4 Pitfalls to Avoid with Your Digital Marketing Campaign

When you’re running a digital marketing campaign, there are certain mistakes you can’t afford to make. To avoid these mistakes, it’s ideal to partner with a professional marketing agency, but if you’re on a tight budget, that might be out of your reach.

When taking a DIY approach to digital marketing, you’ll be at a disadvantage compared to other businesses. However, you can still achieve success, provided you avoid the following mistakes.

1 Allowing malware to remain on your website

What does malware on your website have to do with digital marketing? When you rely on organic traffic from Google, malware on your website can tank your traffic. It can also kill your PPC ad campaign and get your ad account suspended.

Google suspends PPC ad accounts when ads direct users to a website infected with malware. It doesn’t matter if you aren’t aware of the malware – Google will suspend your ad account when it becomes aware of the problem.

If you notice that your website contains malware, clean it up immediately and don’t let another day pass. If your webhost has suspended your account for malware, don’t hesitate to pay for a cleaning service to restore your site to normal.

2. Acquiring spammy backlinks

Nothing will kill your digital marketing efforts like a slew of spammy backlinks. The problem is that you might not even realize you’ve got a ton of bad links before Google takes action against your site, like blacklisting your domain name or de-ranking your pages.

Here are some ways to tell if you’re pursuing spammy backlinks:

• You pay for bulk links. For example, you buy packages of 50, 100, or even 1,000 backlinks for a fee.
• You don’t get to choose where your backlinks are published. For all you know, your backlinks could be published on sites that have no authority, are already blacklisted from Google, or don’t rank.
• Your backlinks are generated automatically. This is a really bad sign that indicates software is being used to insert links to your website on poor-quality websites.

The best way to generate high-quality backlinks is to work with a professional content writer or a team of writers. You should be able to choose where your backlinks are published and you should be paying for the content writing, not the link acquisition.

3. Using AI to write your content 

You may have seen ads on social media for applications that promise to help you write high-quality articles faster using AI-generated content. This sounds good, but it will be a disaster for your content marketing campaign.

Artificial intelligence isn’t capable of writing truly high-quality content. High-quality content doesn’t just put words together in a way that makes sense grammatically. To qualify as high-quality, content needs to be written for your specific audience and must speak directly to their unique struggles, hopes, and needs.

Having AI write your content for you is one step above the old black hat trick called “article spinning,” but it’s not ideal by any means. If you want high-quality content, you’ll need to hire talented writers.

Some people advocate using AI to generate product descriptions, thinking this type of content is less important and doesn’t need perfection. This is also a mistake. The most successful corporations hire copywriters to create product descriptions and rework them until they’re highly effective. Although a description might only be a few sentences long, hours of work backed by expertise go into crafting that content.

4. Copying a competitor from the outside

It’s tempting to copy your most successful competitor, but do so with caution. Copying the outside of a digital marketing campaign probably won’t bring you the same results. For instance, using the same keywords in your content won’t necessarily give you higher rankings in Google. And using the same website template won’t necessarily increase your conversions.

You can’t see all the details of someone’s digital marketing campaign from the outside. What you see on the outside is the result of careful and strategic planning, and may not be appropriate for your business even though you’re in the same industry.

There’s nothing wrong with experimenting, but don’t expect automatic success from copying a successful business.

When you make mistakes, learn from them

As a DIY marketer, making mistakes will be inevitable. Digital marketing has a sharp learning curve, especially given all of the facets involved. Since you aren’t likely to get things perfect the first time around, at least make sure you learn from your mistakes. Knowing what not to do is just as valuable as knowing what brings success.