Brands launch digital marketing campaigns every day. And while every marketer has the best intentions when developing a campaign, there can still be gaps. Digital marketing campaign mistakes are often inevitable. It’s what you learn from those mistakes that can help you build a better campaign. From creating content to targeting audiences to optimizing for keywords, there are lots of opportunities for a misstep.

Understanding your audience is vital to the success of any digital marketing campaign. Even if you know some basic information about your buyers like titles or demographics, doesn’t mean you understand them. You have to develop buyer personas, which are fictional representations of your idea buyer. These go way beyond surface attributes, looking at motivations and objections. Crafting and keeping buyer personas current is hard work but worth it.

Consider this statistic from a Network Advertising Initiative (NAI) study: behaviorally targeted ads are twice as effective as non-targeted ads. Because if you are going to spend the money on ads, whether those be via paid search or social media, you must target appropriately.

When you don’t define or target properly, users will see you don’t know what they want or expect. You can’t sell lawnmowers to people that reside in the desert, and those in southern Florida don’t need snow bibs. Those are obvious examples, but taking it a bit further, here’s a more granular example. If you offer a service to help teens prepare for college then you need to understand that the target is their parents. And not any parents; it may be more beneficial to target those that are college-educated. And that type of specific targeting is possible when you have a well developed buyer persona set. Use that to influence who you target and where.