Digital marketing is growing and changing everyday, and with it come a few misconceptions and myths that many people are lead to believe.
Believing these myths can put you and your business in the dark and can lead to many missed opportunities, so I’ve created this article to debunk a number of the popular and more common myths that I’ve heard from clients, other digital marketers and, well many people alike!
This article will hopefully give you a fresh insight on your digital marketing techniques…
Myth #1: If Your Competition Is Not Online, You Don’t Need To Be Either
This myth is quite common with niche small businesses. For some reason, people misbelieve that, just because some your competitors are not using the digital market then you shouldn’t either. This is a complete myth.
No business can afford to lose potential customers, and you can’t simply rely on your current clientele to keep your doors open forever. In this day and age, your business needs to have digital marketing to grow.
Plus, chances are, as soon as your competition sees you making noise online, they are going to jump on the bandwagon too, and if they don’t they will surely regret it.
Ok, your regular customers may hang around (for now) but not having your business online means you’re missing out on a whole new world of customers. Some of which will never hear of your business without you being online.
Myth #2: We don’t need any digital marketing – our product can sell itself!
I’ve witnessed a lot of people in the past stumped as to why their product or service hasn’t gone viral. The first thing I ask about is obviously their marketing, and many times I’ve heard: “our product is awesome, it should go viral!” or “nobody I know offers the services I do, it can sell itself.”
The expectation of your business or service going viral, or even a slight reliance on that happening, is just simply bad marketing.
Yes, the world wide web can bring a large audience to your business, but remember, you’re competing with hundreds – if not thousands – of other businesses all vying for people’s attention and ultimately people’s custom.
One of the simplest ways to look at this is when Apple released the iPhone. As we all know, the iPhone was a game-changing product that was widely publicised in the media and online etc. Yet Steve jobs and the team still spent millions on their marketing campaigns.
This proves that, no matter how great and game-changing you believe your business to be, you cannot just stand around waiting for it to take off just because…it should.
Don’t fall into the trap of thinking your product or business can sell itself. You need to invest in your digital marketing to drive people to your website.
It’s also worth remembering that on average 90% of visitors to your website are not ready to purchase. Marketing doesn’t end once the visitor gets to your site. You must continuously stay top-of-mind, engage them, and reinforce your unique value propositions to nurture them through the sales funnel, from awareness to actual purchase.
Myth 3: We need to get as many people as possible to our website.
Following on from the last myth, this is another one that leaves business owners stumped. There is a big difference between getting lots of traffic to your website and getting the right kind of traffic, especially if you’re spending time (SEO, social, content marketing) and money (PPC, PR, advertising) to generate it.
Let’s look at it this way – Which is better: getting 100 highly targeted visitors to your website, who are all of your business demographic, or 1000 wide-ranging visitors, from all walks of life and all around the world? It’s more than likely that the 100 highly targeted visitors will generate more conversions than the latter.
“We need thousands of more clicks to our site” is not the solution to your problem.
It’s the right audience you need to focus on. Creating a shotgun campaign will never give you a high amount of conversions. Make your campaigns more pin-point, focusing on certain demographics of your target audience to see more quality visitors coming to your website and ultimately more conversions from your advertising budget.
Myth 4: Email Marketing is just spam
I converse with a lot of our clients on a day-to-day basis and I find a number of them are often surprised when I mention to them how good email marketing can be for their business.
I can see why people fall in the trap to this myth too. Unfortunately, over the years, spammers have abused email marketing, which has given email marketing a bad name. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use it. You just need to know how.
Creating a great email campaign can boost leads by the bucket-load. Just be wary of what your email campaigns contain. Bombarding your subscribers with constant promotions of your service will numb your campaign and you will begin to see people unsubscribing from your emails.
Nurture them, provide them with quality content, promote your blog posts and then after building trust and credibility, finish your campaign with an exclusive offer. Don’t go into your email campaigns all guns blazing – you will find it difficult to convert.
Myth 5: You need to blog every day!
Every aspect of digital marketing has myths and misconceptions, and that includes the world of blogging, too. One of the most common myths about blogging is that you have to generate and post new content every single day.
Now before I debunk this myth I need to make it clear that, if somehow you can create quality content every single day then go for it! But chances are you won’t be able to keep it up.
After 2 weeks of blogging everyday, it’s more than likely you will begin to feel exhausted and uninspired. This will be noticeable in your articles and your blog will become a place of tired writing.
To keep high-quality visitors to your blog and your website, you need to keep your content high quality too. You must keep visitors interested. This is why I advise bloggers to create a consistent schedule where you publish new quality material once a week, rather than once a day.
1 valuable blog article will receive more engagement than 5 tired, boring articles.
It’s good to remember that quality is better than quantity here.
Myth #6: Our site looks great, so our work is done.
Ok, so you’ve spent weeks creating your website and it’s content and it’s looking badass! Your work here is done, right? Wrong. This is one of the biggest mistakes in digital marketing. Your work isn’t complete now that you have a great looking website. No, your work has just begun!
The myth of believing that having an awesome looking website will bring you tonnes of leads without you having to do anything else online is one of the most common, in my opinion.
If you have read any of my previous blogs on here, you will already be aware that building meaningful, quality traffic to your website doesn’t just happen overnight. It’s time-consuming.
But that is what is needed to create a successful business online. You cannot just expect people to somehow find your website.
You need to create a schedule and a budget to consistently execute a long-term marketing strategy.
Generating online leads and customers isn’t just a one-time campaign.
Also don’t just let your website sit there, believing it to be a lead generating magnet. You must monitor your site accordingly. You need to be constantly gathering, filtering, and acting on data and KPIs that allows you to start optimising your site to better achieve your business goals because the ROI on your traffic acquisition efforts depends on the ability of your website to convert this traffic.
There is no shortage of tools that can help you gather and analyse data to assist you with your marketing, yet it’s alarming how many businesses don’t use them, including some of the basics like Google Analytics and Yoast.
I’d also check out Aweber and MailChimp for your email campaigns and automated email funnels as well as SEMrush for your SEO. A great tool is heatmapping your website, which shows you where people are clicking and how often. Take a look at CrazEgg to cover this.
Track. Analyse. Optimize. Repeat.
Myth 7: I don’t need a website, I have a Facebook Page.
Finally, last but by no means least is the myth of businesses not having or believing they need a website because they have a Facebook Page.
Don’t get me wrong, Facebook Pages are an awesome tool, which massively aid lead generation and help to build credibility for your brand. But you cannot just rely solely on your page. You need a website also.
There are countless reasons for not relying on your Facebook page for online business – number one being that your Facebook Page isn’t even yours. What I mean here is that your page and all the content on your page are owned by Facebook – not you. And if Zuckerburg and his team decide to one-day take down your page, they can do.
The second most obvious reason is that your website is where people go to purchase your product. Yes, Facebook has a big amount of users…but it doesn’t have everybody. Not having a website means you are missing out on a huge amount of opportunities from people looking for your service in other places rather than the social network.
It’s true a Facebook page can be found via a search engine, but it doesn’t provide the same comprehensive SEO control of a dedicated website, a point which should not be overlooked.
A website enables you to tailor your content to the exact kind of phrases and keywords your potential customers are searching for, compared to a Facebook page that is limited in this aspect. Showing up as highly as possible in online searches is a critical component of any business’ acquisition strategy.
In short, should you have a Facebook page for your business? Yes, absolutely. It’s free and it’s brand exposure. But is it enough? No.
To create the kind of digital presence that is required for a business to succeed in today’s world, a dedicated website isn’t just a nice asset to have, it’s a necessity.
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