People always talk about what you should do to make your digital marketing strategies a success, but you don’t often hear about what you shouldn’t do.

The truth is that most of the “must-include” elements of any successful. marketing plan were more than likely born out of errors and mishaps that happened along the way.

People don’t like to talk about those things because they’d rather leave the error-finding to their competitors, making it seem like victorious bottom lines on companies’ balance sheets are the sheer result of ingenious marketing folks who make no mistakes.

Rest assured; this is simply not the case.

Most marketing strategies have slip-and-fall moments that are characterized by their own side effects. This is particularly true if someone tells you what you should do but never tells you about the pitfalls to be on the lookout for along the way. In the name of transparency, we’re paving a new path by providing nine digital marketing mistakes that could prevent your campaigns from being profitable.

1. Not Setting Goals
“We want to be great” isn’t exactly a goal that’s going to get you through 2019. Of course, you want to be great; everybody does. You need to know what great actually means to your unique business.

Setting goals means knowing what your baselines are to start with. This means that besides not setting goals, not doing your homework before you get started is equally as detrimental. These things go hand-in-hand, so you can consider this No. 1 mistake a two-for-one.

How to Avoid This Mistake:

Know what you want to do; then put specific metrics on the thing you’re trying to achieve based on the baseline you’ve identified.

Do you want more followers? How many do you have right now? How many more do you want? What are you going to do to get people to follow you?

Do you want to increase your email opens? How many people are opening your emails today? How many are actually clicking on the words you say inside the emails? Are there certain titles or tones that have gotten more attention than others?

You have to know where you’re at now to know how to be better than you currently are.

2. Making Google Mad
Most people know search engines’ algorithms update from time to time, but many people aren’t aware of just how often these updates occur—or how impactful they can really be. Recent Google updates have found filler-filled, keyword-stuffed and fluffy websites and dropped them to painfully low positions on the SERPs because they made Google mad, finding themselves on page 1,532,333 of searchers’ results.

To be honest, being relegated to page two of SERPs is essentially the same thing as winding up on page 1,532,333.

How to Avoid This Mistake:

Only provide content that’s valuable to your audience and steer clear of keyword stuffing and posts that are wrought with time-wasting reads. If you’re not confident about your content, audit your webpages and blogs. It can be incredibly difficult to come back from a search engine exile.

3. Leaving Your Analytics to Hang Out by Themselves
Numbers matter, and while the marketing world was a career option that worked great for people who were solely into creativity during Don Draper’s days, things have certainly changed.

Today’s marketing campaigns can’t be successful without anyone analyzing the analytics behind them. Sure, you may get lucky and grab a few likes here and there, but if you wouldn’t wager your mortgage on luck, you probably shouldn’t gamble your business on it, either.

How to Avoid This Mistake:

A set-it-and-forget-it mentality is a surefire way to fail when it comes to digital marketing. Make sure someone’s tasked with keeping tabs on your analytics regularly. Do you have to watch your numbers fluctuate every single day? Of course not. But, you do need to make sure you’ve got a big-picture grasp on the things that make your audience tick (or ticked off, as the case may be).

By focusing on your trends, you’ll be able to identify the social media channels that work best for your business and deliver content that turns clicks into paying consumers.

4. Forgetting About Your Followers
Don’t let your social media run rogue. You need to engage with your audience to boost consumer confidence in your brand and help people understand the mission, vision, products, services and personality of your organization. Ignoring your social media feeds—whether the feedback is positive or negative—can leave your followers feeling as if you don’t actually care what they have to say.

Of course, you know their opinions matter, so make sure the people on the other side of the screen know you feel this way, too. It’s not just the people who make the comments who are paying attention to your reactions; the rest of the world is, too—even if everyone else is silently lurking.

How to Avoid This Mistake:

Set time aside to check in with your followers at least twice a week (ideally, once a day or more would be better). Don’t shy away from complaints. Online reputation management can be created or destroyed by the way you approach all forms of feedback, including the not-so-nice things people have to say.

5. Treating Each Social Site the Same
From a beginner’s perspective, it may seem obvious that you’d want to have a business account with all of the biggest social media sites; right?

Nope.

Besides the fact that some social channels work better for some businesses than others, you’re setting yourself up for a boatload of work managing and maintaining multiple sites, which only makes sense if they’re actually all filling your sales funnel.

