If you have been involved in digital marketing in any way, shape or form, it’s possible you may have made a few mistakes along the way. Confession time: how many of these digital marketing sins are you guilty of?

1. Not taking digital seriously

The first cardinal sin of digital marketing is treating it as an add-on. Your online marketing presence is often the central platform for consumer awareness – so it needs to be treated as such. Make sure you dedicate enough time, resources and money towards your digital marketing goals, instead of treating it as an extra expense. That way, your strategy should go a whole lot smoother.

2. Not optimising for mobile

These days, there’s no excuse for not optimising your website for mobile and tablet. The ‘Mobilegeddon’ algorithm has well and truly rained down upon Google, so if you haven’t got responsive design on your website, you’ve probably been penalised. This means your website won’t rank as high and you’ll experience a decrease in traffic.

3. Creating too many social media profiles

Pokémon was wrong – you don’t have to catch ‘em all. Creating too many social media profiles leaves you vulnerable to being the proud owner of some deserted assets. It’s much more effective to launch a few social media profiles and keep them well-tended to, and focus on building an engaged customer base.

4. Posting images from Google

Google is a great way to search for information on the web. But that doesn’t mean it’s the best way to find the images that you use on your website or social media – don’t forget that there’s a little thing called copyright standing in your way. Even if you credit the source of photos you’re using, this is a grey area that could land you in legal trouble. It’s best to use your own original photos, pay for stock images or seek written permission from the owner of the photo you want to use.

5. Not nurturing leads

You’ve probably spent good money on building your website and managing social media, so it’s worth making sure you are nurturing your potential customer base. Make opportunities available for leads that want to opt-in to your email marketing or receive a phone call. That way, you’ll have extra opportunities to sell your products or services to a fan base that cares.

6. Having a live chat feature to your website

To be clear, live chat is a great feature to offer customers if you have the resources and actual physical humans available to talk to customers. If you don’t have that amount of staff to allocate to 24/7 customer service, remove it from your site promptly.

7. Not using data to inform decisions

It’s great if you are collecting data and creating reports on that data. But to make your reports valuable, you need to be able to interpret your data, glean discerning insights and make your measurements actionable. That way, you can be sure that you are optimising your digital marketing strategy to its full potential.

Need to confess a digital marketing sin? Get in touch.