A good digital marketing strategy is essential for any modern company. Above all, because the internet offers an ocean of potential customers. No matter who your target audience is or where they live, you’ll be able to find them online.
However, many companies aren’t taking advantage of this vast market. Some of them fail in executing their digital marketing strategy… and others don’t even have one!
The company that falls asleep gets swept away by the current.
A bad digital marketing strategy will cost you more than money and time. It can cost you your current customers and even ruin your reputation. And we don’t want that to happen.
That’s why we’re presenting this list of the 26 mistakes you shouldn’t make in your digital marketing strategy in 2026. If you want to jump ahead to a topic, you can do so from the index:
- Digital marketing and the basics
- SEO
- Social media
- Content marketing
- Email marketing
- Your website and technical aspects
- Marketing campaigns
Basic mistakes in your digital marketing strategy
1. Not putting the customer experience first
Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, described perfectly how the relationship with the customer works: “If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell 6 friends. If you make customers unhappy on the internet, they can each tell 6,000.”
Pay attention to what your customers say. Even if you don’t offer 24/7 support, respond quickly to every user who contacts you.
Your interactions with customers on social media are public. Your responses define your brand and show your audience how much you value them.
The customer experience is vital. And thanks to social media, complaining online is easy and goes viral. That’s why you should try to give every customer a great experience.
2. Not having a conversion funnel
Building relationships with your audience is key on social media. Attracting traffic and getting conversions should be among your priorities.
A conversion funnel is a series of steps to turn a visitor into a customer. It’s a way of visualizing and understanding the flow and conversion of your visitors. It will help you identify what you can offer your visitors, according to their needs, so they keep following your brand.
Having a conversion funnel will help you stay focused in your digital marketing strategy. You’ll turn visitors into users, users into customers and customers into evangelists for your brand.
3. Thinking you have all the time in the world
When we start planning a digital marketing strategy we’re very optimistic. We set goals as if our team had no social life. And what happens at the end of the year? Our optimism takes its toll in the form of poor performance.
Remember: you don’t have 48 hours a day to execute your strategy. And even if you did, you can’t plan absolutely everything: there will always be the unexpected. Especially in the world of digital marketing.
Try to be realistic when you set your goals for the year. Analyze your time and your capabilities. If you want to rank your website but don’t know how, hire a company that specializes in SEO. It will be more profitable to hire someone who knows what they’re doing than to learn on the go.
4. Forgetting your current customers
This may be the most expensive mistake on the whole list. Never forget your current customers. Winning new customers is a constant challenge in digital marketing. But they aren’t the only customers who matter.
Acquiring a new customer is commonly estimated to cost between 4 and 10 times more than keeping an existing one, a figure often attributed to the Chartered Institute of Marketing.
The easiest way to keep your current customers’ attention is to listen to them. Talk to them and find out why they use your products or services. Understand that, and you’ll be able to keep surprising them with memorable experiences.
5. Not defining concrete goals in your digital marketing strategy
Most companies want to earn more money or attract more customers online. But they don’t have concrete goals in their digital marketing strategies. That lack of clarity can mislead them.
For example, a company that achieved 1.5% more conversions over the year may think its strategy was a success. When in reality it could have grown 22% if it had implemented other digital marketing actions.
Set concrete, clear, realistic and measurable goals in your digital marketing strategy for the year. Will these goals be set in stone? Of course not. Over the course of the year you can add or remove goals, depending on how things are going. Clear goals will help you steer your digital marketing actions in the right direction.
Define what you expect from the year in figures you can measure. You can measure, for example, in KPIs (key performance indicators). But what criteria do you need to set a KPI? You must make sure it’s specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound.
Remember: goals are a starting point for your digital marketing strategy. They’ll help you stay focused.
6. Having a brand with no personality
When we talk about marketing, the brand plays a very important role. Without a brand it would be impossible to promote your offices, your stores or your product individually. Your brand brings together all your products, services, values and beliefs in a single concept. And, of course, your brand reflects your company’s personality. Or at least it should.
Finding your company’s personality through your brand is a process that takes a lot of work. With a quick search you’ll find plenty of guides teaching you how to create a brand for free. But if you take your company seriously, you’ll let real professionals handle this process.
Don’t try to please everyone in your communication; that will make you look like a weak brand. For example, if you sell synthetic shoes and you’re against bullfighting, say so. Many people who are also against bullfighting will join you, and you’ll create a community. Don’t be afraid to take clear positions on controversial topics.
Having a brand with a defined personality will help you win true followers. It will make people who think like you follow you and identify with you. And those people will be more inclined to buy from you rather than from your competitors. They’ll even recommend you and take you wherever they go (like Harley-Davidson fans). This is called brand loyalty.