More than likely, they won’t all be filling your funnel, and the few that are bringing you consumers certainly aren’t attracting people in the same ways. Companies that treat every social site the same are missing out on vital opportunities to put each platform’s unique best practices to play in a way that works best for the audience who rely on that channel as their primary source of information.

How to Avoid This Mistake:

Take the time to look into which social media platforms are performing best for your business. Which sites have the most engagement, get the most likes, and offer word-of-mouth advertising above and beyond any PPC or organic interactions your searchers may be experiencing with your brand? Once you’ve honed in on the platforms where your people reside, heed the advice of each site’s ideal setup. Are there character limits? Should you be using hashtags? Do posts that include photos typically get more attention?

6. Jumping on Every New Trend
Standing out above the crowd doesn’t mean you have to succumb to every trend and buzz phrase that finds its way into cyberspace. In fact, if you try to go that route, you’ll spend an incredible amount of time chasing your own ideas through a hamster wheel—over and over and over again.

Do you have time for that?

If so, that’s awesome, and you’ve got way more time to spend on your marketing than most business leaders and organizations. If you don’t have time to spin your wheels, hopping on every trend that might become mainstream someday, congratulations. You’re just like the rest of us.

How to Avoid This Mistake:

Learn to balance hot topics with tasks that’ll actually benefit your business. Being a lemming and following big trends without understanding the implications can cause your strategies to fall right off a cliff. Keep tabs on all the latest trends, but don’t jump in with both feet until you’ve done some testing and know how each trend will affect your time, budget and internal team.

7. Ignoring Your Audience
“What do we want?”
“A great product!”
“When do we want it?”
“All the time!”

Okay, that might be a little vague and unhelpful, but if you pay attention to your social media strings, comments in your blog posts, and the questions people ask when they call or email your company, you’ll likely get a lot of feedback that tells you exactly what people are looking for from your business. Whether you choose to accept the insights or not is up to you, but ignoring the information that comes from your core base can alienate the very people who would otherwise fill your balance sheets with positive numbers.

How to Avoid This Mistake:

Be sure to listen to audience feedback and respond accordingly, even if it’s not necessarily something you want to hear. People don’t appreciate it when their voices go unheard. Even if you won’t be implementing any of the ideas your customer base suggests, it’s important to acknowledge their thoughts and thank them for taking the time to think about the well-being of your business.

8. Thinking You’ll Make It Onto the Best-Dressed List Overnight
The Red Carpet of content creation and marketing strategies is hardly something that’s gifted to the first company that dons a pretty dress and puts on its best pair of heels. In fact, a lot of companies find their ways onto the worst-dressed list long before being invited to take a feature photo for the world’s most-renowned magazines.

What do we mean?

Overnight success is something that’s written into the scripts of fairy tales, but it doesn’t often happen in real life. You’re probably not going to appear on page one of Google the second your site goes live, nor are you going to have a million followers the moment you send your first tweet into cyberspace. It takes a little time to gain momentum and figure out what your audience needs to see before you can bolster your optimal success.

How to Avoid This Mistake:

Be realistic about your expectations and set milestone markers that can actually be achieved. Celebrate your successes when things work well, and take note of any tribulations that prevent certain milestones from being reached.

9. Creating Content for Content’s Sake
OK, so you heeded our warning about not making Google mad, but you know content’s vital to the success of your marketing strategy. You’re trying to figure out how to constantly pump out content that’s valuable and enriching to your audience without overstepping best practices or overstuffing your keywords.

That’s a big order.

The truth is that you don’t need to (nor should you) create content for the sake of having content. Do you need to produce content on a regular basis? Yes. Do you need to spam your followers with information that’s not fantastic just so they can see your name in their feeds? Nope.

How to Avoid This Mistake:

Only create content that’s truly valuable. Create a content calendar, so you have a set timeframe in which you’ll post blogs and articles and add to your idea list as FAQ and other inspirations come about. Also, explore the idea of varying your content across multiple mediums. Maybe you create a series of interviews with your employees or customers. Perhaps you hire an agency to add animations to your posts. Diversify the ways in which you spread value and reduce the frequency of your posts if you’re starting to post content for content’s sake.

The goal of any marketing strategy is to promote your business in a way that speaks optimally to your audience. Of course, some goofs are bound to happen along the way, but when you know what kind of mistakes others have made, you’ll be more prepared to create a plan that dodges the potholes and puts your company car lengths ahead of your competitors’.