We Analyzed 1000s of Online Stores, and Here Are the Top 29+ Marketing Mistakes You’re Making!

There is no beating around the bush — even the most experienced eCommerce store owners are still making some basic marketing mistakes! 

And in today’s saturated market, you literally can’t afford for these mistakes to start piling up. And it’s not just about your PPC campaigns. You can have the best eCommerce campaigns and marketing strategy out there, but if your online store and your customer experience sucks, no one is going to buy from you.

The bottom line is that sometimes the problem and its solution are staring us straight in the face, and we just need someone else to point it out. 

Over the years, we have reviewed thousands of our merchants’ stores. Here are the top marketing mistakes — from digital marketing mistakes to on-store UX oopsies — almost everyone makes. 

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General Marketing Mistakes

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1. Ignoring Customer Feedback

One of the most important sources for eCommerce marketing optimization is your customers. Their continual feedback and reviews are powerful tools you can use to guide optimization and build long-term retention. Even more importantly, many of the potential customers you are trying to reach through your marketing will read reviews before they buy. 

Therefore, by ignoring or neglecting to respond to reviews — especially the negative ones — you can damage your brand reputation and deter a new customer from buying from you. 

Here are some tips on replying specifically to negative reviews: 

• Tell them that you are really sorry about the negative experience — showing understanding and sympathy 
• Recognize the customer’s concerns while subtly weaving in some marketing into your response to the bad review 
• Offer to take the conversation offline to handle it privately 
• Keep your response short, sweet, and to the point 

2. Inconsistent Branding

As important as branding is, it’s often overlooked when marketing across multiple channels. 

The thing is, it’s vitally important in not only establishing brand identity but building trust. By using inconsistent messaging, imagery, or tone of voice throughout each marketing channel and element, you are likely to confuse customers and weaken brand recognition. 

Here are just some of the ways inconsistent branding could be hurting your business: 

1. Ineffective marketing campaigns. When branding elements and messaging aren’t consistent across different channels and campaigns, it can disrupt the customer experience and lead to mixed signals — both of which affect the results of your campaigns.
2. Customer confusion. Inconsistent branding can confuse customers and make it difficult for them to recognize and remember the brand. Instead, you want to ensure messaging, visuals, and tone don’t vary across all marketing channels so a potential customer has a clear idea of what your brand stands for and what sets it apart from competitors.
3. Lack of brand confidence. If your branding is inconsistent, it can undermine trust and professionalism — both of which are vital for real-time sales and building long-term loyalty. By staying consistent, you are able to portray an air of reliability and trustworthiness through good organization and attention to detail. 
4. Poor brand identity and recognition. Brand consistency is key to creating a more memorable and compelling brand presence. Inconsistent branding dilutes identity and prevents you from creating a recognizable and relatable brand personality. This also affects how recognizable your brand will be to potential customers. 

3. Focusing Solely on Acquisition

Yes, getting new customers is important if you want to improve ROAS and build long-term growth. 

However, many brands often focus mostly on acquisition while neglecting marketing strategies that nurture existing customers. This can be a costly marketing mistake, especially in such a competitive market where customer retention is vital for continued business growth and overall profitability. 

Instead, by focusing on retaining and nurturing existing customers through loyalty programs, personalized communication, and exceptional customer service, it can lead to higher customer lifetime value and lower acquisition costs. 

4. Overlooking Key Analytics

Another common marketing mistake is having too little data or not focusing on the right analytics. 

Having a clear picture of your data — and not falling for common analytics lies — is crucial for understanding customer behavior, identifying areas for improvement, and optimizing your marketing efforts. Additionally, by overlooking key analytics or not taking a good look at insights, you run a big risk of wasted resources and missed opportunities for growth. 

For Shopify brands, this means staying on top of the most important reports, including: 

• Sales overview
• Attribution model comparison
• Sessions attributed to marketing
• Average order value over time
• Sales by channel
• First-time vs. returning customers
• Sessions over time
• Online store cart analysis
• Sales by product
• ABC analysis by product
• Fulfillment over time
• Product orders and returns

5. Discounting Competitor Data

Your closest competitors could be your biggest marketing asset! The trick is to not ignore valuable competitor analytics. 

