Marketing is getting complex. There’s a lot of advice to be found, much of it conflicting. Who do you believe? What’s right for your business? How can you be sure you’re not making a mistake? Here is a list of the five most common marketing myths we encounter, and why your business will be harmed if you believe them.
Myth 1: Marketing and sales are the same thing.
Reality: Marketing and sales are entirely different things. In sales, the sole objective is to close the deal there and then. A typical example of this is cold callers, or door-to-door salesmen. Their tactics are to apply pressure and charm in equal measure to get you to sign on the dotted line right now. If you decline, they’ll probably move on and not return. Many people seem to think this is marketing, but it isn’t. Marketing is a long-term strategy to generate a continuous income source for your business. Many of the actions in a marketing plan won’t aim to sell anything immediately. It’s about establishing consumer confidence, creating efficient pipelines for moving customers from one point to the next, and understanding what will be happening a week, or a month, or a year from now. Marketing is about building infrastructure in a way that you don’t have to worry about sales.
Myth 2: Marketing is just about “getting your name out there”.
Reality: There are, broadly speaking, two types of marketing: mass media marketing, and direct response marketing. Mass media marketing is what you get from billboards, TV ads, sponsoring sports events, and generally anything that is done with the objective of creating a backdrop where your product lands in front of as many eyes as possible. This can be effective – as long as you’re running a major corporation with an infinite marketing budget. It works for Coca Cola, for example, because they are big enough to be everywhere at once. Coke has successfully pushed their signature beverage so deeply into the public subconscious that it’s become the default non-alcoholic drink most of us order at the pub. But a medium sized business with a capped marketing budget isn’t going to be able to have the same impact. Instead, direct response marketing is more effective. The aim with this is not to make you a household name; it’s to build up a carefully curated client base, one which suits your objectives and keeps the cash flowing in. This involves a precisely constructed digital infrastructure that identifies prospects and carefully converts them to fully paid up customers.
Myth 3: Marketing doesn’t work for my industry.
Reality: Any kind of business can benefit from marketing. You may offer a certain service or product which you think is too niche to find a target market for, but you’d be wrong. There is a market for everything on the internet (you really don’t want to know about some of it, trust us). We often hear that companies which work on a B2B basis think marketing isn’t for them, but this isn’t true. Industrial marketing works a bit differently to consumer marketing, but it still plays an important role in finding new clients. The problem often stems from people paying for a few ads, not getting anything from it, and deciding marketing just doesn’t work for them. In reality, you just need better marketing infrastructure.
Myth 4: I should spend as much as I can, as fast as you can.
Reality: Throwing a huge amount of money at a marketing campaign right at the beginning isn’t a good idea. When you first begin your campaign, it will be in the test phase. This is where you are working out what attracts the right kind of customers, and what doesn’t. The mantra for the test phase is “fail often and fail cheap”. In other words, you’re anticipating that many of the ads you put out there won’t work at first, and you don’t want to spend a lot of money finding out which ones those are. A sample of 1000 people is just as good as 10,000 or 100,000 at this point. You won’t learn anything further by replicating these results on mass. Once you’ve established what approach works, that’s when you can scale up your spend and go after more customers, because you know you’re spending your money targeting the right people.
Myth 5: Great products will sell themselves.
Reality: Marketing and hype have caused many mediocre products to take off, while superior goods have been left on the shelf because the enthusiasm just wasn’t there. The truth is that the vast majority of consumer purchases are made based on emotion rather than reason. Why did you pick up a certain brand of soap detergent? Was it because you carefully read through all the ingredients and were satisfied that this particular one would clean your dishes better than the other options? Or did you choose it on a whim because it was a brand you recognised, or had a colour pattern you liked, or there was 10% off? Realistically, these are the factors that drive purchasing choices, rather than an inherent quality in the product itself. In fact, with the right marketing, genuinely inferior products can outsell their better quality rivals tenfold. Betamax was technologically superior to VHS, but it ended up losing the videotape format war because the company misjudged what factors consumers would care about more.
