Many small businesses suffer by mistaking digital marketing myths for truths. When you follow the wrong path based on digital marketing misconceptions you can limit your growth and minimize your marketing budget ROI. Here are five common myths about digital marketing that could be keeping you from reaching your small business marketing goals.
1 – Digital Marketing is Targeted at Computer Users
This ranks number one because it’s one of the biggest myths likely to hold you back. Your digital marketing strategy should be designed to leverage all the marketing tools at your disposal. Therefore, you need to think beyond computers, and envision how you can reach your audience in different ways.
While you absolutely need to consider computer users, you also have to look at smartphones, game consoles, tablets and how you can also reach people through more traditional media like radio and television. It depends on your audience, location, and budget, but all the things you do in digital marketing can and should be enhanced by incorporating some old school ideas, in hand with modern methods like personalization to really resonate with customers in more meaningful ways.
2 – My Website Does Everything I Need
No doubt websites are a must when it comes to digital marketing, but it is one small element used to reach customers. You can look at your website as your home base. All marketing points to your site where people find the information they need to make the final step in their customer journey. Whether it’s a phone call, an e-commerce purchase, signing up for a newsletter/email or requesting a demo, you need a digital marketing strategy that gets people to your website in hand with an aggressive SEO strategy to help generate organic traffic. Also, if your website is not optimized for mobile use, you can lose people who finally do visit your site. You either need a responsive site, or a clever app people can download to make your site more engaging.
3 – Social Media is All the Marketing I Need
Many new startups or small business owners are very active on social media, so choose it as their main digital marketing tool. Since they’re already there, they don’t bother “wasting time” on building or maintaining a website and content or anything else for that matter. However, as mentioned in myth #2, your website is like your digital marketing home base. Your social media is something to help drive people there. Social media is an important branding tool but in and of itself it usually can’t generate the leads you need to survive.
It is a must to help build your online presence and is even more important if it is a big part of your target audience’s life. This is where you can really shine and create a persona for your brand, make connections and provide some context where people will “get you”. So while social media is a benefit and probably even essential to your digital marketing strategy, it can’t stand alone as the only component of your small business marketing efforts.
4 – Web Designers are SEO Experts and Digital Marketing Specialists
This can be a very harmful myth to believe. Web designers offer a valuable service, but it is limited to just that: Web design. Unless your web designer is part of a digital marketing agency, they provide only the design of your website. They make the pages look fabulous, and usually also specialize in providing engaging websites that are easy to navigate. However, they do not provide SEO expertise. So you end up with a lovely website all dressed up with no place to go. You need an entire digital marketing agency team to provide the big picture for your marketing strategy. Your digital marketing agency offers:
- Website design and development
- SEO
- Local marketing
- Social media
- Blog content
- Email marketing
- Video production
- Pay per click
- Analytics
These are the things your web designer can’t offer.
5 – I Have Enough Content Now
This is last because we want it to stick with you. You never have enough content. Your content is a living, breathing being that needs to be nurtured every day. Your content strategy can’t consist of a few blogs covering the basics of your services, even if they are the most engaging blogs on the entire world wide web.
You must continue to engage your audience with valuable content speaking about the topics that resonate with them the most. And content is not just blogs. You need to keep things going across multiple channels using various media to make an impression. Your content strategy needs to help each person see the right content for the specific points in their customer journey.
For help with taking your business to the next level, contact Outreach Digital Marketing today.