A lot of things need to be in place for a digital marketing strategy to perform effectively. A clear understanding of your goals, audience, and tools at your disposal. A solid platform on which to launch your campaign. Lots and lots of good content.

There are plenty of articles out there that will outline exactly what you need and how to get it, but there are also certain issues that can pop up. Common problems that, if ignored, can sink a digital campaign before it even starts.

Here are three such issues and how you can tackle them up front, before you start investing in your digital marketing efforts.

If Your Website Gets Hit By a Google Penalty

Google rankings are the currency of digital marketing. If you want to drive more traffic to your website and generate more leads online, you need to rank in Google for certain keywords.

In some cases, however, it can be difficult to rank in Google because of what the search engine sees as unforgivable problems with your website. When this happens, your site can be penalized – tagged as “low quality” and held back in the rankings.

The most common penalties are for low quality or “thin” content (meaning not enough text on the page or duplicate content on your pages), and bad backlinks. If you are getting links from low quality websites, or if you hired an SEO firm in the past that didn’t do good work, this can be a problem.

An Unclear or too General Message

Online you can reach anyone, but that doesn’t mean you should try to reach everyone. A good marketing message is targeted and focused on the specific audience that you know you want to do business with.

While your messaging can be broad and general enough target a wide swath of prospects, there should be specific pages on the site that speak to each of your target personas. eBooks and white papers should be written strictly for personas, and possibly only a single problem or question those personas might have. The more specific you get, the better your campaign will be.

Too Much Content, Not Enough Promotion

The last problem sounds like a good one to have, but it can hurt your campaign as much as any of the others. I’ve run across many sites that were loaded with content. eBooks, white papers, case studies, blog posts – more content than the companies knew what to do with.

And that was the problem. They had content but no idea what to do with it, and as a result, they weren’t seeing more leads. Worse, they had invested in the content and were discouraged that this kind of marketing just didn’t work.

For every hour spent writing or developing content, there should be at least one hour spent promoting that piece. It’s all about quality over quantity – ensure you have a solid piece of content you can promote broadly and then build a promotional campaign that will generate as many leads as possible from that content piece.

Is Your Website Marketing Ready?

If you’re ready to invest in digital marketing or are getting ready to explore the possibility, the first step should be to determine if your site is ready for a full scale marketing campaign. Download our eBook below and learn what it will take to get marketing ready and how you can make small changes to put yourself in a position to succeed.