Demystifying the myths about digital marketing is the first step towards ensuring success in this medium. Some people find digital marketing very complex and confusing, yet others feel it is a shortcut to achieve business goals and a lot of people believe digital marketing is a low-cost marketing medium with instant return on investment.
No doubt with sound digital marketing efforts you can speed up your business success to a great extent and can maximize your reach and sales conversions more economically. However, it is always beneficial to connect the dots about digital marketing with right information, knowledge and insights. In this article we are going to offset few popular myths about digital marketing to maximize results in this medium.
Myth 1: Multiple Digital Platforms are Not Required for Targeting!
In order to optimize your brand and product reach and awareness online, it is important to take a multi-platform marketing approach in digital media. Customer-centric and not platform-centric engaging content is instrumental in shaping customers’ digital experiences. The digital marketing goal is to scale up business aggressively by pushing targeted content in multiple platforms rather than focusing on single platform. Marketers should focus on multiple digital platforms like search engine, social media, videos, blogs and emails to push their brand and products to larger customer base for reach and engagement.
Myth 2: Knowledge of Internet Technology is Enough!
Since Digital Marketing is the byproduct of fourth Industrial Revolution which revolves around evolution of internet technology, many assume that marketing in digital platforms is all about internet and technology. However, in practice when you want to drive digital optimization, it is an integration of marketing acumen and content innovation. Without a smart and relevant content marketing strategy it is impossible to make internet technology work for your brand and business goals. That’s why many regard content as the king of digital marketing since without relevant content it is not possible to attract customer attention and create robust digital footprint.
Myth 3:Any Content will Run the Show!
Content is the ground level foundation of whole Digital Marketing services. As per the latest insights “Google bots itself don’t consider, index and rank the pages that don’t have authentic and relevant content.” Writing relevant content that is recognized by Search Engine Algorithms and simultaneously interests the target audience is the bottom-line of digital marketing. Moreover, many marketers fail to realize that consistency and frequency of content distribution across all digital platforms are equally important. Also content on the website must be in sync with the paid campaigns which are being distributed across all digital mediums.
Myth4: Specific Target Marketing is Impossible!
With the emergence of Digital Marketing and Data Science, it has become extremely easy for marketers to target the specific set of audience and create personalized messages for them. Analysis and testing are the right approaches to improve and create a better digital marketing communication that attracts and retains the attention of the target audience and converts them into meaningful actions. Digital marketing experts use data to segment consumers by demographics or interests to find out the right person for a particular product or business category.
Myth5: Digital Marketing is All about Huge Traffic!
Attracting huge traffic does help but digital marketing is much more than just creating just a website. Sales driven objective needs relevant traffic to the website that provides a seamless user experience and is ready to make transactions with proper Call to Action Page or option. There are many websites that build their marketing strategy solely focusing on getting the traffic but do not emphasize on sales conversions. Both of these goals are important and need different strategies. Moral of the story is, digital marketing needs metrics beyond website to understand its effectiveness.
Myth6: Social Media Marketing is all About Covering All the Channels!
For a successful Social Media Marketing Campaign, be it organic or paid, the first thing is to identify the nature of business i.e. whether it is a B2B or B2C and then select the right mix of social media channels. For instance, Facebook is a must social channel for B2C types of businesses. In fact the first step to identify relevant social media channels is to define the nature of business along with the target audience and business goals. Some brands use social media to drive brand recognition, some others use it for driving customer support and there are others who use social media platforms for building customer loyalty.
Myth7: Ignoring the Negative Comments!
Ignoring negative comments can be very damaging for your business online reputation. Be it positive or negative, answering them effectively can be extremely important. It is a gesture to show that you take notice and value your customers’ feedback. Efficient online review management can positively impact your brand by increasing your visibility and improving your local SEO. Moreover, responding to reviews not only increases your loyalty with the customers but also with your search engine. In fact by not responding to the reviews you are running the risk of losing both online visibility, engagement and possibly an opportunity to increase your customer conversion as well.
Myth 8. Digital Marketing is Not for Small Businesses!
It is the most common myth among the small and medium scale businesses. The point is to have an online presence with proper essence of a business rather determining the wavelength of the business and assuming the requirement of Digital Marketing.
Online communication, advertising and engagement with tons of customers can increase conversion, boost the brand awareness through local Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Google My Business and effective geo-targeting. It has also been observed that advertising in Facebook and Google opens up avenues to showcase the product and convert the goals into success.
Myth9. Search Engine Optimization is Dead!
The SEO game is not easy anymore. Google cannot be smoothly manipulated to give best search results for your product or service. That is why many marketers believe SEO is dead! Google is continuously changing its algorithm and it is estimated by SEO experts that Google is making over 9 changes a day making it difficult for maximum people to keep pace with the changes. However, the recent trend shows that content production and search results are outnumbering search demands. That is for a particular search query there are more search results and providing more content than before.
Google is nowadays more of an answer engine than search engine. People get a lot of answers from search queries without going to the website and that is why we have reasons to believe SEO is not dying but it’s definitely changing. Today, if marketers want to dominate Google, they have to work harder. They have to create more educational and personalized content for their users and last but not the least really work hard on 360 degree brand growth.
Myth10. Email Marketing has Lost its Impact!
Contrary to the tenth myth, statistics reveal that email marketing is here to stay! In spite of all inhibitions, number of commercial email subscribers rise every year. Email is a great way to send personalized content. As per statistics, the companies that focus on email marketing reap greater benefits in terms of customer engagement, retention, and conversion. Presently Email Marketing is one of the strongest and highest return generating methods of digital marketing. However, marketers need to figure out smart ways to attract customer attention and not end up in spam mails or being unsubscribed.
Conclusions
Unveiling the myths is a necessary step to unlearn the misassumptions in digital marketing and formulate sound strategies to boost businesses. You can use the information discussed in this blog to reverse your digital marketing strategies in favour of your business and as a result maximize your return on investment.