Four Common Marketing Myths You Should Stop Telling Yourself

At Philosophy, we hear a lot from our clients about things they’ve read, heard, or seen in articles or from other colleagues. Some are legit concerns and others are just plain false. So, we want to set the record straight and share some of our expertise on the myths we’ve heard over the past year.

1. “Doing any marketing is better than doing nothing at all”

False. If you are spending your budget unwisely by not targeting the right audience or spending advertising and marketing dollars in the wrong places, you are throwing your money out the window. What’s the point of spending money to reach people who aren’t likely to repay your investment with their business. We know the value of marketing and would love to see that budget better spent towards smart marketing initiatives, but even we can recognize that there are many other better uses for that wasted spend than bad marketing—upgrading systems and equipment, building a stronger culture with better pay and benefits, etc. Bad marketing accomplishes nothing but setbacks.

2. “Salespeople are not part of the marketing process, they are a different department”

False. Yes, while businesses oftentimes separate their sales and marketing departments, salespeople are still key to your marketing efforts. Marketing tactics drive traffic to your location or website, but if your sales team isn’t there to greet the customer, help them with their needs, and provide consistent messaging, it can all fall apart. On occasion, our clients hire us to help them generate leads for their business, but we do our best work if there’s a strong sales team to hand off our marketing qualified leads to for closing. For example, marketing can generate interest in your product, but if a customer gets to the sales floor and the messaging and service don’t match what inspired them to act, they will walk away quickly! Bottom line: The marketing and sales departments need to work as a team. Marketers need the data the sales team provides to create strong campaigns that reach the right audience, and sales needs to close those prospects so that marketing shows a positive ROI.

3. “Having a great website is all the presence you need online”

False. You need more than a website to gain a presence online. According to The Atlantic, “In 1994, there were fewer than 3,000 websites online. By 2014, there were more than 1 billion. That represents a 33 million percent increase in 20 years.” This data begs us to ask: how are your customers going to find your website in this seas of competition? You need strategies to actually get your audience to the website you invested in, and strategies that encourage continual engagement with your brand online to lead them through the sales process.

With more people searching online for products, brands need to stay competitive in the marketplace and know where and when to reach their customers online–and sometimes, visitors aren’t always going to your website directly to buy. Whether it’s with an inbound marketing campaign for more of a long-lead sales process, or through digital advertising on YouTube, Facebook, remarketing ads or native campaigns, there are many ways to reach your audience, but the key is making sure you’re doing something to get your customers pointed to your website and not just launching a new website and letting it sit there without further effort invested.

4. “Once a consumer gets to your website, you’ve done your job”

False. Just because the visitor made it to your website, doesn’t mean they have turned into a paying consumer. The key is to think about the user journey of the consumer online. Getting them to your site is part of the overall buying process, but making sure you answer the questions they have and providing what they need is the other part to a successful conversion. For example, we recently launched a new website for a Montessori school in Denver and, while planning it, we thought about: what information does the parent need to act (schedule a tour) and how can we compartmentalize that info so the parent gets to it straight away instead of clicking through many pages. All this strategic thinking helped us create the best parent experience on the school’s website. For example, parents enter the school’s website by first on clicking the age of their child, this way they are getting relevant information based on their child’s age, so it’s very personalized to their needs.

Bottomline: Marketing shouldn’t be a mystery. We hope debunking these myths provides clarity around your own marketing perceptions and efforts so that you can move forward in making a smart marketing investment.

Speaking about marketing investments, if you’re interested in learning about how much your business should be spending on marketing, check out these insights from our own co-owner Randall Erkelens.