Rubbing a rabbit’s foot can bring good luck.

There’s a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Posting a blog article every day guarantees success.

See a pattern here?

Instant results from Digital Marketing, and social media being only for the young, rank alongside unicorns and the tooth fairy as full-blown myths.

After skimming the surface of the vast expanse of cumulative Digital Marketing wisdom, we’ve compiled more than 70 digital marketing tall tales, superstitions, urban legends—call them what you will, they’re all untrue. What follows, in no particular order, are the ten most recurrent digital marketing myths, and what makes each of them, at best, an unfounded generalisation.

1. You get results right away.

It’s probably safe to assume that most businesses wouldn’t expect their products to fly off the shelves the second their new TV advert aired for the first time. Digital marketing efforts are no different. It naturally takes a while between when marketing and actual sales begin.

Digital marketing is able to lessen the waiting time between a campaign’s launch and when its effects can be seen and measured. This doesn’t mean, however, that sales will come flooding in the instant an ad comes out on Facebook.

Content marketing in particular can take significantly longer. This is because the very nature of content marketing involves encouraging the target audience to interact with a brand or business.

2. The more traffic, the merrier.

It’s said that the number of visits a website receives is directly proportional to the number of sales it generates. While that reasoning is theoretically sound, it isn’t actually true. The kind of visits a website should be getting are targeted, personalised visits. Those are visits from people who are actually interested and will actually buy.

With that reasoning, it becomes possible for a website to get less traffic overall, but more of those targeted visits. This in turn translates into more sales, which in turn makes a website more successful.

An extremely simplified example would be to compare

• Website A: 100 site visits (generated 3 closed sales)
• Website B: 10 site visits (generated 9 closed sales)

3. You have to be on ALL the social media platforms.

A business selling ladies’ perfume isn’t likely to hand a sample to every single person in a room full of men and women alike. So, too, would a savvy digital marketer not broadcast his message to every single person on the net.

When using social media for digital marketing, a business needs to find out which particular platforms their target market is using. The senior executive hobnobbing on Linked In, for instance, may not necessarily be scoping out his colleagues on Instagram.

That said, the sensible thing to do would be to choose just three or four platforms that the target market would use and focus on those. It would also be well to remember the operating costs involved—managing social media for business use does use up several man-hours as well as manpower.

4. All you need is a blog.

It’s true that blogging plays a key role in digital marketing, but to say that blogging plays the lead role is quite untrue. The fact is that digital marketing relies on a mix of all sorts of content. This includes photos, videos, social media posts and so on.

And while having a blog is one thing, keeping it active and consistent is quite another. Having an inactive blog may actually be bad for business, as it may drive away potential customers whose interest in that blog (and the business that owns it) could wane.

Besides, a blog is one of the main methods for a business to position itself as an industry leader. That means an inactive blog might be taken as a sign that that business’ leadership stance has weakened somewhat.

5. Social media is just for kids.

Think social media is solely for the young? Think again—the number of social media users over the age of 65 continues to rise. With more than 43% of these users now on one platform or another, they are now the fastest-growing age demographic on social media.

Combined with grown ups in general, they make up 72% of adults using social media today. That’s a lot of customers for your business with real purchasing power!

6. Nobody reads email anymore.

Email marketing being either dead or just plain spam is a big, fat fallacy. While it is true that the ‘dark deeds’ of many marketers have contributed to this prevailing thought, the fact remains that email marketing is a valuable digital marketing tool.

Here are some big, fat numbers from Capterra Sales & Marketing to prove it:

• 70% of millenials like to check their email in bed, while 57% of them check it in the bathroom
• 75% of 900 million Gmail users check their mail on a mobile device
• 58% of adults check their email first thing in the morning
• 61% of consumers actually like weekly promotional emails
• 65% of email users prefer more pictures than text in their mail

Sending emails with substantial content to addresses that were obtained through honest-to-goodness means (such as voluntary sign ups) can lead to great things for a business. This substantial content may include news, offers, discounts or anything the recipient would truly find useful.

7. There’s no way to tell if digital marketing works.

This particular tall tale was the one that came up most often in all the lists of digital marketing myths we’ve seen. Some of the many ways this myth has been expressed includes

• “The ROI on social media can’t be measured”
• “Digital marketing’s effect on brick-and-mortar store sales is unclear”
• “Measuring the results of digital marketing isn’t accurate”

Those who have expressed such concerns are probably not aware that many of the leading social media platforms such as Facebook and Google+ come with analytics and other reports on account activity. Customer engagement with a business in the form of comments and other interactions are also rather easily tracked.

It is now also possible to consolidate on and offline transactions with other marketing data to track digital marketing’s effect on brick-and-mortar sales. A business that knows how to use this information in planning its marketing activities is already a step ahead in generating both leads and profit.

8. Using social media for business leaves you open to negative feedback.

Our second-most recurrent digital marketing myth is actually two-fold:

• Being on social media invites the possibility of negative feedback (which is to be avoided at all costs, as it makes the business look bad), and
• If you do get negative feedback, it’s better to just ignore it.

Both beliefs stand on shaky ground, and here’s why:

• Negative feedback could actually be a positively golden opportunity for a business to improve (not just in terms of operations, but also terms of customer perception and customer service)
• Not responding to feedback is the worst possible thing you can do in content marketing—research shows that almost half of customers who complain on social media expect a reply in one hour.

9. R.I.P., S.E.O.

“Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated,” said both Mark Twain and Search Engine Optimisation. SEO as it was some years ago is passé; today, there’s a lot more to it than just keywords and site architecture.

Highly specialised researchers are behind today’s SEO, figuring out just the right keywords for reaching your target market. Newer and better bots are born every so often, helping search engines find the most relevant sites for the right people.

Poorly planned SEO efforts without research and without regard for quality content can lead to a dead end. Used the right way, however, SEO can be one of the single best investments a business can make in digital marketing.

10. True personalisation just isn’t possible.

That personalised marketing really only happens in call centres, and can never happen in digital marketing, is a myth in itself. Several businesses are already using digital marketing to zero in on very specific customers and adjust their advertising to suit them.

Thanks to technological advancements like special tools and software, it is now possible to tailor-fit almost every feature of an ad to address an individual consumer.

Don’t let the myriad of myths circulating on the online or office grapevine prevent you from maximising the power of digital marketing for your business. Get in touch with NeoRanking today, and see how even a grain of digital marketing truth can help grow your business taller than the tallest tale.

The post Digital Marketing Mythbusting: Top 10 Tall Tales appeared first on NeoRanking.