By keeping a close eye on your competitors and understanding their strategies, you can find missed opportunities for gaining market share. This means closely monitoring their: 

• Website traffic and engagement metrics
• Keyword rankings and organic search visibility
• Social media followers and engagement
• Advertising strategies and ad placements
• Pricing and promotional strategies
• Product offerings and features
• Customer reviews and ratings
• Partnerships and collaborations
• Content marketing efforts and publications
• Customer demographics and target audience segmentation

You also want to do a regular eCommerce Competitor Analysis. Here’s a template to get you started. 

6. Forgetting Your Value Proposition

It’s easy to stray from the basics when your online store has limited visual merchandising space. However, your value proposition should always be the one message that is super clear throughout your shopping journey. 

Let’s take a quick refresher on what a value proposition is. Simply put, it’s a promise of value. Think of it as your unique offer, the core reason why a new customer should choose your brand and products over others. In essence, it outlines specific benefits and explains why your ideal customer should pick you over the competition. 

And the key to an awesome value proposition? Clarity! 

Essentially, you want to make sure all your on and offsite marketing is in keeping with your value proportions. This will ensure your marketing message is on point and answers key questions, such as: What is it? Who is it for? And how does it benefit them? 

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PPC Marketing Mistakes

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7. Poorly Structured Campaigns

This prevalent PPC marketing mistake can be found in the structure of your campaigns. 

How you build your advertising account and campaigns form the foundation of how successful your ads will be. Let’s take Google PPC campaigns, for example: a deficient campaign structure that includes disorganized ad groups, irrelevant keywords, and unaligned ad copy that will lower your Google Quality Scores and increase your CPCs (cost per click). 

Instead, you want to make sure that your campaigns are well-organized and tightly themed to improve marketing campaign performance and maximize ROAS. 

For social digital marketing campaign structure tips visit our How to Create the Best Facebook Ad Campaign Structure for Conversion Success post. For Google, here’s a quick example from our Google ads for eCommerce guide. 

Talking about Google’s Quality Score:

8. Not Harnessing the Power of Advanced AI and Automation

The truth is that without the right AI and automation, competing in this congested eCommerce market will be nearly impossible — no matter how good your marketing plan is. And when it comes to boosting PPC campaign ROAS, this is even more vital. Yet, so many online stores haven’t made the leap to eCommerce automation or PPC management software.  

With Traffic Booster, you can fix this common marketing mistake in a matter of seconds, and it won’t cost you anything more than what you are already spending on PPC ad spend. But that is not the best part; it will also help you triple your conversion rates and dramatically improve your ROAS. 

@storeya.com What secret do all these stores have in common? They are all using Traffic Booster for Shopify. Comment below to learn more 👇 #digitalmarketing #ecommerce #shopify #businessowner ♬ original sound – StoreYa.com

9. Lazy Tracking Set Up

If you’re not tracking your PPC campaigns, how can you know how successful your marketing strategy is? Failing to set up proper tracking for PPC campaigns can lead to inaccurate data and an inability to measure campaign performance. 

Instead, you need to make sure you implement a conversion tracking strategy and are keeping a close eye on other relevant tracking metrics to assess the performance of your campaigns and then quickly pivot if you need to. 

If you are not using one central dashboard for your PPC campaign management, then you can follow these key steps: 

1. Access your PPC advertising platform’s dashboard and navigate to the conversion tracking section.
2. Set up conversion tracking by creating “conversion actions” for specific things you want to track, such as purchases or form submissions. Install tracking codes or tags on your website’s relevant pages to capture conversion data accurately.
3. Enable auto-tagging in your settings to automatically append tracking parameters to your destination URLs.
4. Implement event tracking using Google Tag Manager or similar tools to track interactions such as video views or button clicks.
5. Set up cross-domain tracking if your website spans multiple domains or subdomains to ensure accurate attribution of conversions. 
6. Configure your eCommerce analytics in order to track revenue, transactions, and product performance. 
7. Utilize custom tracking parameters and UTM tags to track specific campaign elements and sources accurately.
8. Regularly test and validate your tracking setup to ensure data accuracy and consistency. 
9. Monitor and analyze tracked data regularly to gain insights into campaign performance and optimize strategies accordingly. 

