4 Common Mistakes Most Beginner Marketers Make

If you’re just starting out as a marketer, then you probably have quite a lot on your plate. After all, marketing strategies can be complex, nuanced, and ever-changing. Marketers need to be dynamic and adaptable in order to help deliver the best results for a business.

As with any role, when you’re learning the ropes, you’re bound to make some mistakes. However, by understanding the common mistakes that most beginners make, you can avoid them. This will help you to work more efficiently and enhance your overall career development.

Here are four common mistakes that most marketers make at the start of a new job that you can avoid.

1. Not Paying Attention to SEO

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is one of the most effective ways to improve a brand’s online visibility, credibility, and organic traffic. SEO is all about using strategies that boost a site or webpage’s rank in a search result. This includes using well-researched keywords and knowing the optimal way to use them in your content.

Some beginner marketers who aren’t brushed up on their SEO may think that stuffing keywords into their content is the way to go. But while this may boost SEO in the short-term, if Google catches on to this practice (which is considered an unethical form of SEO), then you may be penalised as a result.

Many beginner marketers may avoid learning SEO believing it would be  time-consuming or complicated. But the truth is that it doesn’t take long to learn the basics of SEO. Also, while SEO specialists do have valuable, in-depth knowledge about SEO that can take years to develop, knowing the basics can still be enough to get a company’s page to rank well on Google.

2. Not Focusing on Quality Content

As a beginner marketer, you will understand the importance of content marketing. You will know that creating and promoting content related to the company is an essential method for driving sales. But, many beginner marketers will simply focus on producing a lot of content while ignoring quality. This is a mistake. You can produce as much content as you like, but if it’s not providing real value to readers, then you will never achieve your marketing aims.

Every successful marketer should focus on creating content that is relevant, engaging, informative, and impactful. This is the kind of content that will generate traffic to a website. High-quality content is also a key component of any fruitful SEO strategy.

3. Ignoring Feedback

When you start out as a marketer, your primary aim may be to create compelling content. And once you feel confident that you’ve got the hang of things, you will tend to just keep repeating what you’re doing. But this isn’t how you develop as a marketer. If you really want to hone your marketing skills, then it’s important to pay attention to feedback from customers. Comments on your posts and content can all be valuable feedback. They can provide you with positive affirmations about what you’re doing right; but – and most importantly – they can point out areas that need fixing.

By replying to comments, marketers can build a strong relationship with customers and add a human face to marketing. Customers may lack trust in a business if they feel they’re just having products pushed on them, rather than interacting with the business in a mutually beneficial way.

4. Now Knowing Who Your Target Audience Is

A marketing campaign can only be successful if it is directed towards a specific audience. Many beginner marketers may try to direct their content towards everyone, in the hope that that this will generate the most interest, engagement, visibility, and sales. But, while this approach may be ambitious, it doesn’t tend to achieve the desired results.

Before a beginner marketer creates any content, they should know who it is aimed at. Effective content should provide useful information to a question or a problem that is facing a specific type of person. Increasing your knowledge of your target audience will allow you to gain loyal and interested readers who will keep coming back for more.

It takes time to understand the various pitfalls of marketing. So don’t worry if you’re new to the industry and feeling a bit overwhelmed. It’s normal to feel that way in the beginning.

The most important personal quality you can develop during the beginning of your marketing career is a desire to learn. Avoiding mistakes is just one aspect of achieving success as a marketer. The next step is it work on fulfilling your potential, which means challenging yourself. You should always be thinking about how you can improve your SEO knowledge or content creation. Staying passionate about marketing is what will allow you to stay ahead of the game.

You can learn more about useful resources for a beginner marketer or a prospective marketer by clicking here. 

Sam Woolfe is particularly interested in self-development, psychology, mental health, and the future of work. Most of all, though, Sam is passionate about helping people find work that is meaningful and fulfilling. You can follow him on Twitter and find more of his work at www.samwoolfe.com.