The Social Media Takeaway - Louise McDonnell

Social Media Marketing: The Top 10 Mistakes To Avoid

• Season 1 • Episode 53

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In this episode of The Social Media Takeaway, I dive into the 10 most common social media marketing mistakes—and more importantly, how to fix them fast. From setting clear goals to knowing your audience, managing expectations, and leveraging paid ads, I’ll walk you through the exact strategies you need to start seeing real results.

What you’ll learn:
✅ Why vague goals are hurting your social media success
✅ How to attract the right customers (not just any followers)
✅ The importance of testing demand before launching products
✅ Why consistency beats overnight success—every time
✅ How to tap into trends the right way (without losing your brand voice)
✅ The truth about paid ads—and why they’re often necessary
✅ How to track ROI so you know what’s really working

I’ll also share real client success stories that prove small shifts can make a huge difference. Tune in now and start optimizing your social media marketing today!

SHOW CHAPTERS
00:44 Welcome to the Social Media Takeaway 
01:11 Top 10 Social Media Marketing Mistakes to Avoid 
01:38 Mistake 1: Lack of Clear Goals 
03:28 Mistake 2: No Market Demand 
04:32 Mistake 3: Undefined Ideal Customer 
06:16 Mistake 4: Unclear Messaging 
07:16 Mistake 5: Unrealistic Expectations 
08:13 Mistake 6: Lack of Persistence 
10:04 Mistake 7: Ignoring Trends 
10:23 Mistake 8: Believing Social Media is Free
12:43 Mistake 9: Not Tracking ROI 
13:42 Mistake 10: No Strategy 
14:08 Conclusion and Final Thoughts


Let's connect:
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If you'd like to book a call to see how I can support you head over to my website here. www.sellonsocialmedia.academy/hello