Whichever tactic you choose to track campaign performance, you want to be sure you are keeping a very close eye on key metrics such as CTRs, conversion rates, CPCs, ROAS, quality score, and ad position (Google campaigns), search term reports, device performance, and audience insights. 

10. Ignoring Negatives and Exclusions

Here’s something you may not know about PPC management — negatives or exclusions do not refer only to keywords. Despite their importance, many eCommerce marketers overlook tweaking their negatives and exclusions as a ROAS optimization tool. They also include URLs, locations, and placements. 

For example, if you aren’t excluding the blog pages from your PMax campaigns — which, as we know, is operated by Google’s AI — your results suffer dramatically. This is because Google will keep serving your store’s blog pages within your campaigns until it learns it gets a low conversion rate. In other words: excluding them from the start can help you prevent a lot of wasted ad spend, which negatively affects your ROAS. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to do just that. 

@storeya.com Google ads PMAX campaigns have always been a little mysterious. But did you know that you can dive deeper into the Google Ad universe and play with your placements? If you want to automate your Google advertising check out Traffic Booster, our #AI driven ads manager. We help you build, scale, and optimize your Google ads campaigns using AI! #googleads #AdsDecoded #DigitalMarketingInsights #StoreYaSecrets #AdventuresInAdvertising #CampaignMastery101 ♬ original sound – StoreYa.com

11. Not Tweaking Your Ad Copy

This may seem like an obvious marketing mistake, but you will be surprised how often marketers aren’t testing slight variations in their campaign copy. Even the smallest copy tweak can make or break your campaigns! 

Here are the three most common ad copy tweaks you should be making: 

1. Using call-to-action within ads
2. Using trustworthiness phrases within your ads (example: 5,000+ 5-Star Reviews since 2004)
3. Emphasizing possible ads’ eye-catching elements, such as using numbers (example: Free Shipping over $40) 

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Onsite Marketing Mistakes

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12. Not Making a Great First Impression with Your Homepage

You have only seconds to make a good impression with your online store marketing — and one sure way to make a bad one is with clutter.

To start, these are the three important areas you should be focusing on when optimizing your onsite marketing: 

• Your homepage CTA 
• The above-the-fold area 
• Your homepage design 

In all three of these key areas, you should consider what you should leave off, not piling more on. You want to consider white space and clutter, as well as messages to get shoppers from your homepage to your product pages. Some additional areas you will want to focus on: 

1. Homepage pop-ups 
2. Quick links to important information 
3. UGC/review placement 
4. Overall design and UX 

13. Throwing the Kitchen Sink at Your Shoppers

Marketing 101: A confused mind never buys. Simple as that.

Even the most experienced online store sellers try to fit into too many niches — especially when sales are low — onto the main advertising and merchandising space in their stores. But this can have the opposite effect of what you’re looking for! 

No matter how you play it, mixing multiple niches into a single brand can leave customers feeling indifferent, or even uninterested. This erodes trust and causes confusion. Therefore, it’s crucial to maintain clarity and coherence in your brand identity to ensure a positive customer perception.

Instead, ensure you focus on a few key products on your promotion pages, or that your product page is uncluttered without too many other recommendations. 

14. Missing the Mark with Trust Building

Every part of your online store and marketing journey should be checked and tested for trust. After all, eCommerce sites thrive on trust — it’s the backbone of successful conversions. Trust issues can follow you all the way from the top of your funnel to your checkout pages, with as many as 18% of shoppers saying trust was the reason for abandoning a cart. 

At the end of the day, the major obstacle to conversions — regardless of how optimized your on and offsite marketing is — is very often the lack of familiarity and trust in your brand. Here is a quick checklist you can use to make sure. 

You can see a breakdown of each of these strategies in our Do Customers Think Your Store Looks Professional and Trustworthy? [Checklist] post. 

