Myth-Busting: Misconceptions About Digital Marketing

I tried it and it just didn’t work!

We hear this one a lot, and we always think to ourselves “Instant gratification isn’t fast enough for you, is it?”

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and it always takes time (and effort) to construct a winning marketing program, digital or not. Still, we’re conditioned to expect instant results. Too bad.

Most forms of digital marketing take some time to reach their full effect. SEO campaigns, for instance, require time to generate results. The same is true for content marketing, blogging, even pay-per-click advertising: results build slowly and you need to wait until you can examine enough data to make intelligent decisions about what is working and what isn’t.

Patience, grasshopper. 

Digital marketing is just for BIG companies

Yeah, but no. Bigger companies may have more resources to throw into their marketing programs, but that doesn’t mean those programs are going to deliver outsized results.

Any sized business can benefit from an effective digital marketing program. You start with a stellar website, optimize for mobile, and invest in workable strategies. Whatever your budget is.

The point is to build communications with your customers, strengthen your brand awareness and deliver relevant information. When you do that, the customers respond, no matter what your budget was.

All traffic is created equal and the more of it the better.

Newbies think all you need to do is drive traffic to your website, sit back and watch the cash flow in.  Ahhhh, nope.

Where is that traffic coming from? And is that traffic your desired customer demographic?  You want targeted traffic, not huge numbers of eyeballs who aren’t at all interested in what you have to sell.

How long are visitors staying on the pages? If they click and run, then the relevance of your message is lacking. Again, they aren’t your type!

What’s your ROI?  You could be attracting bazillions of eyeballs, but if they aren’t converting, it’s all kind of a waste of time, isn’t it?

The more social media platforms, the better.

Again, this ignores the need for relevance.

You can invest a ton of money getting your videos up on Tik-Tok, but if your customer base isn’t young teenagers and cultural groundbreakers, a lot of that money will disappear into the ether.

A very simple way to decide which social media platforms are right for your business is to survey which platforms your competition uses. There may be rare cases where you can steal a march from them by being different, but most of the time, the social media platforms that attract your customer demographics are the right ones to pursue.

SEO marketing is outdated. Email marketing is dead.

The statistics tell a different tale. 

The entire purpose of SEO marketing is to work with the algorithms of Google and other search engines to attract relevant eyes to your site. That is, people who are interested in your product and services. That continues to be as important as it ever was.

Email marketing continues to be one of the top methods for attracting new customers. Yes, it requires resources and expertise to do correctly. Yes, if your messages are perceived as ‘spammy’ they can be counterproductive. 

But saying either SEO or E-mail marketing is no longer relevant is just lazy. And again, the statistics tell a different tale.

All I need is content and lots of it!

Another misconception. Quality beats quantity every time in digital marketing.

Digital marketing is not about keyword stuffing, nonstop blog posts and endless email messages. 

Successful digital marketing is about communicating with your customers and giving them relevant information about the products and services they are interested in.  And having some fun. And being creative. And being responsive. 

You may have other myths about digital marketing. Please give us a call at Fuel Media. We love bursting bubbles for our clients, and, importantly, helping them achieve their goals.