Most Small-Business Owners Buy These 5 Digital Marketing Myths Don't fall for these common digital marketing myths.
By Dan Scalco Edited by Dan Bova
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Digital marketing, being a relatively new form of marketing, has a lot of myths associated with it.
Running a digital marketing company, I often hear many small business owners who are under the impression that these myths are true. Regardless of whether you're a startup or a local business, it's important to understand fact and fiction when it comes to digital marketing. Below are the top five digital marketing myths, debunked...
1. "Digital marketing is only for big businesses."
Years ago, this statement might be true. Today, not so much. Technology has evolved, software and hosting have gotten cheaper, and nearly everyone uses the internet before making a purchase, whether it's a product or service. While it is true that the higher your budget, the grander your digital marketing campaign can be, don't assume that you need tens of thousands of dollars to get started. In fact, many small-budget marketing campaigns can be very successful.
Related: 10 Budget-Conscious Digital Marketing Strategies
2. "Results are instant."
It would make my life, as a digital marketer, much easier if results were instantaneous. However, as with any marketing campaign, there will be a buffer between when the campaign begins and when you start to see results. The difference between traditional and digital marketing is that the time difference can be much shorter and the results can be tracked much easier.
3. "More traffic equals more money."
Often times I will hear people say that the more traffic a website gets, the more leads and sales will come. In theory, yes, this is true but it isn't the goal of digital marketing. The goal of digital marketing is to use the technology at your hands to best understand your demographic and drive hyper-targeted traffic to your site. Driving less but targeted traffic will provide a higher ROI than driving more but less targeted traffic.
Related: 5 Digital-Marketing Tactics to Ditch in 2016
4. "Email marketing is spam."
When talking to clients, it often surprises them to hear that email marketing has been statistically proven as the digital marketing channel that provides the highest ROI. Email marketing, like all marketing strategies, can be used or abused. Unfortunately, many abuse email marketing by "spamming". This gives email marketing a bad name. On the flip side, when an email marketing campaign is created by sending to emails that were earned with content that is truly valuable (e.g. promotions, coupons, updates) it can be an incredibly powerful digital marketing strategy.
Related: 7 Digital Marketing Trends to Watch Out for 2016
5. "We need to be on every social platform."
Digital marketing is about finding your target demographic in the "crowd" that is the internet. Most likely, the demographic that uses LinkedIn on a daily basis probably isn't using Pinterest the same amount of time. It's important to survey your demographic and current customers to understand what platforms they use most frequently so you can be where they are to spark an initial relationship. You also need to factor in that social media marketing and management is a time consuming process. It's better to give 100% on two or three social platforms than it is to give it 50% on all of them.