15. Overlooking Basic Product Page Optimization

It’s easy to overcomplicate things regarding product page optimization. But the truth is, optimizing the basics is even more important to ensure that your marketing campaigns align with your ad URLs (product pages). Here are the top things that you could be overlooking: 

1. Poor product photos. And not just in terms of quality. Generic stock photos or badly conceptualized photos can hurt product trust and damage conversion potential. Here’s a guide to help you audit and review: Your Full Guide to White Background Product Photography [2024].
2. Unclear pricing. Another common pitfall is failing to make the true product price prominent, which can lead to confusion for your customers. It’s essential to clearly display the cost of the product — including shipping — so that a new customer knows exactly what they’re paying for.
3. Poorly placed CTA. You want to ensure that your “Add to Cart” or other call-to-action buttons are strategically positioned. It’s crucial that they’re placed above the fold and stand out prominently from the rest of the page.  
4. Missing information. Missing size charts or detail-rich details leave customers unsure if products will fit their needs. 
5. Too much information. On the other hand, padding your descriptions with unnecessary information makes it hard for customers to scroll — and won’t help eCommerce SEO if it’s not relevant. If your products do require a lot of explanation, consider implementing accordion-style product information sections, categorized for easy navigation. 

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Email Marketing Mistakes

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16. Neglecting Advanced Segmentation Strategies

While email marketing continues to reign as one of the most important eCommerce marketing channels, neglecting to establish a comprehensive email marketing strategy will set you back. 

One of the most common email marketing mistakes is not understanding the importance of email segmentation well beyond basic demographics. 

Instead, you should segment based on purchase or search history, shopper behavior, engagement levels, and personalized data to ensure your email marketing speaks directly to your audiences and their product needs. 

Here are two more advanced email segmentation strategies worth testing:

1. Behavior-based segmentation. Behavior-based strategies move beyond basic demographics and purchase history by segmenting your email list based on specific actions taken by subscribers, such as website visits, email engagement metrics, or interaction with specific content types. 
2. Predictive segmentation. Predictive analytic strategies anticipate future customer behaviors and segment your email list accordingly. It does this by analyzing past interactions, purchase patterns, and demographic data to forecast which subscribers are most likely to engage with certain offers or content.

17. Not Implementing Dynamic Content or Advanced Opportunities

Yes, personalization is definitely still relevant when it comes to email marketing optimization. But not any old personalization. You need 1:1 personalization mixed with advanced email automation, dynamic content, and advanced personalization tactics. Let’s quickly look at each. 

1. Email automation. Your eCommerce marketing must utilize email automation to streamline workflows, deliver timely messages, and nurture leads through automated email sequences. Whether it’s an optimized welcome series or automated drip campaigns, advancing email automation can help boost email ROAS.
2. Dynamic email content. Not leveraging dynamic email content to deliver more-personalized remarketing emails can drastically limit the effectiveness of your email marketing. 
3. Advanced personalization tactics. If you’re not going beyond basic personalization strategies for your email marketing, you are almost certainly hurting your conversion potential. Strategies such as dynamic content, 1:1 personalized product recommendations, and customer-specific promotions can substantially improve your conversion rates. 

18. Glossing Over Email Deliverability Optimization

Another widespread marketing mistake you could be making with your email marketing is failing to optimize email deliverability. In doing so, you run the risk that your marketing emails aren’t reaching your intended recipients. 

Factors such as sender reputation, authentication protocols, and list hygiene can land your emails in spam folders or be blocked by ISPs. Instead, you want to: 

• Regularly clean your list to remove inactive or invalid addresses, ensuring high deliverability to engaged subscribers
• Use subscriber data to personalize emails and segment your list for targeted campaigns, boosting relevance and engagement
• Implement email authentication protocols like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC to verify domain authenticity and prevent spoofing
• Track open rates, click-through rates, and bounce rates to optimize campaigns and maintain a strong sender reputation
• Ensure compliance with email marketing regulations such as GDPR and CAN-SPAM to build trust with subscribers and avoid penalties

19. Not Utilizing Advanced Analytics and Attribution Models

Advanced analytics and attribution models not only matter for Google Analytics — they also play a crucial role in optimizing email marketing strategies. 