7. Believing you’re alone in the world
Sometimes so much work can make you forget you have competitors. Lots of competitors: hundreds of companies working every day to take your customers away. I’m not exaggerating.
Constantly monitor and analyze your competitors. Look at what’s behind their successes. Learn from each of their mistakes. Or at least from the ones you can identify.
Also, connect with fellow marketers, even if they don’t work in your industry. On the contrary: it’s much better if they work in another industry. Build alliances and share the challenges of your digital marketing strategy with them. From their perspective, they may well contribute invaluable things to your strategy.
8. Not investing the necessary time
Doing digital marketing is a lot like being on the stock exchange on a busy day. You have to keep an eye on each of your investments moment by moment. You need to maximize the return on investment and get every possible benefit.
If you don’t spend enough time monitoring your campaigns, you risk losing money. You’ll be investing in visitors you can’t turn into customers. Or in promotions that lead nowhere. Or perhaps in SEO activities that competitors will easily surpass.
Review the results of your digital marketing actions daily. Look at the metrics and at how your audience is responding. With that data in mind, optimize your campaigns.
SEO mistakes
9. Believing SEO is a postmodern myth
There are a number of myths about SEO. Some marketing experts claim SEO is dead. Those same experts also claim witches exist and that they went to Narnia in December.
We’re in the era of artificial intelligence and advanced algorithms. And still there are people who dare to ignore SEO in their digital marketing strategies. Those are the people who send their websites into oblivion, of course.
Without an understanding of SEO, the actions in your digital marketing strategy will fail. You’ll get fewer visits, so you’ll convert far less. Like it or not, SEO is still one of the pillars of a web presence.
You don’t need to know absolutely everything about search rankings. If you learn the basics of SEO, you’ll be fine. Or you can relax about it and hire a company that specializes in SEO.
10. Not identifying the right keywords for you
Many clients ask us the same thing: how can I be on the first page of Google?
The answer is always the same: you can’t.
You can’t be omnipresent on Google. Even Wikipedia, which has something for everyone, can’t manage it.
Oh, did you mean being on the first page of Google when someone searches for “fast food”? That is possible.
That’s why it’s so important to discover the perfect keywords for your company. That way you can tell people that you offer exactly what they’re looking for.
Now, you’ll want to rank for keywords with a lot of traffic. Being the best result on a topic nobody searches for won’t do you much good. Ranking for keywords with traffic will let you attract new traffic to your website.
Tip: Use Google’s Keyword Planner. You’ll be able to find the perfect keywords for you that are also useful to your target audience.
11. Leaving metrics and analytics aside
Every time someone visits your website, hundreds of data points are generated. Which channel did they arrive through? Where do they live? How long did they browse your site? Which pages did they like most? On which page did they leave? You can answer all these questions with Google Analytics in just a few clicks.
And Google isn’t the only one offering analytics: Facebook, Instagram and X (Twitter) do too.
Successful digital marketing campaigns don’t happen on the first attempt. They’re the product of a long process of trial and error, of analysis and measurement, of rinse and repeat.
When we launch a campaign, we identify what people liked most and least. What our audience liked most, we’ll try to put into other campaigns. What they liked least, we’ll never use again. Never, ever.
You need to get data on everything. It’s better to have data and not use it than to need it and not have it. The data might tell you that your real audience is the Benedictine monks of Tibatí. And meanwhile, there you are trying to sell to film-loving men and women aged 22 to 35 in the capital.
Using metrics will help you know the return on investment (ROI) of your campaigns. You’ll be able to see whether you’re meeting your goals or drifting away from them. See also why GA4 matters for measuring your strategies.
Social media mistakes
12. Ignoring your social media
“I have notifications on my social media! What if it’s a complaint? Better not open the message, and everything will sort itself out by magic.” Those were the last words of a community manager before being fired. And with good reason.
Social media is the easiest way for your audience to talk to you. When someone talks to you, listen and reply. They’ll thank you with their loyalty and, why not, by telling their friends about you.
If you manage your social media well, you’ll see that interactions start happening naturally. And most of them will be positive.
13. Being “active” on too many social networks
Having an account on a social network is like having a store for your company. A store in the most crowded place in the world, open 24 hours a day and with the most intolerant people there are.
As with a store, each of your social media accounts needs a manager. Someone who greets the people who come in and receives customer complaints. Someone who changes product prices and the window display every day. Otherwise, people won’t come into your store, and those who used to will stop visiting.
Each social network needs special care. Social networks feed on content and time, at a minimum. If you can’t create content for your networks or interact with your audience, you’re better off staying away from them. Managing a social network badly in the age of social media can backfire very publicly. If you need help, see our social media management service.
