Digital marketing myths are a funny little thing, one day you’re doing some work on your campaign and then someone hits you with a myth. They’ll give you a call and tell you that “email marketing is dead”. Of course, a lot of these rumours have no basis in fact and are normally born from clickbait headlines that are designed to get you to read articles that provide no value to the reader. This is why we’re going to go through and debunk some digital marketing myths.
Digital marketing is indeed a rapidly-changing and complicated environment to understand. Despite this, some of the stalwart methods of digital marketing are still going strong and if anybody tells you that a specific part of digital marketing is dead, you need to take it with a pinch of salt and look into it for yourself.
Digital Marketing Myth: Digital Has Completely Replaced Traditional Marketing
It’s true that digital marketing has completely changed marketing forever and has caused marketers to re-evaluate the way that they connect with customers. This doesn’t mean that digital marketing has completely replaced traditional marketing methods. For those that aren’t sure about what traditional marketing is, it’s the methods of old like TV ads, radio, and print marketing. The stuff we used before the good new days of the internet. There are several reasons why digital marketing hasn’t completely replaced traditional marketing. One of these reasons being that less internet-savvy people still prefer the old ways.
When you look at the statistics, you’ll find that traditional marketing is still very much alive. For example, a survey showed that 79% of households would read or scan adverts from direct mail sources and 56% of people find it to be the most trusted source of marketing. Not only that, but traditional marketing can go hand in hand with digital marketing. 44% of people have said that they visited a company’s website because of the direct mail that they received in the post.
Rather than thinking about the untrue fact that digital marketing has completely replaced traditional methods, think about how you can blend them. If you think that your customers are likely to respond well to a traditional campaign, then do it and don’t let the naysayers stop you.
You Don’t Need To Be Online If Your Competitors Aren’t
This is one of the more annoying digital marketing myths that I’ve come across. It stems from the reactive mentality to business, “they’re not doing it, so why should I do it?” Business is no longer an environment where those with reactive tendencies will succeed at a great rate. It’s the era of being proactive in business and the fact that your competitors don’t do something isn’t an excuse for you to not do it. If your competitors can’t be found online, then quite frankly they’re doing something wrong and you shouldn’t be looking to them as an example for your business.
If you see that your competitors can’t be found online, then you need to pounce on the opportunity. You can immediately begin siphoning potential customers away from your competitors by building up your online presence before they do. Furthermore, if your competitors do then decide to come online because of you, you’ll have a head start on them in terms of your SEO and social media strategies, meaning you’ll stay ahead of the game in general.
So, if you can see that your competitors aren’t online, see it as a business opportunity and jump on it!
Mobile Customers Won’t Convert
I don’t particularly know where this digital marketing myth came from. I can see the pseudo-logic in the argument though. The idea is that mobile customers don’t want to go through a long and complicated payment process just to buy an item. This point may be true, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that mobile customers aren’t going to convert to your website. You just need to go about things in the right way to get them to convert. Over 50% of web traffic is now on mobile devices, so you need to get this right.
When working to ensure that mobile visitors to your website convert, you need to try and make sure that the method of payment is as simple as possible. I don’t want to play around for ten minutes to make a payment and other people won’t either. There’s an array of different plugins that can be integrated into your website to ensure that your customers find it easy to pay and therefore convert.
It is genuinely as easy as just making sure that your mobile payment solution is quick, easy, and hassle-free for your customers. If you implement this into your website, you’re going to find that a lot more of your mobile customers are going to convert.
Email Marketing Is Just Spammy and Doesn’t Work
Indeed, a poorly managed email marketing campaign will just lead to customers putting your email into their spam folder. It might even end up there automatically. This doesn’t mean that email marketing is spammy and that it doesn’t work. If you’re finding that your email marketing campaign is struggling, then you need to blame yourself rather than the method. Try looking into ways in which you can avoid your emails ending up in someone’s spam folder. A lot of businesses will also have systems in place to detect spam emails and file them away.
If you don’t want to handle all of that yourself, then don’t despair! There are so many digital marketing agencies out there that can help you to craft email campaigns. They’ll be able to handle every element of your campaign, from subject lines, email copy to delivery in general. This is also something that we provide at Driven Media Solutions, allowing you to spend more time on the things that matter to your business. Email marketing isn’t spammy, it just needs to be done by the right person. The message itself is also incredibly important to your success.
