The Top 5 Online Marketing Myths Exposed
Talking about online marketing and the technical complexity of it has led to a growing phenomenon of entrepreneurs, start-ups and small businesses, hiring online marketing help that leaves them feeling deceived, lost, and robbed.
It’s sad to say, but along the path to the web’s gold rush, there are many snake oil salesmen who mislead, misrepresent, and fail to help people create a clear path to success. Just about every marketing or advertising company nowadays offers SEO program, most of them are severely lacking in terms of experience and demonstrable results.
I met a company that offered SEO services at an event. Being the networking type, I asked how long they had been in business. They admitted that they had no clients and just got into offering SEO as a service because they were a print company that was about to close it doors!
Another thing that makes it tough for businesses to excel in their online marketing efforts is that they hire companies that use deceptive practices and lie about what to expect. Like, "We guarantee first page results in 3 months or less," which isn't impossible, just highly improbable to achieve that fast.
You can use a free back-link checker tool like WebMeUp.com to see the quality of links a company has been building for their customers. Ask the company you are considering hiring about their specific SEO tactics. If they can’t explain what the do in layman's terms, then they are not good at it more than likely.
Get your online marketing up to speed quickly by avoiding common myths which many marketers fall prey to. Save yourself money, time, and energy. Don't believe these myths below:
1. I don't need a strategy to do one type or marketing or another
Having a strategy that leverages the symbiotic relationships of tactics is much more powerful than blindly drilling down into the weeds of one tactic or another. For example, if you have a blog that positions you as an expert, it will help your search engine ranks, and also give you something to share in social media. It might even make your paid clicks go further because people are more impressed with you. Your blog content can also be turned into a book that helps you get media interviews and guest posting opportunities.
As Lee Frederikson of Hinge Marketing says about online reputation and expert positioning strategy:
“A good reputation is magical. Referrals flow like liquor. Prospects seek you out. Competitors start to sweat when they hear your name. But there’s no magic to building your reputation. It takes hard work and a well thought out strategy.”
Whether you are selling hats and t-shirts or B2B professional services, all companies need a strategy that factors in their reputation and online positioning.
2. I need dozens of domain names and/or websites, even if I’m unclear on my unique value proposition
While it’s okay to have multiple micro-sites that target very specific groups of people, it’s not okay to start off running in three different directions. Trying to build several websites at once while you are not yet known for any one particular thing makes you look unprofessional. Having dozens of domain names can even make Google think you are trying to spam them, so make sure that you’re clear on your positioning first and have one or maybe two excellent websites that have blogs and active social media profiles. Thinking that somehow a huge pile of domain names and crappy websites will help you is foolish and just creates a big mess as well as extra expense.
My website isn’t generating enough leads, even though I have no idea where my leads are coming from
If you don’t set up analytics properly, you’ll never know how many leads your website is actually generating. At minimum you need to set up the following:
a. Install tracking code on the thank you page of submission forms, email signs ups, and ebook downloads.
b. Tracking of web-based phone calls using a tool like Mongoose Metrics, so you know not only how many leads your website is generating by phone, but what keyword drove the phone to ring.
c. If you have a shopping cart, you must set up e-commerce tracking through Google Analytics or another tool.
d. Create a spreadsheet of all leads and sales, even from walk-ins/offline, and then put a score of 1 to 10 on each lead, so your marketing company knows which leads are best. That way they can work to get you more of the better leads.
e. Set up attribution tracking, so that you know if someone who originally came in from Facebook a year ago, but directly types in your domain name today and buys something, can be attributed at least partially to your social media investment. HubSpot software does this well.
Once you have the proper tracking in place, the next steps is to choose which metrics you will focus on.
Avinash Kaushik on his extremely popular analytics blog Occam’s Razor says that “The ability to pick critical view metrics to focus on is the difference between plodding along, or winning big.”
Even if my website stinks and has a low conversion rate, I should blame all my web failures on my SEO or social media agency
As Bryan Eisenberg, the godfather of conversion optimizations. says “Companies spend $92 on driving traffic compared to $1 on customer experience”, whereas they should be more focused on making it more likely that each visitor will turn into a lead or sale. If you don’t know what conversion optimization or A/B testing means, consider checking out the conversion chapter in my book Web Marketing On All Cylinders and then start fixing your site.
Not doing formal conversion optimization and expecting lots of traffic, or a merely pretty website to solve all your problems, is perhaps the biggest mistake you can make.
Web designers don’t necessarily understand how to build a site that works well with Google/SEO, is highly persuasive, and/or has the right amount of content to make you competitive and scalable. They often fail to realize that Internet marketing is not the icing on the website cake, but is all of the ingredients that help it rise.
5. I have to be number one for the top terms in my industry.
While ranking #1 for wedding locations, DUI lawyers, art colleges, or golf clubs is truly great, you can get tens of thousands of visitors a month from long tail or longer search terms. According to digital marketing software giant Moz, long tail search comprises 70% of search traffic.
Google’s new Hummingbird algorithm does a great job providing search results when people ask a question using voice recognition on their mobile phones. If you have lots of Q&A type content – such as can be created through podcasting/FAQ videos and transcribing the text on your blog, you can get an incredible amount of traffic ranking just below the first result for moderate search volume terms.
The key is to focus less on the most popular keywords and to provide volumes of content that fully cover your topics, using a vast array of semantical related phrases and interconnected subjects. That is certainly not the “instant coffee” or “magic dust” approach to digital marketing, but it actually works.
Conclusion
If you have a well-planned strategy, clear goals, a specialized team, an attitude of publishing helpful content, and a culture of continual testing and working hand-in-hand with your “white hat” agency, you’ll be able to get realistic results and not live in a web marketing fantasy-land.