Content marketing mistakes
14. Not focusing on offering value
Why should anyone visit your website or click on your ads? Are you solving someone’s problem? Are you useful to the people who visit you? It’s very hard to find websites that genuinely care about offering value. That’s why those sites are highly successful.
Look at the case of Wikipedia. A website that offers free information about almost everything. Its visitors need to learn about something and find exactly that: complete, meticulous information. However, it isn’t Wikipedia that produces that information: it’s its own visitors! And they do it because they believe in what Wikipedia believes in: that everyone should have access to knowledge.
Every company has, or at least should have, a value proposition. But not every company knows how to communicate it. If you’re struggling to find your value proposition, think about how your company started. What problem did you want to solve, and why?
Great companies start because they want to create change. Microsoft wanted to empower ordinary people to reach their full potential. Apple wanted to give people tools to challenge the status quo.
Stay true to your value proposition and you’ll see your digital marketing strategy succeed.
15. Neglecting your target audience
You think you’re the Superman of marketing, until you realize you haven’t published on your blog for 5 months. It’s happened to all of us.
Your audience feeds on your content. If your content solves your audience’s problems, even better. And if it’s high quality, better still.
A good technique for not neglecting your audience is to create a publishing calendar. Write down the topics your visitors are most interested in and get ready to write about them regularly.
Remind your target audience that you always have them in mind. Not all your content has to consist of 3,000-word articles. Sometimes a simple thank-you message on social media is enough.
16. Trying only to sell, sell and sell
Yes, sales are fundamental to keeping your company going and growing. But trying to turn every visit into a purchase can be annoying for your visitors.
If you’re trying to sell more than you’re trying to be useful to your visitors, you’re making a mistake. In the long run, this mistake will make you sell far less than you expected. Because nobody likes being sold to all the time.
The key to content marketing is to educate first and sell later. Your goal should be to teach your visitor how to solve their problem. Only after teaching can you include your call to action. At the end of the article, for example.
If you manage to help someone, that person will thank you. Whether by telling their friends, subscribing to your website or becoming interested in your services.
Connect with your visitors, offer them value and make them fall in love with your brand. After that, they’ll be ready to buy whatever you offer.
17. Not creating valuable content
It doesn’t matter when you publish your content or who you’re writing for. If your content is poor, it won’t be well received. If you’re lucky, Google will put you on page 50 of the search results.
If a user does read your content, they won’t get much out of it. If your reader has to wade through spelling or grammar mistakes, you’ll have lost them. Your reader won’t focus on your content but on your mistakes. Bad content drives visitors away from your site.
Valuable content, on the other hand, will help you reach your target audience. But what makes content valuable? Usefulness: your content must meet your visitors’ needs.
To create quality content you have to get inside your visitors’ heads. Identify the questions they have and answer them through your content.
Email marketing mistakes
18. Not growing your subscriber list
Email marketing is consistently cited as one of the channels with the highest ROI for small and medium-sized businesses. So if you aren’t growing your email list, you’re making a mistake. A large, segmented email database is every marketer’s dream.
Derek Halpern, creator of Social Triggers, ran an experiment to test the effectiveness of email. He sent the same link to the same number of people: some via Twitter and others via email. From his Twitter followers he got 300 clicks. Meanwhile, the same link sent by email to the same number of people generated 4,200 clicks.
The effectiveness of email in Derek’s experiment was due to two factors:
- The ratio of emails received to Twitter updates. You’re much more likely to open an email during the day than to check your entire Twitter timeline.
- The trust of the people who sign up for your email list. They signed up because they believe your content adds value for them. So if they have free time, they’ll open the emails you send them.
Building an email list is less complicated than you think. You need to offer valuable content to your future subscriber and make subscribing easy. Place your sign-up form somewhere visible and guide your visitor toward it.
The more people who visit your website, the more opportunities you’ll have to turn them into customers. In other words: more visitors, more clicks, more money. For a practical guide, see email marketing for SMEs in Colombia.
19. Spamming or bombarding your followers’ inboxes
As we mentioned in the previous point, sending emails to your subscriber list can deliver a very high ROI. As long as those emails have valuable content for your subscribers. Otherwise, they may send you to the spam folder, and you’ll never get out again.
Losing subscribers should be the least of your worries. More subscribers prefer to mark you as spam than to unsubscribe. If many subscribers mark you as spam, your email provider may suspend you temporarily. It could even delete your account permanently. And you don’t want that to happen, do you?
When a subscriber marks you as spam, they’re complaining about your content. You may be sending them content they didn’t subscribe for, or they may be receiving too many emails. In short: the emails you’re sending them don’t interest them.
Spam complaints count against your sender reputation. Gmail, for example, asks bulk senders to keep their spam rate below 0.1% and never let it reach 0.3%, so be very careful.