Digital Marketing Myth: It’s Too Expensive
This digital marketing myth, like many others, actually stems from a grain of truth. Digital marketing can be notoriously expensive, especially if you’re working with a bad agency or you don’t know what you’re doing. This is why it is incredibly important to make sure that the agency you’re working with is competent and has your best interests at heart. A good agency will give you an exact quote on the costs that you will incur for their services and also won’t hesitate to talk about the ROI figures with you.
By using a good digital agency, you’ll be able to keep your digital marketing costs low and either invest the money saved back into your campaign. If you prefer, you could even reinvest it back into another element of your business. The point is, you’ll have more money lying around to spend. Digital marketing can be expensive, but if you do it right, you won’t even care about the costs, because you’ll be making your money back.
If you feel like you’re not getting the best value for your money, you should switch agencies or the tools that you’re using. A complete cost analysis against the returns that you’re getting from your campaigns will give you a good idea if you’re getting a good value.
Digital Marketing Myth: You Don’t Need Content Marketing
This is less of a digital marketing myth and more of an outright lie. Yes, on the surface, you don’t need to smash out content marketing to get customers for your business. This doesn’t mean that content marketing won’t massively accelerate your business and help you grow when you do it right. 72% of marketers have said that content marketing has helped them to generate more leads and to be honest, the other 28% frankly, probably aren’t doing it right. This is why it is really important to employ the use of a digital marketing agency if you don’t know what you’re doing. It’ll save you time and money.
When you start doing content marketing, you need to make sure that your message is important to your audience. The reason why your content marketing strategy is failing is probably that your message is not consistent with what your audience wants. This is why market research is needed. What you need to think about when doing content marketing is whether your content provides value to your customers and is something they want to read.
So, if you’re struggling with your content marketing, you need to take a step back, breathe and reevaluate what you’re doing. Then, attack it again when you have a better idea of what type of content will make your business fly.
You Should Target as Many People as Possible
This is one of those digital marketing myths that you might be likely to believe if you don’t understand some of the more subtle nuances of how digital marketing works. You might be thinking that it’s best to target everybody, but that’s just not the case. For example, if your campaign is based around providing cryptocurrency trading to people, you’re not going to want to target people in country’s where cryptos are banned. You’ll just be wasting a lot of time and a lot of money. By targeting your ideal audience, you’ll be able to save more money and get a better conversion rate.
SEO Strategy is Only About Your Keywords
This one of those digital marketing myths that makes me want to bang my head against a wall. SEO strategy is not just about keywords! It’s also about the value of the content that you’re posting and making sure that it generates as much organic traffic as possible by being optimised for search engines. Yes, choosing the right keywords is incredibly important, but there’s a lot more to it than that. I see countless businesses that have sorted out all of their keywords and they’re still not getting organic traffic.
This can be for many reasons, not updating the company’s blog enough, the content may not be properly optimised for SEO, even with the keywords. There are hundreds of other reasons why a company’s content marketing strategy might not be working, but a focus on only keywords will certainly doom you to failure.
Any Content is Good Content
Let’s just dispel this digital marketing myth now. Not all content is good content! Yes, it’s good that you’re regularly posting on your blog and your social media sites- but without a set direction and plan for your content, how are you going to make sure it’s seen by the right people? You’re not going to. This is why you need to carefully curate your content to align with the interests of your audience. By aligning your content with the needs and interests of your audience, you can increase your lead generation and conversion capability.
Content marketing can be a lot of trial and error. You want to be looking at the posts that have done well for you in the past, this will help you to understand what you did right. Additionally, you should also look at your posts that haven’t done so well. Is there a common denominator? If so, you should try and eliminate that common denominator so that you can get more traction and engagement on your content marketing posts.
Conclusion
In closing, we’ve gone over nine of the most commonly seen digital marketing myths. Now, you should be able to understand that a lot of these myths, whilst containing a nugget of truth, are actually false. Furthermore, because we’ve gone into all of these myths and explained several best practices, you will increase the effectiveness of your digital marketing campaigns. If you found this interesting, you may want to have a little look at some of the other posts on our blog. They all contain a wealth of useful digital marketing advice and best practices.