4 Digital Marketing Myths to Leave Behind in 2020

Is your digital marketing strategy working for your business?

As a small business owner, you start out by wearing a lot of hats, including the heavy hat of marketing your business and building your customer base.

Planning and executing your own marketing campaigns can quickly become an overwhelming and challenging process, especially considering that not all the advice available online is accurate or best for your business.

When it comes down to digital marketing, there are a lot of myths floating around online which can do more harm than good to your business. We are on a mission to try and bust these myths, and to help you engage with your audience in the most efficient way.

We have rounded up four of the most common digital marketing myths that, if applied, could damage your brand and affect the outcome of your marketing strategies. Each myth is accompanied by honest advice on how you can turn your efforts and resources into creating a strategy that works for you.

Myth #1 — My ideal customers are not on social media.

Many business owners believe that, if one of their social marketing strategies fail to generate new leads or increase traffic to their website, the main reason is because their ideal customers are not active on social media.

This is a big misunderstanding that can prevent you from taking advantage of the unique opportunities social media marketing provides to help you connect with your audience.

The truth — There is at least one social media channel that aligns with your target audience’s interests.

A recent report showed that 3.81 billion people use social media worldwide in 2020, up almost double from 2.07 billion in 2015. In addition, the average person has 8.6 social media accounts, meaning there is a high chance that at least one social media platform has your ideal customer spending time looking for products and services like yours.

It is therefore your job to find them and to actively engage with them in a relevant and efficient way.

When crafting your social media strategy, the first and most important step should be identifying what your ideal customer looks like. Start building a buyer persona to shape the characteristics and the online behaviour of your consumers. You can do this by gathering information about their age, their gender, the industry they work in, their job title etc. This, in turn, will help you to gain a greater idea on which social media platforms your audience is most active on, and what type of content best resonates with them.

And remember, it’s not about how many followers you have, but how relevant those followers are to your business. Think quality over quantity!

Myth #2 — SEO is just about rankings.

Even though SEO can help you achieve higher search engine rankings, top rankings do not always ensure the most success to your brand. If your focus is solely based on your ranking status on Google, then you are neglecting a huge part of the customer acquisition process.

The truth — Focus on nurturing your leads, not on ranking #1 on Google.

Using SEO to achieve greater website traffic is just one piece of the puzzle. You also want to ensure that the people who are visiting your website are relevant to your business and fall within one of your buyer persona categories.

In order to create the best marketing tactics for your business, your SEO plan needs to hit each step of the sales funnel, from capturing leads to getting return customers to purchase from you again.

Rather than focusing all your attention on achieving a top position on the most common search engines, it’s important that you also spend time, money and energy on creating relevant content that appeals to your ideal customer and converts them into paying customers.

After all, simply using SEO to reach number 1 on Google does not always correlate to gaining new high-quality leads.

Myth #3 — I need to post every day on social media to increase my engagement.

There is one thing that is worse than not being active on social media, and that is posting content that is not relevant to your audience.

Whilst you may have heard that posting every day to social media is beneficial to your business (and there can certainly be truth in this), posting content that does not relate to your customers’ values or interests could lead to you losing your credibility and, ultimately, damaging your brand’s reputation.

In other words, posting content for the sake of posting content will often lead to poor results.

The truth — Content quality is better than content quantity.

There is no magic formula to tell us the ideal frequency of posting to social media, however, one thing to bear in mind is that quality always trumps quantity.

As cliché as it sounds, consumers crave authenticity, and this approach will help you open an honest two-way conversation with them.

Make sure every piece of content you create is meaningful, current, and directly answers your readers’ most important questions. Do not overflow your social platforms with unnecessary content as that will make you lose sight of your overall business objectives and, consequently, lower your engagement rate.

Myth #4 — Writing a blog is useless for my business.

No matter how powerful social media is as a marketing mechanism, your business strategy would not be as effective without having a fully functional and professional website designed to drive your online presence forward.

Despite this fact, many businesses do not maximise the many functions of their website and fail to see the benefits of blog writing.

Creating relevant and engaging content that aims to solve your customers’ pain points will help you gain something very important — your customers’ trust.

The truth — Content marketing is the present and future of digital marketing.

Social media, blogs and search engines — these are the best places where you’ll find users who want to get informed.

According to recent reports, a whopping 77% of internet users read blogs. The hunger for new information and the constant search for quick and efficient answers from customers is what makes blogs stand out.

Did you know that the average writing time for a blog in 2019 was three hours and 57 minutes — a 65% increase from 2014’s two hours and 24 minutes? More than ever, business owners and content marketers are becoming aware of the needs of their consumers, and are spending more time researching and writing high-quality articles that appeal to these needs.

Content is King — but consistency is Queen!

Content marketing proves to be one of the most effective marketing tactics you can use for your business as it provides value for your prospects. When you consistently show up to your audience with compelling and persuasive content that benefits their needs, prospects will show up to you.