Ultimately, they allow you to dig deeper into the performance of your email campaigns, providing valuable insights into subscriber behavior, engagement patterns, and conversion pathways. Tracking key email metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates will help point to opportunities and weaknesses. And by neglecting to use advanced analytics and attribution models, insights into your customer journey are limited and your optimization efforts are stalled. 

Two advanced analytics and attribution models to consider are multi-touch attributions and cohort analysis. Let’s quickly look at each in more detail. 

1. Multi-touch attribution. Multi-touch attribution is like uncovering a puzzle of your customer’s journey. Instead of giving all the credit to just one touchpoint, it considers every step along the way. By looking at how different interactions across various marketing channels influence customer decisions, marketers can better understand what drives conversions and where to invest their marketing efforts. It’s all about getting a complete picture of campaign performance and making smarter decisions about where to allocate resources.
2. Cohort analysis. Cohort analysis involves grouping customers by common characteristics and monitoring their behaviors over time. By tracking these cohorts, marketers can identify trends, refine strategies, and improve customer retention efforts. It’s a valuable tool for understanding customer behavior and maximizing the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.

Also, you can visit our eCommerce Attribution Modeling Made Easy guide for a whole list of expert strategies and how to implement them.

20. Not Factoring “Less Is More” into Frequency Strategies

Let’s talk about email frequency. Bombarding subscribers with excessive emails without considering the “less is more” principle can cause fatigue, lower engagement, and harm brand reputation.

According to one study, the recommended number of emails per month for an eCommerce brand is around 10 to 19, while another suggests 2 to 4 times per week.

However, you need to fit your own market/brand’s “sweet spot.” (This is called email marketing cadence and is the process of finding the optimum frequency for your brand, in terms of engagement.) 

Failing to find your sweet spot between email frequency and quality content may lead to higher unsubscribe rates, lower open rates, and missed chances for personalization. Instead, marketers must focus on delivering value, respecting subscriber preferences, and enhancing brand perception to optimize email campaign effectiveness.

To find the best email marketing cadence for your brand, HubSpot recommends the following: 

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SEO Marketing Mistakes

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21. Ignoring Long-Tail Keywords

Targeting long-tail keywords, which are more specific and often have lower competition, is important to your marketing and search engine optimization strategies. 

By overlooking long-tail keywords, stores lose out on valuable opportunities to attract specific traffic and connect with users ready to buy. Introducing long-tail keywords into SEO plans empowers eCommerce ventures to boost their presence in specialized markets, elevate search rankings, and attract highly relevant visitors to their sites.

Here are some steps you can take to help you optimize your SEO strategy for long-tail keywords: 

• Dive deep into eCommerce keyword research tools to uncover relevant long-tail keywords specific to your niche
• Develop high-quality, informative content tailored around these long-tail keywords, addressing users’ specific needs and queries
• Optimize your website’s meta tags, headings, and content with the chosen long-tail keywords to improve search engine visibility
• Ensure your website offers a seamless user experience with easy navigation and fast loading times to keep visitors engaged
• Track your SEO performance regularly using analytics tools and refine your strategy based on insights to continuously improve results

22. Underestimating the Importance of Page Speed Optimization

No matter how experienced you are with eCommerce marketing, it’s easy to put off page speed optimization when there are so many other store and digital marketing strategies to stay on top of. However, in doing so, you not only hinder your SEO performance but your conversion rates as well. 

The bottom line is that it is vital that you prioritize page speed optimization, understanding its significant impact on user experience, bounce rates, and search engine rankings. The best way to do that is through techniques such as image optimization, minification, and caching. Here’s a very quick breakdown of each: 

• Image optimization focuses on image file sizes without compromising quality
• Minification removes unnecessary characters and whitespace from code files
• Caching enables store data to be temporarily stored on a user’s device — reducing load times and improving store speed 

Additionally, here’s a free tool you can use to audit your store — in terms of marketing and SEO — in seconds. 

23. Overlooking Advanced Internal Linking Strategies

Another marketing mistake that can be harming your SEO is your internal linking strategy — or, more accurately, your lack of one. This is because a lot of us focus more on backlinking (externally) without optimizing for internal links. 

