Digital Marketing

The first myth is “Digital Marketing is all about Graphic Designing and Posting it on Social Media” whereas focussing only on designing attractive images without understanding the underlying principles can be misleading for Digital Marketers because arbitrary creatives can be a hit or miss game. Graphic design involves using visuals to communicate ideas and values. It has largely been used to design brand elements such as logo, sign, symbol, brand mascot etc. but most of the budding professionals believe that designing attractive images using canva or any other creative designing tool and posting it daily on Social Media is Digital or Social Media Marketing. They fail to understand the underlying concepts of digital & social media marketing which targets consumers precisely at the most relevant stage of its purchase journey with the right level of communication which addresses the concerns of consumers. Driving traffic through arbitrary images is misleading for Digital marketers because such creatives won’t attract the right consumer, whereas such visitors will only increase fake traffic or fake followers and won’t help in the long run. Slow and steady growth with the right strategy is a winning formula in the online world.

The second myth about digital marketing is “Memetic Marketing or memes can make your content viral & help you earn fortune overnight” whereas reality has proved that memes can even derail the brand overnight if not handled properly. Memes attract attention & entertain people. Many researchers believe that memes are risky because some meme attempts, despite being funny, can elicit negative feelings and thereby negatively affect consumer attitude towards the brand. A well-intentioned joke that falls flat can ruin a party, similarly failing to be funny can backfire & damage the brand image. However, many businesses use memes & still want to be taken seriously to drive engagement among buyers with an intention to make it viral for attaining different business goals such as improving brand awareness, increasing brand consideration, increasing followers, and more. But they overlook its nature of virulence which can affect the masses if not handled properly. When people find something funny they take it lightly and even take the brand message lightly but when it comes to buying something they take serious decisions. It is a double edged sword which can help you earn fortune for your brand if it gets connected well with the brand message or else will derail your brand overnight if wrongly understood by the audience which can never be reversed.

The third myth is “All online Platforms are same and Posting similar content across all platforms is equally effective”. It has been proved that spray and pray approach doesn’t work in the online world. Cross-posting can be tricky. Cross-posting is effective for social media managers because it saves time, saves efforts and streamline content across all platforms but they fail to understand that each social media platform is designed with some purpose and for some specific audience, therefore people use different language, tone and style to communicate and to build networks. Marketers save efforts and time in order to reach millions of audiences at one go with an intention to build awareness and trigger actions among them. This spray and pray approach is used in traditional media like television & print where you can’t track your target audience, but online marketing doesn’t deprive you from multiple benefits like you can precisely reach your target audience with customize message, your budget never gets wasted on unwanted audience, you can always tweak your campaign, you can trigger their action at their favourable time etc.

The fourth myth about digital marketing is that “most of the people believe that digital marketing is about website design and they can’t become a Digital Marketer without learning web designing”. While the fact is you don’t have to be a Web Developer for being Digital Marketer. Content is the King- If your goal matches with the goal of the search engine, it will rank your business high on search engine result page and the goal of every search engine is to provide uncluttered experience & high quality content to the searcher. You don’t need to learn HTML Coding, you just have to align your content writer well with the developer to utilize each part of your website for maximum conversion and attainment of your goal. Being a Digital Marketer, you need to know how to bring traffic on your website and which part of your website should influence visitors to take action. Learn to create relevant, fresh, popular and high quality content more frequently to inform crawlers for its database updation & ranking. Digital Marketers should be able to diagnose the problems and suggest corrective actions.

The fifth myth is that “taking command on software and platforms is the only thing which is important for Digital Marketer”. The fact is that software and search engine will come and go but the basic concept of marketing will remain same. To be successful with the fast paced digital transformation, marketers try to focus more on the better usage of technology rather than using marketing concepts better and in the process they fail to maintain the balance between the two. Mastering technology is not the only criteria of success, the right principle of marketing must also be put in place to properly develop, manage, and nurture the benefits of the technology. Posting content or sending messages to the consumer without understanding their real need, demography, preferences, stages of their purchase journey, relevance of the content and more, can permanently damage the brand image.