Online Marketing Myths That You Must Stop Believing In
If you read through blogs and articles on online marketing you must bear in mind that there is a lot of misinformation floating around. The digital marketing industry has grown exponentially over the last two decades and this has created a situation where there are too many ‘experts’ all around and everybody has a say on how you should start your campaign and manage it. If you don’t hire the right online marketing company you can also fall victim to this misinformation campaign. You may already believe in half-truths and even more dangerously myths. So here we debunk some of the most popular myths and also explain to you the reasons why you should stop believing in them
1. Digital Marketing isn’t needed when you can grow by word-of-mouth
In an ideal world, there is no marketing strategy as good as word-of-mouth marketing. When your potential customers hear about your brand from people they know and trust, it should help you increase your reach fast. But you don’t live in an ideal world and as everybody else around you go gaga about digital marketing you can’t turn a blind eye to this strategy. The problem with traditional word-of-mouth marketing is that its reach is limited and lead generation is slow. If you are targeting a small community around you this might be good enough but if you have bigger ambitions you need to market your business digitally.
What you need is a digital marketing campaign that imbibes the same attributes as traditional word-of-mouth marketing. If your customers are happy with your products and services, you can offer them some incentives such as discount coupons and free services to pass your name within their social networks. The good thing about running an online word-of-mouth marketing campaign is the fact that it can immediately lead to footfalls in your store of inquiries via phone or email. You can also build your social presence using this strategy.
2. The more marketing tools you use better results you have
Every time you search for upcoming trends and strategies for digital marketing you are likely to come across a new marketing tool that promises you the moon. In the past, businesses would try and use every possible marketing tool they came across to improve, refine and fine-tune their campaign. The only problem is there is no end to the number of tools that you can use for your campaign. According to some estimates there are 5000+ free and premium tools available and you can’t keep up with the pace at which newer and so-called ‘better’ marketing tools are released.
As the saying goes “too many cooks spoil the broth” the same can happen to your campaign. To draw an analogy from real life – you can buy as many paint bushes as you want but if you don’t have steady hands or creativity you are likely to create a mess on your canvas! While you definitely need marketing tools to manage your digital campaign and your online marketing agency is likely to be using many of them, the focus should always be on running the campaign creatively rather than relying only on tools to create the magic. Test few tools and use those that really improve your campaign and show results.
3. You need to be ‘Active’ on Social Media
You may have heard this a zillion times. Every digital marketing expert would tell you this without defining what they mean by being active or what benchmark is used to separate an active campaign from an inactive one. Does one post per day on Facebook make you active on Facebook? Do you need to send out a couple of tweets every day with tiny URLs promoting your products? Forget digital marketing for a while and think of your personal social media use. Have you un-followed a friend or colleague recently bored of his/her posts of dining out with family or visiting weekend destinations? Did you just mute a group on WhatsApp tired with those irritating forwards?
The same thing can happen if you run a social media campaign without putting yourself into your target audience’s shoes. Do you really need to post the thing on Facebook that you have planned? Will your post add value to the relationship you have with your customer? Will it enlighten them about a new development in your industry? If ‘yes’ go ahead with the post if ‘no’ tread with caution. Being active on social media isn’t measured on the number of posts but on the value, you are spreading through your posts. Don’t chase numbers and rather think of value.
4. Backlinks define the success of your campaign
It takes only two words to bust this myth – ‘they did’. To brush up with the history of digital marketing (search engine optimization to be precise) backlinks or what is popularly known as cross-linking was at the heart of every SEO campaign. The logic used by search engines was that more the number of sites that linked to your site better you were in terms of value. Marketers tried every possible strategy to cash in on this from buying links to exchanging them. But Google has pulled the plugs on this strategy a few years back when this led to lowering the standards of its search results. Marketers were just trying to get smarter than Google and it had to act to improve the search experience of its users. In fact, you can invite the wrath of Google by following this strategy today and your website may be blacklisted from search engine index for having too many links.
A good online marketing company would always ask you to focus on quality content rather than links. If you write good and unique content that is good to read and loved by the audience you will grow your site organically without having to do any fancy things. And as for backlinks, they are ‘illegal’ now if we could use that term.
5. Business blogging is just like personal blogging
If you have been following personal blogs for a while you’d have noticed that people blog on everything from their shopping extravaganza to writing political commentary. According to some business, blogging is pretty much the same where you need to write unique content on a regular basis and you’d rise up the ladder. It is not and it doesn’t quite work that way with business blogs. It requires a careful bit of planning where your focus should be on gaining good leads and taking them through your sales funnel. Aimless blogging doesn’t fetch you much more than some additional traffic. And as a business, your success would be measured on sales and revenue and hence you should never treat business blogs much like your personal blog.
To sum up, digital marketing is extremely powerful, in fact, more than what any of us can imagine. If you use it strategically it can bring great rewards to your brand’s campaign. If you get it wrong which is possible when you believe in the myths we have just busted above, you’d be doing more harm to your business than any good. So stop believing in these myths and focus on the results your campaign offers rather than all other things that are being passed on as truths and real strategies.
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