When it comes to digital marketing, the internet is full of tips, tricks and “expert” opinions. There is a lot of noise out there and if you’re just starting to grow our business, it can cause you to spread yourself think and get pulled in a lot of different directions. This is the worst thing you can do when you’re in the of your business. Instead, its usually best to focus on one or two channels and dominate them. Let’s talk about a few digital marketing myths.
SEO Is Dead
The biggest myth that you will hear out there is that SEO is dead, or that it doesn’t work anymore. The reality is far from the truth, in fact, with the rise in costs in paid advertising, SEO is more important than ever. There are a ton of websites still succeeding in organic search today, and many that have completely given up on it because they believed the rumors. Those rumors started because Google started getting smarter as the years wore on. Google began rolling out its most drastic changes in 2013 and on.
Prior to these updates, it was very easy to achieve rankings through black hat SEO tactics, which is a spammy and unsustainable way to achieve organic ranking. With Googles updated, a lot of the spammy tactics died down. Some of these included things like spun articles, duplicate content, automated low-quality links, and keywords stuffing amongst many others. With each update, each of these tactics fell by the wayside and many companies lost their traffic overnight. That is when they decided that SEO is dead when in reality, only spammy SEO died.
Today, if you continue to write high-quality content and build high-quality links, you will continue to see results. The reason people want to believe its dead is because that is hard work and many marketers refused to adapt to the new seas.
Don’t fall for the hype, SEO is by far the best ROI of any marketing campaign out there. Take the white hat sustainable approach to it and you will do well.
It Can Change Your Business Over Night
A lot of people engage in digital marketing with the idea that they’re going to be millionaires by this time next week. This is an amateur outlook and is also far from reality. The reason many people opt for PPC or Facebook Ads over SEO is that they want “instant results.” While it is true that you can get clicks to your ad pretty quickly, it will probably be some time before you optimize the campaign to a profit. In the beginning, you will have to tweak your ads, keywords, targeting and call to actions constantly to perfect the conversion.
If you walk into it with this belief, you may blow through your funds or worse, abandon a campaign with potential too soon. Digital marketing takes time to get right and there is a lot of A/B testing that has to take place before your business will see the results that it needs to see.
Social Media Is A Gold Mine
There is a lot of hype around social media. Every marketing book and every marketing guru (that had fame before social media) claims that this is the best thing for your business. Social media does have its place, and it can be a powerful method to brand or even sell your products. The trick, however, is that it’s not all created equal.
Depending on your industry, social media can take a long time to get going. You have to post consistently, every day, and it will be a while until you can even get to 10,000 followers unless you go viral. The other issue with it is that you may not convert any of your followers to sales. It can have its place for personal branding and reputation management, but having it be your only channel of revenue generation is a huge mistake. In fact, if you’re just starting out, social media is the last place you’d want to bet all your cards. Take your resources and allocate them to channels with a larger ROI potential.
Selling Doesn’t Work Anymore
While sales isn’t necessarily digital marketing, it has a ton to do with it. Not only that, we use sales psychology in every piece of marketing collaterals that we put out there. A lot of new companies, especially in the software space, feel like “sales doesn’t work.” The truth is, sales psychology will work for as long as people will continue to have a fear of change. In fact, there is much different in conversion optimization than there is on a sales call.
- Build Rapport
- Explain the Product’s Features and most importantly, the Benefits
- Establish Trust
- Going for the close (call to action)
- Following up (retargeting, emailing, etc.)
While customers may be more informed, it doesn’t mean that they don’t enjoy the efficiency and benefit of a well-informed process.
Popups Are Annoyonig To Your Visitors
Many of my clients that need help with conversions tend to give me the same warnings before I start. A lot of them tend to go a little something like this:
“I don’t want those annoying popups everywhere that will drive my visitors away. Make sure we’re not bombarding them with stuff.”
Well, the reality if this myth is that most of your visitors want to be bombarded. They want to know the next step in the process, and if they don’t find one on your website, they will hit the back button and look elsewhere.
Make sure your website is optimized. While you don’t want to overwhelm them with too many colors and different messages. You still want to give them the opportunity to do business with you. In the age of instant everything, there is a huge chance that they won’t take the extra effort to find a way to contact you.
Do Your Due Diligence And Experiment
There are a lot of varying opinions out there and this is mine based on the experiences that I’ve had. However, don’t take mine or anyone else’s word for it. Go out there and explore the different ways you can grow your business. Nothing pays like an investment in sweat equity.
About The Author
Sean Dudayev is the Founder of who is passionate about all things related to business growth. After selling his first company, he chose to take what he’s learned and help other entrepreneurs scale their start-ups to the next level.