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The second client that I was working with, they were an online coach as well, but they were helping people. They were a dietician and they were helping people who were on the cusp of having diabetes. Okay. So they knew exactly who their ideal customer was. They knew exactly the pain points that ideal customer had. They knew exactly how that ideal customer was. thinking, they knew exactly the advice that they had been given by their doctors. They knew their fears, they knew their family's fears. And from there, it made it a lot easier to plan a free downloads or eBooks, to create, to plan social media content, to pick out the testimonials that were going to be most effective to appeal to that person, to plan the paid ads, the emails, the podcast appearances, everything. Welcome to the Social Media Takeaway. I'm your host. She's McDonald. And this is the show for business people that want to know how to use social media more effectively to drive sales and leads for their business. If you enjoy the show, please make sure you subscribe. And if you know any friends or business colleagues who may benefit from this episode, please make sure that you share it with them. Hi, everybody. You're so welcome to my live broadcast today. So we're going to talk today about the 10. Social media marketing mistakes that you absolutely want to avoid. And we have put this list together just based on what we encounter every single day when we do in our academy, whether we're training people, whether I'm training people or in the agency, especially when we're bringing new agency clients on. And we obviously at the beginning, when you're starting to work with the clients, first thing you've got to do is create that strategy for them. So the first mistake that people have is that they're not clear on what they want to achieve. Okay. If somebody comes to me and they want to launch, let's say an online program, so they're a coach and they want to launch an online program or you're an e commerce store, you want to launch, you want to sell more products. So if I ask my clients, what do you want to achieve? And they say, I want to get more sales. That's just too wishy washy. If you're launching an online program, what is the program? Is it a one to one program? Is it a group program? When do you want to launch it by? How many people do you want to, do you want to recruit onto that program? What are you charging for that program? So let's say you say, so rather than saying I want to launch a program, if you say by the 30th of September I want to launch an online program, it's going to be 5, 000 euros per person. I want to get 10 people on it. There's 50, 000 people, that's 50, 000 years that you want to have in your business by the end of September. Now, if you're really clear on what you want to achieve, as in that example, then what you can do is you can work your way back from that date, from that goal, and you can start planning your content, your paid ads, your email, your direct marketing, your indirect marketing, your influencer marketing, whatever it is. So you have to be extremely clear on what you want to achieve. And I'm really detailed because that allows you plan your content, your ads, your emails, and it also allows you to allocate a budget for how much you're prepared to spend to help you achieve. And in fact, what that is, setting a goal. So being wishy wasy, if you're any way wishy-washy about what you want to achieve. If you are absolutely not 100%, 110% sure of what you want to achieve. It's always going to mean that your social media is not going to be as effective as it could be, and not just social media, your marketing in general. The second thing is to make sure that you have, there is a demand for what you are selling. If you're selling products, obviously from September to December is a huge sales period. For anyone in the run up to Christmas, if you're a coach and you're going to be launching an online program or an online training program or an online coaching program or whatever that is, yeah, you have to make sure that there's demand for what you are selling. Make sure that whatever you're selling, whether it is a cup or whether it is an online coaching program, make sure that there's demand for what you're selling. And it is not good enough to ask your friends and your family because your friends and your family, for the most part, love you. And they will tell you, Oh, it's fantastic. It's not that they're lying to you. It's just that they love you and that they really want you. If you've made this product, they're like, that's the best product I've ever seen. I'm going to buy it. I'm going to tell all my friends, but you have to go beyond your friends and family to grow a business. So you've got to make sure that there's enough demand for what you're selling and that you test that. You do a competitive analysis, you look at similar products and services, you look at the price point, you look at their positioning, you look at their messaging, and you make sure that there's demand for what you're selling. The third thing then brings me on to, you have to identify who your ideal customer is. And I want to tell a tale of two cities, a tale of two clients that I've seen recently. It was two coaches. One coach said, we're just starting off and they, and I said, who is your ideal customer? And they said that word that I never want to hear on people when I ask that question. And that word is everybody. They're like, I'm online. I can deal. I can help everybody. And if you think, Oh, I can help everybody. You can just forget about it because you're going to find your messaging is going to be so broad, your targeting is going to be so broad that you're going to appeal to absolutely nobody because you're just too broad. The second client that I was working with, they were an online coach as well, but they were helping people, they were a dietitian and they were helping people who were on the cusp of having diabetes, okay? So they knew exactly who their ideal customer was, they knew exactly the pain points that ideal customer had, they knew exactly how that ideal customer was. thinking, they knew exactly the advice that they had been given by their doctors. They knew their fears, they knew their family's fears. And from there, it made it a lot easier to plan a free downloads or eBooks, to create, to plan social media content, to pick out the testimonials that were going to be most effective to appeal to that person, to plan the paid ads. The emails, the podcast appearances, everything. So the more focused you can be on your, who your ideal customer is, but also profiling them in a meaningful way, the better your results are going to be. Now, here is the thing. This is another thing, another mistake people make is that they sit down and they have a pen and paper and they go, I'm going to profile my customer. But what they do is they guess it. You can't profile your customer based on your. Guessing, because if you're not in their shoes, if you're not that person who is that problem, then you're only guessing. The fourth biggest mistake that people have is the lack of clarity on messaging. Again, if, if you're very clear on what you want to achieve, and if there's demand for the product at the price point and all of that, and if you have identified your ideal customer, then you can be clear on the core messages that you're going to time and time again. In your organic content, in your paid content, in your emails, on your posters, on your brochures, on your websites. But if you're not clear on what you want to achieve and who your ideal customer is, the chances are, if you're busy on social media, that messaging is a bit all over the place. And if your messaging is a bit all over the place, it just means that sometimes you're spending a lot of time and energy on social media, but you won't be getting the results because. people won't be clear on what you're trying to communicate. If you're not clear on what you're trying to communicate, they won't be able to understand it. So that's number four. So before you create any content, ads, email, website, brochure, whatever it is, before you do any of that, what you got to do is get clear on your message. Because if there's any room for confusion, people go away. The fifth mistake that people have is they've Unrealistic expectations. If you haven't got a huge amount of followers and you're creating an organic post, which is, you're not paying for it, you're just putting a post up on Instagram