Planning on starting out the year with a strong marketing plan? Maybe you already have a few digital marketing resolutions set in place. But you don’t want to encounter the usual pitfalls that frustrate many marketers when they establish their marketing strategies. To help, we’ve listed solutions for five common marketing mistakes below:

#1: You Haven’t Set Any Goals

Not having goals is like playing football without any end zones—you’ll never know if you’ve achieved anything. Are you trying to grow your mailing list? Sell 10,000 books? Or reach $100,000 in sales? Knowing specifics will help you measure the success of your marketing efforts and frame your whole marketing plan. Consider what you want to accomplish and then create manageable steps to achieve them.

#2: You Don’t Analyze Your Data

Analyze Data
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Almost as bad as not having goals is not following up to find out if you’ve been successful. For example, you had a goal to bring in 350 new customers in three months. You get 350 new customers, but you haven’t asked them how they heard about you. You’re not sure if it was through a good online review, social media, or your e-newsletter. If you don’t know what worked (or what didn’t) you’ll waste extra energy on useless activities.

An effective way to learn about where new business is coming from is to use Connectivity’s Customer Insights product—it automatically adds new customers who’ve interacted with your business to a database that collects their contact details, geographic location, and demographic information. It also tracks all their interactions with your business so if a customer makes a call using a unique number from your Google My Business listing, you’ll know that you should keep your profile up-to-date in order to draw more people to your company.

#3: You Ignore Online Reviews

It’s easy to think a person with a criticism is just being grumpy, but when that grumpiness gets aired online you never know how far word will spread. Connectivity offers reputation management, including review monitoring, which alerts you to any mentions of your company online, so that you can respond appropriately. And when people have something positive to say they’ll be encouraged to share it. Read our guide on how to respond to online reviews so you can ensure a better online reputation.

#4: You Send Too Many Useless Emails

Email marketing can be an effective form of marketing but only if you know how to wield it properly. Set up a regular e-newsletter schedule that you can follow, and only send emails with useful, relevant, and engaging information. For example, if you own a restaurant with a menu that changes frequently, send a regular e-newsletter with the monthly specials and new dishes to try. You can improve the email process by automating your campaigns.

#5: You Neglect SEO

We know there is an ever-growing list of factors to take into consideration when designing your site or optimizing your digital marketing campaigns: social media promotion, creating engaging content, paid advertising campaigns. But SEO is still an important way to bring customers to your website. Knowing what phrases your customers use to search can help you in building the right SEO approach for your website, which in turn will improve your search rankings. Use Google Trends to figure out what search terms customers are looking for and create blog content or web copy on your site to capture that interest and answer the questions they’re searching for.

Top image credit: Dragon Images/Shutterstock

Alex Harris is Connectivity’s Eastern Region Sales Manager