Technical and not-so-technical mistakes on your website
20. Not including any call to action on your website
After a visitor lands on your website and reads your first page, what should they do? Do you want them to click a button? To leave their details, call you or buy a product? Don’t make your visitor guess.
Your visitors won’t know what to do on your website unless you point them in the right direction. And how can you do that? With a specific call to action.
“Sign up and get 20% off”, “Buy 1 and get 2”, “Click and we’ll advise you for free”. Calls to action like these tell your visitors what to expect from your website. And if you have great web design, even better.
If you need help, this article will teach you how to create calls to action that turn visitors into leads.
21. Having a slow website
If your website is slow, it doesn’t matter that you have the best digital marketing strategy. Google research has found that more than half of mobile visits are abandoned if a page takes longer than 3 seconds to load.
Excessive loading time can be due to several reasons. It could be bad programming, too many scripts, very heavy images or slow hosting.
There are many free tools that will tell you how fast your website is: use them. You can get good results with Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix or Pingdom. These tools will help you detect what’s slowing your website down.
If your website has a speed problem, you need to fix it as soon as possible.
22. Not optimizing your website’s conversions
Forgetting to optimize your website is the best recipe for failure online. Optimizing your website’s conversions is much easier than it seems. It’s a process of trial and error, but with data involved.
You don’t need technical knowledge of programming or analytics. You just need to pay attention to a few metrics and keep tweaking your page.
A good way to optimize your website is with A/B tests. Two almost identical pages, with changes to the copy, the images or the calls to action.
The metrics will tell you which version is most effective at getting conversions. Choose the winning version and pit it against a new, improved version of itself. And repeat the process. There are no limits: conversions can always be optimized further.
23. Assuming that because it’s responsive, it’s readable
Some people believe readability problems are exclusive to computers. Everyone assumes that because their website is responsive, it’s readable. Wrong.
Readability on mobile devices is a big challenge. Some websites still haven’t adapted properly. When you try to read them, something feels off. Maybe you have to zoom in, or the typography doesn’t work, or the content gets cut off.
The solution is to browse, browse and browse your website again. Explore it from start to finish on mobile devices. Read all its content on phones and tablets. And above all: check twice before publishing new content.
Mistakes in your marketing campaigns
24. Offering all your visitors the same “special offer”
Can you imagine walking into a restaurant and, without anyone asking you, being brought a 400 g baby beef steak? That would be great if you love red meat, but what if you’re vegetarian? Wouldn’t you have preferred them to ask about your tastes first? The same thing happens with websites.
Not all your visitors are at the same stage of the buying cycle. Some need to buy your product today; others are just finding out. And that’s completely fine.
Offer each visitor a product or service that matches their need. Write free articles for people who are just discovering their need. Prepare guides and consultations for those who have already identified their problem. Sell your product to those who have already decided to take clear action to solve their problem.
25. Running misleading advertising, a.k.a. “selling smoke”
Misleading advertising abounds online. Companies that promise you everything so you become a customer, but then forget about you completely. Who likes being treated like that? Nobody.
A good slogan can motivate a visitor to buy your products. But if your products don’t live up to what you promise, you’ll disappoint your customers. And a disappointed customer will tell their friends, who will tell theirs, and so on. At the end of the day, you’ll have a reputation problem that’s hard to manage.
You should make sure most of your customers’ experiences are positive and satisfying. Your customers expect something specific from your product. And they expect it because you told them so. If your product doesn’t do what you promised, the customer will be dissatisfied.
Satisfaction is what you get when you compare reality with expectation. If you wanted an iPhone (expectation) but receive a replica (reality), your satisfaction will be negative. If, on the other hand, you wanted a replica and receive an iPhone, your satisfaction will be very positive.
In short: take great care with your sales promise. If you promise something, deliver it, and try to surprise the customer by giving them more.
26. Not creating campaigns specifically for mobile devices
Many agencies design their digital marketing campaigns for an audience using computers. But they forget about mobile devices: a market that has long since overtaken computers.
In Latin America, smartphones overtook computers years ago, and users spend more time on their mobile devices than on their computers.
You should prioritize your energy on optimizing your campaigns for mobile. Once the mobile version is ready, focus on the desktop version. Mobile devices first, computers second.
The future of digital marketing is mobile. And so is the present.
Conclusion
Is it possible to create a perfect digital marketing strategy? There’s no such thing as “perfect” in digital marketing. There are strategies that work and strategies that don’t. What is possible is learning from mistakes, your own and other people’s.
A good technique for standing out from your competitors is to offer value to your visitors. Put yourself in their shoes and give them real reasons to follow you to the ends of the earth.
Still need extra help creating a good digital strategy for your company?
Then get in touch with us: we’re experts in digital marketing.
All images were downloaded from freepik.com.