Internal backlinks enable you to distribute links throughout your store, which helps with keyword ranking, better indexation, and improved crawlability. There are a couple of strategies eCommerce brands can use to enhance and improve internal linking. Let’s look at some of the more advanced ones. 

1. Siloing. Siloing is grouping related content into thematic clusters to improve organization and relevance. In eCommerce terms, this means categorizing products or content based on their attributes or types, such as brand, category, or price range. For example, a tech retailer might implement siloing by organizing promotional products into separate sections for laptops, smartphones, and accessories.
2. Hub pages. eCommerce hub pages are central points of reference for a content theme or product category. For example, an online apparel brand could create a hub page titled “Winter Fashion Essentials” that includes articles, videos, and product recommendations related to staying stylish during the colder months.
3. Product cross-linking. This strategy involves linking to related products within category pages of product descriptions. For instance, on a digital camera product page, there could be links to compatible lenses, memory cards, and camera bags. (This also enhances the shopping experience and boosts the likelihood of additional sales.)

24. Underestimating the Importance of E-A-T

E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) is the criteria that search engines like Google use to evaluate your online store and determine the credibility of content. The stores that show themselves as experts with trustworthy content are more likely to rank higher for SEO pages. 

Essentially, it’s vital that you prioritize authoritativeness in your niche if you want to improve your rankings. Here are three ways you can optimize your eCommerce website for E-A-T: 

1. Keep churning out top-notch content that’s informative, spot-on, and thoroughly researched to flaunt your expertise. An eCommerce blog full of helpful guides will go a long way to helping you do that. 
2. Hustle for backlinks from the big-league sites in your niche to level up your site’s authority. Submitting guest posts with helpful content is a good way to get backlinks. 
3. Make sure your site is bursting with customer reviews, accolades, and security badges to give a potential customer an incentive to hang around (reducing bounce rates), signaling to Google that you are trustworthy. 

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Social Media Marketing Mistakes

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25. Forgetting about Micro-Influencer Partnerships

When it comes to digital marketing mistakes, the most common one is going for quantity over quality — especially in terms of influencer marketing. It’s easy to get distracted by big follower numbers, but if those followers aren’t engaged or their demographics are just too broad, you are throwing away a valuable marketing budget. 

Rather, you need to recognize the value of collaborating with micro-influencers who have smaller but highly engaged followings within specific niches. This offers far more targeted outreach and authentic brand advocacy, which in turn helps you reach new audiences more likely to buy your products and engage with your brand. 

Not sure where to start? Here are some tips to help you find the right micro-influencers for your social media marketing campaigns: 

• Try to establish genuine relations and authentic connections through personalized outreach 
• Look beyond follower numbers and focus on influencers who have a highly engaged and loyal audience within your niche 
• Dive deep into a potential influencer’s content, engagement rates, and audience demographics to ensure they are aligned with your brand values and target market 
• Scrutinize their past partnerships to gauge an influencer’s credibility, authenticity, and effectiveness in driving engagement and conversions
• Consider using specialized platforms and agencies to streamline the search process and identify suitable influencers for each marketing channel

26. Ignoring Emerging Platforms and Trends

Another digital marketing mistake is being overly cautious about new trends or channels. Neglecting to explore new platforms or adapt to evolving trends, such as social media shopping or live video, can result in missed opportunities to reach and engage with your target audience in innovative ways.

That’s not to say you should be blindly spending all your advertising money on any fad! Instead, you want to ensure you stay ahead of the curve by not only monitoring emerging social media platforms and trends — but testing them for your specific market, brand, and product.  

Take TikTok, for instance. Many marketers dismissed the platform because of its younger user demographic, which paved the way for their competitors to get in ahead of them and establish themselves perfectly for when TikTok Shop arrived. 

This brings us to the next common digital marketing mistake many online retailers make. 