or TikTok or Facebook or LinkedIn, and it's reaching 50 or 60 people. So if you do four of those posts and you've now reached 240 people. The phone isn't going to start ringing off the hook. It doesn't just happen like that. So I think people having unrealistic expectations can cause them to give up too soon because they go, Oh, that didn't work. But really for organic posts reaching a few people or a few hundred people, that's never going to work. That's only the start of the journey. So it's simply not like turning on a switch. It's not a case of that you start on your social media and then all the business comes in. Unfortunately, if it was that easy, everybody would be doing it. It's not that easy. What you need to do is you need to keep showing up and consistently. And a lot of the times people come to plan their social media marketing when it's too late. And then the sixth mistake is that people have, you have to be persistent. So if you're not persistent, if you're not like a dog with a bone, okay, what'll happen is You'll give up. So let's say I'm going to run an ad. I'm going to create a lead magnet, like free download. And I want to roll an ad to get to grow my email list. And let's say you come up with this style, this free ebook, and you run the ad. And then you're really disappointed with the results. So maybe you just don't get as many click throughs or downloads that you want. Instead of just saying that didn't work. What you got to do is look down and look at all the different parts of that campaign where there was a conversion. What, how many, like how many people saw the ad versus how many people clicked on the ad versus how many people clicked through to the landing, to the page where they can get the free ebook versus how many people put in their contact details and got the ebook versus how many people opened the email to download the ebook versus how many people opened the subsequent emails that you sent to them to nurture them, to get them to sign up to whatever it is you're selling. And you look at that, you look at all that. And you go, okay, where do we fall down? Was the landing page not good enough or was the book, the ebook that we were offering, was it just not interest to the people that we got it in front of? Or maybe the ebook had no relationship really to the product or service that we were selling them ultimately. So it's about being persistent and it's about not giving up and it's about not. expecting things to work first time because they rarely do, but it's about realizing that there's huge potential and that if you sit down and you continue to work and you continue to improve all the different parts of your campaign, that it will work. And so you've got to never give up, you've got to keep trying. So you've got to look at the, at your campaign and say, maybe if I had used a better image or maybe if I had used a better description, or maybe if I'd had a better ebook, or maybe if my landing page had been better, or maybe if. My email sequence had been better. Or maybe if my offer had been better, I would get better results. And then another mistake that people make when it comes to social media marketing in particular is that they don't tap into trends. So tapping into trends can be a wonderful way of getting great organic reach. All of that is going to come with planning. So look at the trends is number nine. Look at that. We went from six to nine. So that's trends should be seven. And then eight is social media is not. free. So if you think that you're going to, to be able to grow your business using organic social media, your expectations are not aligned. Okay. Because the days of social media being free, they're long gone. Now it's still possible to get organic reach, but the problem is you can't depend on. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, or Twitter, you can't depend on any of them to give you reach because sometimes you can put huge time and effort into creating a post and then you're really disappointed with the results. So the whole thing about organic, which is the non paid for reach, it's when the algorithm decides how many people sees your content. The whole point of that is that you can't control it. And if you want to be able to control who sees your posts and who sees the important posts. You've got to pay for that. Okay. And the benefit of running an ad is that if you've got your tracking set up properly, you can see the direct sales that you've got from an ad. So the indirect sales then are the people who didn't want to buy the product that you were promoting, but they bought other products or the people who didn't want to sign up to your coaching program, but maybe they've. They bought something else from you. Maybe they didn't approach you about doing a major big project instead. Okay, they're the indirect sales and that's, so when you're running an ad you always get direct, you always get indirect. And then you get the future sales as well. So future sales are the people who saw the ad, they're not ready to buy now, they're not in a position, it doesn't suit them. They'll, they're gonna, they're gonna follow you or they're gonna bookmark that post, or they're gonna screenshot that post and they're gonna maybe do something with you in three or four months time. If you say, I want to target people who are of this age, who has this interest in this location, I want to exclude you people who are, whatever it is. You can do all that really effectively by running paid ads, and so you're not crossing your fingers hoping that the algorithm will show the posts to the people who need to see it. You actually. Getting it in front of the people that you need to get in front of. And remember, let's go back just a few steps. You've got to have, you've got to be, you have realistic expectations that people, if they see and they hear about you once, that they don't generally take action from that. Generally, people need to see you at least between nine and 18 times being really clear on your message, talking about a product or service that they want before they take action. And so that's why paid ads are so important, because it means that we can continue to get in front of people who are the most, who are most likely to buy our products or services. And then number nine is you've got to be tracking return on investment. So if you're running an ad, oh my God, so many people recently, all this, the last few months, I have come across people who are running traffic ads and expecting sales. So if you are running a traffic ad, you'll not generate sales on the back of it. If you want to generate sales, you must be running specific conversion ads, whether that's Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, or TikTok, no matter, or Google. So you've got to be running a. specific ad and the objective of that ad is to generate sales. And if you have your social media and your Google and all that set up properly, the tracking set up properly, you'll be able to see, I spent this much, I generated X amount of revenue. And from that, you can make an informed decision as to whether you want to run that campaign again, you want to increase the budget, or you want to decrease the budget, or you need to tweak the campaign to get it perform better. So these are all things. So not again, a mistake, not looking at the return on investment, not thinking about it strategically. Working it through and being really strategic about your next move. And then the last thing then is obviously strategy never dies. And I suppose that's what I'm talking about all throughout this whole 10 mistakes people make is that if you don't have a strategy, you don't know what your goals are, if you're not clear on your message, if you don't know who you're targeting, if you're unrealistic about your expectations, if you show up too late, if you're not, if you're, if your social media content doesn't look professional, isn't aligned to your brand messaging, if you're not using paid ads, all of these things. You're not going to get results. So strategy never dies. That's it, everyone. That's another episode of the social media takeaway. If you have some feedback, make sure that you tag us on social media. You'll find me under sell on social M or on LinkedIn. You'll find me under Louise McDonald. I'd love to hear your feedback and what you thought about the show. Make sure you hit that subscribe button so that you don't miss out on any future episodes. And if you know anyone who may be interested, be sure to share the show with them too. Thanks everyone.