5 Digital Marketing myths most small business owners believe are true

5 Digital Marketing myths most small business owners believe are true

When starting a business, you might think the world wide web is a scary place where all the scams happen to good people, but that's not true at all.  There are all sorts of business online, big and small, and we aren't scamming or getting scammed daily.

There are plenty of misconceptions about the digital world, and that's what this discussion is all about.  I'll be going over the top 5 Digital Marketing Myths I hear every week from my clients because I tend to squash them as soon as they pop up.  Sure, there is spam out there, and people with bigger budgets are doing amazing things, but that shouldn't stop you from trying to get online and make a name for yourself and your business. 

If you're a new business owner or have owned one for years and don't understand digital marketing, please keep reading.


Email marketing is always a way to spam others
I've run plenty of cold and warm email campaigns to shed light on an amazing service or product that I think select people might like.  Plenty of people will tell me that a cold email campaign is spamming since the recipients hadn't opted into my lists, but generating an email list is extremely difficult, and even the big corporations know this.

Look at Uber; they send out millions of cold emails to spread the word about their services when they first started and now look at them.  They're one of the biggest rideshare programs, probably the biggest, and they have loads of investors throwing money at them because their systems will be extremely profitable over time.

You can argue that "Uber did it in a way that pleased everyone!" but by your explanation of "If I didn't opt into the list, and I get an email from them, it's spamming!" doesn't make any sense.  Sure, you love Uber, and you use it all the time, but they spammed in the beginning, and no one cared lol.

Also, there are super legitimate ways to do this by generating lists using MailChimp, Aweber, ConstantContact, etc. but that takes a while lol.


Only big corporations do digital marketing
This is false, and I know this because some of my clients couldn't afford my services when we started.  They negotiated a lower price, which I gave to them because I saw potential, and now they pay me my full price because of all the amazing digital marketing I'm doing for them to pull in customers.

You can do digital marketing for free if you're willing to put in the time and effort it needs to make your business successful.  Hell, there are even people like me out there who will work for free if you're signing over some equity in exchange for my services lol

More traffic means more profits
This isn't true at all, and it's because you could get un-targeted traffic coming in through various methods, and it will never convert into a sale.  You can run a huge PPC campaign, set it at $1,000 a day, get 10,000+ people to your website, and never make a sale.  You could also run an amazing PPC campaign, set it at $100 a day, get 100 people a day to your site, and make an additional $1,000 profit.

Just because you're getting more traffic to your website doesn't mean you're going to make more money.  You need targeted traffic from credible sources like Google and the other search engines if you want to be super successful.

SEO and Digital Marketing provide instant results
Not true at all!  SEO and Digital Marketing take plenty of time to take root and bear fruit.  You can't build a few dozen high quality backlinks today and expect to rank #1 for your competitive keyword tomorrow; it doesn't work like that. 

I always tell my clients it will take a minimum of 6 months before they start to see amazing results.  They may see some top rankings for keywords here and there, but their competitive keywords will take much longer, and they shouldn't expect a positive ROI from their SEO and Digital Marketing services right away.  The only thing that can be an instant success is if you have an amazing PPC campaign running and your website is amazing at funneling people to your checkout page, that's it.

You need to be on every social platform to be successful
This is not true at all, and that's because your target market likely isn't on every platform.  Think about it; Facebook is now for older people whereas Twitter and Instagram are for the younger generations.  If you're targeting people over 30, then you'll want to be heavily on Facebook, and if you're targeting people in college, you'll want to be on platforms like Twitter and Instagram.

You will need to choose your top 3 platforms and hit them hard.  You can be seen on the other platforms, but you don't need to be as active, but you can always syndicate your content to every platform using IFTTT and still have a presence everywhere ;)


Final Thoughts,
The myths I've posted above are concerns of new business owners all over the world.  Some of them are obvious, while others are laughable.  You won't get scammed every time you're making a purchase online, you aren't always spamming if you're sending out emails, you need quality traffic to your website not bot traffic in the millions, SEO and Marketing isn't instant, and you don't have to be on every social platform you come across.


Thanks for reading

Tommy Carey
https://www.seoclerks.com/user/TommyCarey