Eight Rookie Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

About half of people in marketing roles aren't confident in their ability to run successful digital marketing campaigns for their businesses, according to a recent Adobe study. Partly to blame is the fact that many marketing roles are filled with newcomers who are taking up the reigns without a lot of formal training.

Given that there are over 200 million active websites on the Internet according to a survey conducted by Netcraft, it's not easy for newbies to break into the world of online marketing, but with proper planning, education, and strategy, you can better know how to side-step common faux-pas, lessening the intimidation and strengthening your company's online presence.

Here are eight rookie marketing mistakes to avoid:

1. Not using hashtags wisely
   Social media is a great marketing tool, and everyone knows that hashtags are an essential part of success on networks like Twitter and Facebook. However, it's easy to spot a marketing newb by their hashtag use. Some common faux-pas include too many hashtags, broken hashtags, hashtags that seem irrelevant, or no hashtags at all. Avoid this by finding a list of hashtags that are relevant to your business and that your audience uses, and add them to your posts when appropriate.
2. Being too focused on perfection
   Quality is of the utmost importance in successful marketing strategies, but a lot of new marketers take this idea too far and fail to publish anything because it's not perfect. You won't see any marketing results if all of your strategies are still on the drawing board. Take some risks and set them free to see what sticks. However, this isn't an excuse to let errors occur. It's still a good idea to run any content by an editor to check for mistakes before publication.
3. Paying for anything spammy
   The idea of building an audience organically is intimidating. Perhaps you expected that turning on the marketing faucet for your business would unleash a floodgate of prospects, but the reality is results are a slow trickle. It's at these moments that offers to "build your audience overnight" are tempting. Paying for Likes, Follows, Comments, and Links are not a good idea for your marketing strategy in the long run, and rookie marketers should stay away from them... even if it means a less impressive quarterly report.
4. DIY everything
   Most marketers who are just getting started don't have a lot of resources to work with. When they want social media posts, they write them themselves. When they're putting together a newsletter, they design the layout using the tools they have. If the website isn't working correctly, they'll sometimes troubleshoot on the backend themselves. DIY is OK most of the time, but there are cases when it looks unprofessional and can undo some of your hard work. Experienced marketers know when to throw up the white flag and ask for professional help.
5. Being too promotional
   Under pressure to deliver results, inexperienced marketers have a tendency to include a sales pitch in everything they do. They don't trust that the idea of inbound marketing works, so they err on the side of being promotional to connect the dots for their audience. This is a classic rookie mistake because readers often phase these types of messages out when they're reading online.
6. Not measuring results
   If you're new to marketing, results can be scary. You don't know how to measure them, and even if you did, you might not want to see them ... until you get things to where you want them to be. However, this is a big mistake. How will you know that what you're doing is working, if you don't know what your numbers looked like when you started? Experienced marketers understand the importance of results.
7. Not making a formal strategy
   They say that if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. This couldn't be truer than when it comes to marketing strategies. The Content Marketing Institute found that 61 percent of companies with highly successful content marketing strategies have a documented plan steering their efforts. Yet, many newbies don't have a documented strategy. This puts you at risk of being inconsistent and being driven by passing trends.
8. Not testing your strategies
   Marketing newcomers are too overwhelmed by the tasks at hand to think ahead to testing. But, stretching themselves at the outset is something they will thank themselves for in the long run. It's true that testing is part of a mature marketing strategy, and it's a practice rookies should adopt if they want to be successful sooner. It's not as intimidating as it seems - there are many A/B testing tools that offer free trials - and they will give you valuable information that will make you feel confident in your strategy.

Bottom Line: The road to marketing success in the digital landscape can be a bumpy one, but it doesn't have to be so difficult to traverse. Avoid these eight rookie mistakes, and you'll look like a pro and feel more confident about your digital marketing chops before long.