In a small way, marketing is like placing a bet. You invest money on activities that are supposed to pay off by bringing you in more customers or getting existing customers to spend more.

When these gambles don’t pay off as expected, you end up with a net loss. And since marketing efforts can often be pricey, many organizations accidentally bet on the wrong horse and end up paying dearly for the lesson.

Sometimes, these losses are unavoidable — the result of something you couldn’t have predicted or a pure stroke of bad luck. Other times, they are the result of unfortunate yet common digital marketing mistakes that tend to hit companies in the pocketbook.

To greatly raise your chances of positive returns and reduce your chances of spending cash ineffectively, consider the following common marketing mistakes and our advice for how to avoid them.

Not Segmenting and Targeting Your Audience

Identifying key segments in your customer base and targeting most of your ads to those exact individuals can enhance the value of each campaign. Yet, far too many companies still insist on mass broadcast messages in lieu of finely targeted digital ads. These ads tend to be seen and heard by people who have zero interest in the company’s product, effectively making them wasted spend.

Instead, marketers must identify their audiences who represent the highest value and the most likely people to respond with a purchase. You can brainstorm with your sales department and other customer-facing individuals to jot down common characteristics that jump out at them, and then test your actual audiences to see if these segments exist as predicted.

Ignoring High Return Channels Like Social Media and Email

Many marketers do not recognize the value that social media marketing offers. Even though people go on social media mostly to kill time, they are often multi-tasking by looking into products and experiences that they may want to try for themselves.

More importantly, social media provides heaps of demographic and personal interest data to help you identify and target new audiences. Each paid ad campaign can be fine-tuned to target the most valuable people among your audience, and it can also be structured to show only at certain times when they are online most often. In this way, you can get maximum return for your dollar even if you only get a few hundred ad exposures overall.

Similarly, email marketing offers fairly substantial returns at a low cost. People still check their email diligently, and they are willing to opt-in to receive emails about offers, special events and interesting content as long as it is relevant to their needs. Open rates and other analytics also tell you a great deal about which marketing messages grab interest and which ones fall flat.

Not Measuring Digital Marketing ROI

“You can’t control what you don’t measure,” as the saying goes, so not trying to track your returns on marketing campaigns is a recipe for indiscriminate spending. Instead, you can configure digital tracking methods like pixels, unique landing page URLs and similar means to see how many people go from an ad exposure to a final purchase decision.

You can account for metrics other than sales revenue, too, but be sure to assign either concrete goals or a type of alternate value to metrics like Facebook likes, ad exposures or lead offer conversions.

Keep in mind, too, that diligently measuring every campaign not only helps you establish ROI, but it also helps you make refinements to new campaigns that can help make them more effective than ever. For instance, if you have one email that receives more opens than another, you know to adjust your approach to mimic the more successful subject line.

Avoid Digital Marketing Mistakes With Help From the Pros

Obtaining hard numbers on ROI and other digital marketing metrics is not always easy, but you can work with a digital marketing agency to help you measure better and target better in order to optimize your campaigns and maximize returns.

If you are interested in finding out more, you can contact Vonazon today.