Common Misconceptions about Digital Marketing

June 20, 2023 | Digital Marketing

“Digital marketing” is an umbrella term for the marketing of products or services using digital technologies. This type of marketing is typically geared towards the Internet, but it can also including mobile devices, display advertising, and any other digital medium.

Common-Misconceptions-about-Digital-Marketing

Though Digital Marketing can be an extremely successful tactic and beneficial for a business, the process is often shrouded in myth and misconceptions. Unfortunately, users who follow these myths and misconceptions often miss the vast opportunities that are available to them through digital marketing. With the many articles authored by expert SEOs who have debunked some of the more common myths related to digital marketing, there isn’t any reason to fall for these common pitfalls.

Digital Marketing is for Small Businesses, Too

While big businesses are known for taking advantage of a wide range of marketing strategies, including digital marketing, small businesses can take advantage, too. In fact, there are many small businesses that do very well leveraging search and paid strategies online. Digital marketing is usually a low-cost option, especially compared with more traditional print marketing. One of the many reasons Digital marketing has become a popular choice for small to medium sized business is because it can be used by business owners to:

  1. Effectively communicate and engage with customers
  2. Sell to customers directly without a physical shop
  3. Gain insights and analytical data of consumer buying preferences

These benefits will not just help big businesses. For a small business, these benefits can help them grow and expand. Don’t get me wrong, these marketing strategies can work great for large corporations as well. But when you’re constrained by budgets and have more time than money, online marketing can work in your favor.

A Significant Part of Business Strategy

Business-Strategy

With the rise of the online consumer, many businesses have realized that digital marketing should be a significant part of their business strategy. Each day, more and more people go online to find information about a company or to purchase products. Savvy consumers are going online to help make a decision looking at a company’s website as well as online review sites such as Yelp, BBB, and YP.com to name a few. With a well-made website as the company’s main window of interaction with online customers, a business is more likely to see a rise in online orders.

The Truth About Website Traffic

Quality vs quantity is an adage that certainly applies to digital marketing. A digital marketing campaign should be focused and targeted to specific consumers who are looking for the products or services you offer. While you can work to attract hundreds of visitors to your site each day, your efforts will be in vain if the visitors are not consumers looking for your products or services. This is an important component of any successful website that should be kept in mind before deciding to dedicate time and resources to an online marketing campaign.

If Your Competitors Are Not Online, You Still Should Be

If you know your competitors are not online, take advantage of that fact and create a website and other digital marketing tools. You want to do everything you can to set your business apart. Especially if your competitors are not taking advantage of digital marketing, you most certainly should be.

Good Content

To create a good website, you need good content. Ensure that your website offers visitors high-quality content that is relevant to its mission. By offering good content, you will attract relevant visitors who, if they like what they see, they will return again and again.
Good content not only attracts better visitors but will also attract the right type of attention from search engines. Keep in mind that search engines will filter pages with thin content, duplicate content, and pages that offer little unique text or value. Quality content with appropriate key ord use will give more credit to a website, thus ranking it higher in search engine results and helping to propel the brand’s visibility.

SEO is Not Dead

Site-Rankings

 

Because many website owners fail to understand how SEO works, they dismiss it. For any marketer, this can be a dangerous culture to live and breathe. However, the bulk of Internet users will use a search engine to find the information they seek. Because search engines play such a big role in how consumers find products and services, business owners should take advantage of SEO. By optimizing your business’ website and social media for search engines, you will find yourself ranking much higher in search engine results, and more likely to be seen by your targeted audience.

No-No’s to Know in Digital Marketing

A number of business owners and digital marketers do not fully understand how SEO works, they end up spamming their sites and decreasing their ranking in search engine results. It is an unfortunate happenstance that often occurs to new businesses who have not learned best practices.

For example, in the early days of SEO, meta tags were used to help search engines recognize content for displaying proper search results. However, this process was quickly spammed and is no longer used. Instead, digital marketers can use the title tag and meta description tags to attract the attention of search engine crawlers as well as influence users to click on your website within the Search Engine Results Page (SERPs).

If you fail to follow proper guidelines issued by search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing, you will find your website does not rank well and visitors have difficulty finding it. Follow best practices and take the time to do it right and attract the best visitors to your site.

In addition to improperly using tags, many digital marketers use “keyword stuffing.” This process involves “stuffing” as many keywords into a web page as possible, resulting in content that does not flow or even make sense. The thought behind this is that the more times specific keywords appear on your website, the better your ranking will be. However, this is not the case. To keep websites from doing this, search engines typically divide the number of words on a page by the number of instances of giving keywords. This helps crawlers determine relevancy and ranking. If keywords are repeated too many times, the web page will be flagged and it will not appear high in the search engine results.

To bypass this, some websites implement “cloaking.” Cloaking is the process of hiding text in your website’s HTML code. It will not be seen by visitors, but it can be seen by search engine crawlers.

Manipulative linking is another form of web spam that attempts to exploit a search engine’s use of link popularity when ranking pages. There are several ways this is done:

  1. Reciprocal link exchange – two sites create link pages that point back and forth to each other
  2. Link schemes – Fake or low-value websites are built and maintained as link sources to artificially inflate a website’s popularity
  3. Paid links – Links to a site can be bought
    Instead of putting time and energy into marketing efforts that search engines will dismiss, invest in a valuable, long-term digital marketing strategy that search engines will accept.

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5 Comments

  1. Digital marketing has actually turned out to be beneficial for small businesses more than it was ever for big corporate or manufacturing giants. I enjoyed reading the article and I couldn’t agree more to the facts that are presented here.

  2. Of course SEO can never be as dead as assumed by amateur online marketers. Even if it died, it would rise from its own ashes. As long as people are using search engines, SEO is going to stay put. There’s no denying the fact that SEO strategies are evolving with every passing year and one has to keep up in order to stay abreast of the competitors, but it is really not wise to call it dead. It was a nice article. I enjoyed it to the core.

  3. Most people form a baseless opinion without going into the depths of digital marketing or even knowing what it is all about. This article is an eye opener and a must read for anyone who usually hears through the grapevine about digital marketing.

  4. I agree with what all you’ve described here. Digital marketing is so beneficial for small businesses & SEO is not dead. I enjoyed reading your article thank you.

  5. thanks you for the knowledgeable post which has helped a lot peoples. Keep it up for providing valuable information..

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