Digital Lab

Stay Away From These Marketing Mistakes

This was written with zero use of AI. I actually just sat down and wrote all of this on my own using my knowledge….so cool right? 🙂

A few simple tips you can use right now to see more success in your marketing campaigns.

With 20 years under my belt running digital for some of the fastest-growing brands…this week’s Digital Lab I wanted to break down 3 quick and simple 2024-inspired tips that can make the biggest impact and save you the most money on SEO, Paid Ads and Email.

9 total tips broken down into 3 tips for each channel.

SEO

Let’s start with SEO. First off, please do not make the mistake of thinking an SEO strategy is pointless.

When a potential customer finds your site naturally on Google (not a paid ad) the chances of him/her closing far exceed the chances of signing up a lead from paid ads.

The reason is when someone “naturally” finds you they typically have already done their research and are not getting quotes from as many companies. Also paid ads bring on tons of spam, bots, and partnership opportunities that come in or call in that you do not deal with as much with leads who come from SEO.

Now when it comes to an SEO strategy, the biggest mistakes I see are:

1. Not focusing on the proper keywords

This seems easy, but time and time again the keywords the customer or so-called SEO expert has chosen make it so that any work you do in terms of blog posts, and landing pages could all be a waste of time as the keyword is one you will never rank top 3 or even first page on.

Search for niche keywords with 150-1500 searches a month that have the lowest keyword difficulty*.

You can start with a more general keyword and then run that into SEO software and it will help you narrow down better niche keywords to focus on.

*Keyword difficulty – Semrush and other expensive SEO tools can tell you what keywords you would have the best chance of ranking for and which are worth investing in blog posts, landing pages, and fresh content.

2. Not knowing if the keyword you’re focusing on needs a landing page, a blog post, or just an adjustment on content from an existing page.

This is pretty self-explanatory but basically what this means is that a blog post is not always the answer. Do yourself a favor and Google search “what are the 4 types of search intent” to learn more about this.

3. Not putting any effort into the content you’re producing.

I am so sick of hearing that AI makes everything so easy…AI is literally step 1 of a 10-step process to creating content.

The next 9 steps are manual work you need to do to make the piece of content work.

How many of these things do you think about on your own?

• Word count Google is looking for
• What parts are AI written that Google will notice
• How many images/videos Google recommends for any page.

Plus the most obvious that I see overlooked is how this content looks on your website, how long someone stays on a page CANNOT be overlooked as a Google ranking factor for showing you over others and sloppy design or content that is not digestible quickly will kill your rankings.

Paid Ads – Google and Social

First off, I always break down Paid Ads to Google Paid Ads vs. Social Paid Ads. They both work by paying the platform to display you over others but the success of these campaigns comes from different strategies. The tips below cover paid ads in general with tip 3 being more focused on social ads.

1. Which page of your site is the prospect being directed to from your ad?

Simple enough question right? Wrong!

This is one of the most common items I see happening is that the quality and attention to the page a user lands on is not the most important focus long before they start running an ad.

A great ad manager is one thing but when you combine a great ad manager with top-level creatives your chance of success increases by 10x.

You may need multiple landing pages, a redo of your website, or whatever else will provide you the highest conversions but trust this is step 1 and not the other way around.

The quantity of work needed on the site side can depend on how diverse your services and products you want to target and other factors.

2. Not spending enough on paid ads

Like any other marketing channel if you only test it with a small amount of money you simply will not get enough data to clearly say if paid ads is a channel that you can scale your company with.

Think of paid ads as a 6 month commitment initially..that is if you’ve never run ads before or have tried it unsuccessfully previously.

You need a budget that you are not going to struggle by not having but also enough to get enough traffic and data to try out at least 3 different strategies before calling it unsuccessful.

I am not saying do not expect to break even or even 2x or 3x in your first 6 months of working with a new agency or starting to run ads on your own but for sure I can tell you that if you have the proper budget…a proper website/landing pages…and a quality ad manager you will know after 6 months if this is a channel your company can scale with.

3. Creatives, creatives, and more creatives

This mostly ties into running successful social media ad campaigns but also applies to the Google Display network.

Everyone knows if people you want to work with see or hear from your company more… then that will give you a better chance of working with them…that is obvious. They either do not see you at all or you’re doing something to get noticed.

Social Media Ads works in that way, if a potential customer uses or has social media (LinkedIn, Facebook, IG, TikTok) you can have them see your content by paying for it to be there.

That is not rocket science but getting them to ignore the 100s of ads they see a day and for yours to make an impact you have to be different.

You need better content, more content, more creatives, better creatives, A/B testing every creative, every audience, and then having smart people deciding what is working and not working behind you.

Email

Email is not dead. How you’re running it or have run it is dead.

1. How many email addresses are you using to send your campaigns?

If you say 4 or less you are already doing it wrong.

We used to have 4 email addresses running at once targeting new potential customers for our own company…now we have 75+ we use daily…we used to be able to have 1 person manage our internal email campaigns but now need a team of 5 just for our internal lead generation to run properly and leads to be handled properly.

With every new year comes Gmail and Outlook doing more and more to block mass email marketing.

What that means is you need to send low amounts of emails but with tons of email accounts and you need to monitor every inbox daily to ensure you are not contacting people who do not want to hear from you and will report you along with all of the issues with spam and other items that start happening from poorly managed email campaigns.

2. How you are sourcing the leads

We have tried every software, every LinkedIn tool, and other tools out there and what we found is when it’s that easy to get the leads the leads never work well or the email accounts get banned, etc.

The only thing we have found that has worked is manual work to get the best quality leads.

We may use a tool as a starting point to source leads, but then we manually check each email on Google search and other methods…then we use a bounce check tool to eliminate any last ones that could prevent a ding in our sending metrics.

3. What is your 6-month email sequence?

We believe strongly when you have the best quality leads you should never send a prospect only 1 sequence*.

Start with a sequence of an intro to your company or a product or service that you find to be the one that makes you stand out from every other email they get as the first touch point and email sequence.

Then 30 days later send these same prospects who have not expressed interest or asked to be removed to another completely different subject line and message directed towards a different product/service/etc.

Never spend the time to generate high-quality leads and think that doing it one time is the way to do it or ever think your 2nd or 3rd or even 4th sequence may not be the one that gets them to say yes to talking more.

*We define a sequence as a 2 or 3-step email message that starts with 1 simple email that is as personal as you can get for a mass email and is 1 thought or pitch spread out over 2 or 3 emails over a week to 10 days.

I hope you find these 9 tips useful and worth the 3 minute Saturday read. 🙂

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