Brands and businesses play out their life cycles online where marketers are constantly asked to do more and often with less. Making the right digital investments isn’t especially intuitive, especially given the multi-discipline talent that is often required to design, build, stimulate engagement, generate leads, and monitor traffic. It’s important to know what is and isn’t crucial to driving business. Having partners whose fingers are always on the pulse of transformative digital communication can help—so today we’re sharing a few misconceptions about modern digital marketing that, if left unchecked, might potentially hold your business back. (Link to drumroll app?)
1. Digital marketing is only for big businesses.
Digital marketing IS business—now and evermore. If you nurture your audience with digital marketing your business will perform better—no matter its size. It’s also worth noting that for at least 15 years most businesses that have successfully grown from startup to large enterprise did so through digital means.
2. Digital marketing doesn’t need to be a priority if I don’t do ecommerce.
It’s not all about sales–regardless of your business type, no promotion means no growth. We believe that digital marketing should be your #1 priority no matter your industry, location, size, product, service, or idea.
3. Having a website is enough to market my business.
A more cynical blogger might suggest that the year 2001 is calling because it wants your marketing strategy back. Websites are not magical or magnetic. If you want people to come to it, you must engage in digital marketing.
4. If I just put content out there, it’ll be enough.
Content is king! It’s absolutely still true. Sadly, there’s zero value in being king of an invisible castle. Your content needs the attention of your stakeholders before it can go to work for your brand. Yes, it must be relevant and embrace ideas that people care about—but first it must be findable among a crowded information marketplace. A smart SEO strategy ensures it can.
5. If my competition isn’t doing digital marketing, I don’t have to do it either.
Why miss out on a practically free opportunity to outsmart your competition? Good branding is all about an organization’s presence and because the digital realm is now the epicenter for ALL business, your firm can roar to the top of its sector by creating and promoting digital content that’s valuable to your audience.
6. There’s too broad of an audience online to market effectively.
A broad online audience increases the opportunities for your niche to be discovered by its proper tribe. Digital marketing best practices that focus on tactics, tools, and well-branded messaging make sure the right people hear you. Target, target, target.
7. Email marketing isn’t effective anymore.
Email marketing open rates and click throughs definitely aren’t what they used to be—audiences are just too sophisticated. But communicating with your people through well-crafted and highly-targeted email marketing can still be incredibly effective—if the content is valuable and is delivered at the right time (within the user’s journey). Because when it’s NOT relevant, it’s spam.
8. Personalization is creepy.
Personalized mass-marketed spam ads that find their way into our inboxes bearing absolutely no connection to our interests ARE creepy! Done well, however, digital marketing is about connecting people through conversation, shared interests, and goals. When following best practices and common sense guidelines, digital personalization creates community and fosters collaboration.
To sum up–it’s a digital marketplace. If you want to do business there, your customers must know where to find you and they must understand why they should visit you instead of the competition. If you do a good job of explaining it to them, you can expect brand loyalty.
