction. If you're digital advertising and marketing savvy, digital mistakes are less likely to happen.