As a digital marketing agency or digital marketer, you need to know the best practices and avoid the common mistakes in digital marketing.

What is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing is a component of marketing that uses internet and online-based digital technology to promote products or services. It is a common practice that many people and businesses use all over the world.

However, as a digital marketer or a digital marketing agency in Nigeria, you might be making some mistakes that are detrimental to your performance or brand reputation. Below are some of the common mistakes you should avoid as a digital marketer or a digital marketing agency.

1. Focusing on Revenue and not on Profitability:

Many digital marketing agencies are focused on generating revenue and forgetting that making a profit is also important. Profitability is the ability of your digital agency to produce a return on an investment based on its resources. In other words, profitability is revenue minus expenses.

Therefore, agencies should aim to generate revenue while also keeping their expenses low and their profits high. This will help the agency grow and serve its clients better. Agencies should not be satisfied with just having enough revenue to run their business without making any profit. Therefore, you should not only focus on how much revenue you make each month but also monitor your profitability and see if you can improve it.

2. Not keeping clients updated about their accounts:

Communication is key when dealing with your clients. Poor communication or lack of updates on their work can give them the wrong impression and make them lose trust in you. They might even cancel their services with you if they feel neglected or ignored.

When your clients partner with your digital marketing agency, they are trusting you with their brand and their goals. They are relying on your expertise and your transparency when it comes to sharing results and feedback.

While you don’t have to inform them of every single problem or challenge their project faces (after all, you are there to solve them), you should communicate with them on a regular basis. You should keep them updated on the progress of their work, the achievements you have made, and the areas you are working on improving. This will give them confidence that they are in good hands and that you care about their success.

3. Not offering clients support and project management assistance:

To be a successful digital marketing agency, you need to have effective project management led by a competent project manager. This role is one of the most important ones in your agency, as it keeps the relationship between the client and the agency stable and smooth. Your project manager or client support specialist is responsible for ensuring the quality and timely delivery of your work, managing expectations and budgets, resolving issues and conflicts, and maintaining communication.

Without this role, it will be difficult to retain your clients and satisfy their needs. Your project manager or client support specialist should be detail-oriented, organized, and able to spot bottlenecks and risks in your projects. They should also be able to communicate clearly and professionally with both your team and your clients.

4. Setting unclear objectives and goals: 

Setting goals in digital marketing is a fundamental task. An agency that does not have clear objectives or goals will not be able to achieve its vision or mission.

Digital marketing is a competitive field that requires constant innovation and adaptation. Without having clear objectives or goals, you will not be able to measure your performance, identify your strengths and weaknesses, or plan your strategies. You will also not be able to gain trust or loyalty from your clients, who expect you to deliver results that align with their goals.

Therefore, you should always set SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) objectives and goals for your agency and for each of your clients. You should also review them regularly and adjust them as needed based on the data and feedback you collect.

5. Spending too much time on reporting:

According to HubSpot, agency staffers spend around four or five hours per client each month reporting on digital. Reporting itself is good, but you can achieve the same result through some automation without wasting most of your valuable time.

No doubt, the reports are essential to the clients, but they rarely spend more than a few minutes looking through them.

The introduction of marketing automation technologies is one of the fastest-growing trends. The advantages of marketing automation lie in quite banal things: saving time and resources (primarily money) for performing routine actions and optimizing all business processes.

Reporting tools help improve productivity and can make a considerable contribution to your company’s overall business performance. However, it is crucial to understand which reporting tool you need. There is no perfect set of tools for all marketers. They need to be selected based on the specific situation and the available budget.

6. Not having a clear service value proposition:

This is one horrible mistake agencies make that affects the growth of their organization or makes them not get enough clients for their business.

As a digital marketing agency, you need to have a clear service value proposition that explains in detail what your agency offers to its clients. For instance, a client who comes across your agency website will like to check up on what your agency does, but if the proposition isn’t clear, the client will not bother to contact you for a project or partnership.

Give your clients a clear view of the value proposition that will entice them to work with you whenever they visit your website. Your unique selling point should Stand out!

7. Surpassing your team’s capacity and taking too many clients:

Taking more than what your team can handle is one common mistake many agencies make. This isn’t good for an agency that wants to achieve a lot. Many agencies take more than their team’s capacity, and at the end of the day outsource them to other agencies.

Though outsourcing is good, but you do not have the assurance they can deliver better than you do, or that there won’t be a glitch someday.

Sometimes, some agencies lose their clients to the agency they outsource to as a result of them presenting them in a negative way. It is therefore advisable to take clients that your capacity or your team can handle better or do their work on time. If eventually, you will outsource, you need to have an idea of what the work is all about before taking the client. This will help you stand in when there is an issue with the outsourcing agency.

Conclusion

I hope this article helps you avoid these mistakes and improve your digital marketing performance.

If you want to take your business to the next level, or partner with us, contact Brandz Digital today or book a free consultation.