Marketing Myths Exposed
By Marketing professional


This small guide should help remove some of these myths, and help you develop better marketing for your business.

MYTH 1
Doing any marketing activity is better than none at all!
Absolutely not true, the bottom line is that marketing costs money. If you do not do any format marketing you maybe using the wrong messages to the wrong audience, in the wrong media, and all your money will be wasted, and you may do your brand damage.

MYTH 2
Branding is concept dreamed up by marketing consultants and doesn't affect me!
Crazy, branding at its simplest form, is “delivering a promise”. You promise the market something (by your actions, messages, promotions, advertising etc) and deliver (through website, staff, branches etc). You MUST ensure that customers receive the products/service and delivery they are promised, failure to do so is fatal. Just think how you feel when you receive poor service or a faulty.

MYTH 3
Public Relations (PR) is FREE!
Well in it purest form yes it is, but you are missing lots of editorial opportunities if you live by this myth. Spending a bit of money on building a relationship with editors and journalists is incredibly important. Invite then to your product launch/open days etc, entertain them, even take them out. You will be surprised just how helpful they then can be when you need editorial coverage, fitting in a photo to your story, or information about future editions that may be of interest to you.

MYTH 4
Marketing takes a while to work, I know I have to be patient!
Crazy, if your marketing hits the right market, the right decision makers within that market, with the messages they want to see, then results can be almost instantaneous.
Its true that large business have got the budget and time to create subtle awareness campaigns that take a while to sink into buyers minds, but a well executed campaign can bring in problems within days, even hours!

MYTH 5
We have a website, business will now come to us!
Not true, sure you have a website, but

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does everyone know about it? Have you informed your customers and prospects? Have you placed your website on the popular search engines?
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MYTH 6
I put in the right Meta tags and I'll get ranked high.
Meta tags are a small part of a very big puzzle. They are extremely important but they are not the only thing that you need to tweak in order to improve your search engine ranking. Sometimes a good meta tag change can make a big difference, mostly it won't. There isn't one magic formula that can vault you to the top of the search engines. It's more like 20 little things that you must do just right in order to get ranked high. With that said, by all means do your meta tags, but don't stop there.


MYTH 7
We are a sales organisation, and salespeople aren't part of the marketing process!
Crazy …. Sales are an incredibly important part of the marketing process especially in the B2B environment, marketing alone cannot sell anything. Marketing can get customers through the door, marketing can get in sales leads, but it takes a sales team to convert these prospects into customers.


MYTH 8
How do I know what percentage to spend on marketing!
You MUST give x% of your revenues and plough them back into marketing .. nonsence, its certainly true that you could expect to spend a certain percentage of your revenues on marketing, but all businesses are different and its difficult to say exactly how much you should spend without looking at market conditions, business objectives etc