5 Ways to Avoid Digital Marketing Challenges in 2024

With 2023 in the rearview, we are reflecting on marketing efforts that soared—and those that sank. We’ve seen many businesses using proven digital marketing strategies well, like using SEO to get their videos ranking in search and designing landing pages that convert to increase awareness, improve customer relationships, increase donations and sales, and boost website traffic. All good things to carry into 2024 right? Yes! Regularly reviewing your digital marketing efforts is critical, so you can learn from both wins and missteps and improve this year. For now, let’s look at how you can avoid five common digital marketing challenges.

Five Digital Marketing Challenges to Avoid in 2024

1. Failing to Provide Conversion Points

Ultimately, the goal of digital marketing is to land conversions or get users to commit to something: purchase a product, submit a form, call the number, download content, visit a page, and so on. Good calls-to-action (CTAs) are key.

What constitutes a conversion varies based on your company’s objectives, but providing intentional conversion points is crucial to guiding potential customers to make the next step. If the purpose of your website is to generate leads, include a form on your ad landing page so interested users can share their contact information.

Another mistake companies make is giving away valuable content without asking for anything in return. Allowing users to download an informational PDF without asking for their email address is a missed opportunity for another conversion point or future engagement. We know—gated content can be controversial—but if you’ve got something truly valuable to offer, it’s worth trying to gather email addresses. That way, you can build trust, provide more value, and eventually turn those leads into customers.

Life Enriching Communities offers users informational ebook PDFs and asks for their name and email address in return.

2. Expecting Immediate Results from SEO

A digital advertising campaign may boost traffic quickly to your website. But, SEO efforts are a long-term solution. Once you start seeing a spike in traffic from a new campaign, you may expect immediate leads and business. Sometimes, this happens, but it’s much more common for an increase in leads to trail behind a boost in traffic. And leads often slowly increase over the course of a few months. Patience is required, as the increase in traffic needs refinement. Assembling adequate data to make informed decisions can take three months or more.

Once a campaign launches, focus efforts on the best-performing keywords. If you’re not seeing the desired results after launching a campaign, take time to identify issues. Are forms too long? Which words are performing the best? Have you tried a different CTA? Hang tight, and remember that identifying issues and optimizing campaigns takes time.

3. Using Unclear or Inconsistent Messaging

Bringing traffic to your website is only part of the battle. Delivering great content is critical. First and foremost, make sure your messaging is super clear. Visitors should know what you do and how you can make their lives better within 5 seconds of landing on your site. Confusing users or dumping too much information on them is the best way to lose leads. After all, they have lots of other apps and videos to watch.

• Focus content on how you can help your visitors. Sorry, not sorry: You are not the hero here, even if it is your website. Your customers are the heroes.
• Empathize with the problems they’re having.
• Tell them you know how to help them.
• Help them imagine the great things they can achieve by working with you/buying your widget/donating to your cause.
• Give them a plan, or at the very least, tell them what to do right now.

Our story-driven approach helps our clients create stronger messaging. We’ve integrated it into our strategy phase to help you get clear on messaging before diving into digital marketing.

Brand cohesion is equally important. You want your brand to be strong and recognizable. To do this, you need consistent messaging, tone, and aesthetics across channels. We highly recommend testing to determine the effectiveness of brand or copy elements as you roll them out—whether that’s with a handful of users or through A/B testing. Try out different CTAs across your website and digital ads and see what gets the best response. Thinking of changing the style of CTA buttons? Try it out in an ad and its partner ad landing page. A revolving door of CTAs, icons, or fonts won’t work. Give each test long enough to determine its effectiveness. (Think a couple of months, not weeks.) Implement one change and wait to see the impact before deciding what comes next. Then, apply the best of the best across all of your channels.

4. Using Keywords Too Frequently

Imagine you’re sitting in a coffee shop interviewing a potential new hire. You’re sipping your oatmilk cold brew, listening to them tell you about their strengths—only their speech is full of “uhs” and “likes.” You glance at your phone, hoping an emergency call trills from someone or the barista spills coffee in your lap. Now imagine this speech was on the person’s homepage: You’d click away pronto. The overuse of “like” in speech and repeating the same words over and over—aka keyword stuffing-have something in common. They’re both bad for business. Sure, using certain phrases on your product page or blog post may have a high search volume and satisfy the SEO gods, but repeating those words painfully often doesn’t create quality content. In fact, keyword stuffing can lead to Google penalizing you by lowering your search rankings or even causing your content to be removed from listings. Our goal should always be to write content for real people, not robots. Read it out loud. Does it seem natural?

To combat keyword stuffing and get great SEO results, assign each content page a single primary keyword that is closely related to the subject. Separate keywords for each page make it easier for search engines to determine what each content page is about and will avoid keyword inter-competition. In addition, make sure each content piece includes at least 300 words in the main body copy—this is good for your users, but it also shows Google that this is robust and valuable information. Other tips for SEO greatness without keyword stuffing: incorporate secondary keywords, synonyms, and long-tail variations of the main keyword within the copy.

Remember to place the primary keyword once in areas like the page title, one or more subheadings, title tag, meta description, image alt tags, first paragraph, and near the end of the piece.

Don’t sacrifice content quality for increased traffic. Friends, colleagues, and other humans will always be your most important target. If you stay focused on creating content that is relevant and helpful to them, you’re already on the right track.

5. Having Too Many People Running Digital Marketing Efforts

We love experts. They’re great. Except when there are too many of them—it can undermine digital advertising efforts. For example, when separate people manage search advertising, social media advertising, content writing, and search engine optimization, it’s tough to launch coordinated campaigns.

Nothing in digital advertising works in a vacuum. Takeaways draw from a variety of sources, so important information and trends are easy to miss when partners handle different pieces of digital marketing efforts. Giving responsibility to single or multiple partners working closely with one cohesive strategy will yield better results.

What’s Next: Planning for Great Digital Marketing in 2024 Digital marketing is an invaluable tactic for spreading brand awareness, generating leads, and growing your business. Effective digital advertising and SEO bring people to your site—but closing the sale, getting the donation, or generating more leads comes down to content. The copy, pictures, and videos they see when they get to your ad landing page or website will win them over or drive them away. So, how do you create more successful digital marketing in 2024?

• Coordinate digital marketing efforts and communicate goals, campaigns, and outcomes.
• Be patient as you test campaigns, and remember they won’t all be winners.
• Create good content, for every page, ad, and email. Use heat mapping and data to see what’s working.
• Identify multiple benchmarks for success. Converting leads shouldn’t be the only one.
• Be very selective about what you pull the trigger on. Just because you picked up a tip or tactic from a webinar, YouTube video, or colleague, doesn’t mean that approach is right for your organization.

Keeping up with changing trends, tactics, and data is tough unless it’s your full-time job. If you’d like more strategies and ideas for your business, we’re here to help.