Internet Marketing 2017: Three Bad Habits You Should Definitely Quit This Year

The New Year came and went and even if you’re still tired from the celebration, you have to start thinking about your business goals for 2017. But how can you even start making plans of you don’t know what are you exactly doing?

Marketers and Their Lack of Confidence

And this is not a jab in any way, because the thing is – most marketers apparently don’t have a lot of confidence in their organization and their marketing skills. According to a 2014 Adobe survey of more than 1000 marketing professionals, less than 1% of marketers feel confident that their marketing efforts are working.

And if that doesn’t sound alarming enough, the survey also revealed that more than 80% of marketers doesn’t have any formal training – they simply learn on their job. And while the numbers may have changed in two in a half years since the results of the survey were released – chances are things haven’t improved dramatically.

How Can You Change Anything?

So, the question we have before us is quite simple – what can you do to change things up a bit and become more confident in your marketing capabilities? Despite the fact that a large number of modern marketers don’t have a college degree, even the educated ones often make rookie mistakes that affect their campaigns and ultimately, their bottom line.

Simply put, every marketer has certain habits that he may not even be aware of. And these habits are holding a lot of professionals back in a big way. Therefore, we are going to talk about three marketing practices you should definitely leave behind in the next twelve months.

Three Bad Marketing Habits:

1.      Ignoring Mobile

How does your site look on mobile screens? Better yet, are your social media and blog posts properly optimized for a number of smartphone and tablet screen sizes? And if you’re not thinking about it, just consider this – over 70% of social media networking takes place on smartphones.

Furthermore, you cannot stop there – you have to make sure that even your emails are properly optimized. This even more important if you’re marketing an eCommerce website, because over 65% of mail is opened on mobile, and if your message isn’t visible, your remarketing efforts will be worthless.

2.      Overlooking Security

So, you’re working for a small company, and you’re probably completely unconcerned about the safety of your data. But hacks and breaches happen all the time, just ask fitness celebrity, Chalene Johnson who had her official Twitter, Facebook and Instagram hacked at the same time.

With so much cybercrimes out there, having a strong password isn’t enough anymore. So, you should start using a two-step authentication process for your email, have a firewall on your PC and use a VPN provider with enough servers and security features to encrypt your files.

3.      Lack of Content Strategy

What’s the goal of your latest content marketing campaign? Does it have an intended audience? What is your aim? You might have the right tools and personnel to execute your content campaign, but that’s only half of the battle. If you don’t have everything planned out, success may take longer than you think.

But you’re not alone on this one. According to data gathered by KissMetrics, only around 27% of Internet marketers have well-documented content strategy. So in order to know where are you going and how to get there, you need to have a detailed road-map  to guide your content marketing efforts.

Final Thoughts

Finally, let’s mention one bad habit most of us have – expecting overnight success.

And while marketing isn’t exactly science, you still can never be sure what’s going to get the most attention from your customers. As a matter of fact, things you work the hardest on will not always perform as well as you’d like them to. On the other hand, some things you throw together in a couple of days may get a lot more engagement than you expect.

The bottom line is – the ever-changing world of marketing is and always will be unpredictable. Therefore, if you expect to have long-term success, you have to learn how to be patient, improve your marketing tactics over time, and of course, how to drop all of your bad habits.