27. Not Incorporating Social Listening and Monitoring

Social listening and monitoring is the tracking and analyzing of online conversations, sentiments, and mentions related to your brand, product, or industry. Even with the right automation tools (such as Mention), this can be a cumbersome task. However, it’s also an important one, as it helps you gain better insights into your shoppers’ opinions and preferences — while staying on top of trends. All of which help you make more informed marketing decisions. 

Fundamentally, by neglecting to actively listen and respond to social media conversations, you are likely missing opportunities to address customer concerns, capitalize on trends, and engage with your audience in real-time. All things that can help you boost marketing performance and drive conversions long-term through retention and loyalty. 

To get you started, here are some tips and strategies to improve your social listening: 

1. Investing in top-notch social media monitoring platforms equipped with features like sentiment analysis and real-time alerts to gain valuable insights and stay ahead of trends
2. Defining specific objectives and key metrics for your social listening efforts, ensuring alignment with your overall marketing strategy and allowing for easy tracking of performance
3. Getting actively involved in online discussions, such as being quick to respond to customer queries and feedback and addressing any concerns 

28. Failing to Establish Yourself as a Brand Authority Through Your Social Content Plan

As we mentioned earlier, establishing yourself as an authority in your niche helps boost SEO and trust — but it doesn’t stop there. Brand authority is also a vital part of your social media and digital marketing content plan. However, so many brands put all their focus into product ads and videos without including some helpful content. 

In essence, you want to educate and help, not just sell. 

Instead, by positioning your brand as the authoritative source in your niche by showcasing deep product knowledge and industry insight in your social media content, you can build credibility, drive engagement, and build long-term retention. Here are a few tips to get you started: 

1. Keep your audience updated with the latest trends. For instance, if you’re a fitness apparel brand, you could share tips, videos, or infographics on new workout trends or nutrition advice.
2. Provide step-by-step guides or tutorials that address common problems or help achieve specific goals. For example, if you’re a home decor brand, you could use TikTok shorts to help guide users on maximizing space in a small living area.
3. Share insightful hacks or opinion pieces reflecting your unique perspective on industry-related topics. For instance, as an online fashion brand, you could arrange live streams to discuss hacks for improving product photography to enhance customer engagement and sales.

29. Lacking Integration with Your Overall Marketing Strategy

Your social media content marketing, ads, and social shops should all align with your overall marketing plan. However, so many brands keep each of their marketing channels, content plans, and eCommerce ads separate. The results are disjointed messaging and inefficient budget allocation. Not to mention, worse marketing performance. 

This is something we explored in detail in our guide to building a winning eCommerce marketing strategy. But here is a summary of the steps every eCommerce store should be making: 

1. Lay the foundation for an omnichannel experience. Ask yourself which of your social and marketing channels are bringing the most traffic and how many steps shoppers have to take before they finally check out. Where are your audiences hanging out and what kind of content are they consuming? Ultimately, you are looking for gaps you can fill with touchpoint-specific campaigns or authoritative content. 
2. Choose your core marketing channels. When it comes to eCommerce ads, there are seven core eCommerce digital marketing channels every online store should consider: Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, SnapChat, Twitter and TikTok ads, and influencer marketing. You need to choose the right combination for your specific brand, market, and product. 
3. Select the right eCommerce ad campaigns for key journey touchpoints. Once you have narrowed down your content and advertising channels, you need the right social media plan that covers the awareness, consideration, purchase, and repurchase stages of the sales funnel. 
4. Use real-time automation to manage optimization and drive sales. Next, you need the right PPC automation tool (Traffic Booster is the best fit for eCommerce) to help you run your campaigns across all your social (and search) channels — making sure they all work together seamlessly. 

Neglecting to align social media initiatives with broader marketing initiatives — such as paid ads, content marketing, email marketing, and search engine optimization — can result in mistrust, confusion, and incoherent messaging that can reduce performance across your entire marketing strategy, not just social media.  

Wrap Up 

There you have it, over 29 tweaks you can make to improve conversion and drive long-term growth today. Let’s quickly recap the top marketing mistakes you’re likely making. 

Still have eCommerce marketing questions? Post them in the comments below and our PPC and digital marketing experts will get back to you. Alternatively, be sure to sign up for our suite of eCommerce marketing apps, here. 

 

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