8 of the most common myths about product marketing, debunked

If your business provides a product or service, and you have taken steps to amplify and advertise this, then you have engaged in product marketing. However, with so many marketing misconceptions and myths currently doing the rounds, it's hard to know the best course of action for planning your marketing endeavors in the future.

To help you navigate this tricky situation, we've compiled a list of eight myths about digital marketing. Avoid these and strategize your product marketing the right way in 2021 and beyond.

Some of the most common marketing myths that are killing business

The Myth: Quantity is the best metric for leads.

Bringing in huge amounts of leads for your business is going to make you feel great, but are these leads really going to convert?

The Reality: You need genuinely qualified leads.

As always, quality must come before quantity. Simply achieving a large number of leads is not enough. You need qualified leads who have a genuine interest in your product or who can easily be nurtured along the conversion funnel.

If you are marketing to anyone and everyone, you are likely wasting time, money, and effort in the process. Hone your efforts and market to the right lead segments in the right way.

The Myth: Vast social media reach puts you ahead of your competitors.

Having thousands of followers on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter certainly gives you the potential to get your content and your brand out there. At the same time, though, you need to be aware of what these followers are doing.

The Reality: Engagement is everything.

Social media is a changeable environment, and many people are quick to follow accounts and forget about them. It's not enough just to have lots of followers; you also need to be engaging and energizing those followers.

Reach, on its own, is a difficult metric to quantify, as all too often it comes to nothing. The number of active followers is a far better measure of marketing performance.

The Myth: Emailing leads is a waste of time.

Marketing has moved on beyond email. Emails are simply ignored, and it's far more effective to target leads on social media or via other channels.

The Reality: Emails need to be a key part of your strategy.

This is one of the biggest internet marketing myths in 2021, and email is certainly not a waste of time. Ninety-nine percent of email users check their email every single day, and 58% read emails before checking other online content, such as news or social media.

Audiences are also growing, with around half of the world's population projected to be using email by 2023. This is not something to ignore.

The Myth: Longer content pieces turn your audience off.

Attention spans are getting shorter, and people want swift, bite-size pieces of content. Does this mean longer-form content is dead?

The Reality: You need longer-form content to demonstrate your authority.

No, it's certainly not dead. In fact, it could be argued that longer-form content is more important than ever, particularly in terms of pages that Google defines as ultra-valuable or Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) content.

This content needs to offer great value to your audience, and often, shorter-form, swiftly-delivered articles just won't cut it in this capacity. Maintain your authority with longer pieces and balance this with shorter content when appropriate.

The Myth: A great product is all you need.

Some believe that at the end of the day, a great product will sell itself. While a great product is certainly important, this may be a risky strategy.

The Reality: You still need to market your product!

In reality, there are many great products out there. This does not mean your product is not also great or even better than many of its competitors, but it does make it difficult to make your voice heard above the noise.

Don't assume that your audience will recognize greatness in your product all by themselves. You still need to tell them why they need the product, and marketing is a crucial aspect of this.

The Myth: If you're not seeing immediate results, your marketing is failing.

We live in a fast-paced environment, so it's natural to want to see immediate results when you market your product. But, does a slow-burning campaign really equal a failure?

The Reality: Great results can take time to appear.

Great marketing takes time. While results can sometimes happen immediately, you need to take a more data-driven approach to marketing to understand if you are moving in the right direction. Platforms like engage™ are geared toward giving you this insight into customer opinion.

Use this kind of digital solution to gauge how well your efforts are being received by your audience and make changes, if any are required, to keep you on track.

The Myth: The best marketing is expensive marketing.

If you are not getting the results you expect from your marketing, throw money at the problem! Some business owners believe this is the best way to secure success, but it also makes failure more expensive.

The Reality: Money needs to be spent wisely.

It's true that marketing spends are increasing. Deloitte predicted that overall spend would grow by 14% in 2021, while the most successful marketers have been found to devote 40% of their total marketing budget to content marketing. This means that product marketing is an investment, but you still need to make sure that this investment is going to pay off.

Be smart with your marketing spend. Focus on measurable goals that will help you work incrementally toward your goals. In order to track your returns, you need to start by tracking how much you are spending.

The Myth: Marketing is exclusively about sales.

When you market a product, you are seeking to grow your sales. This is the bottom line, and nothing else is important. Or could this be an oversimplified way to approach a complex discipline?

The Reality: There are many different marketing metrics to track.

Of course, when you put a product out there, you want people to buy it. However, this is just one of the metrics you can track with your marketing. We created the engage™ platform and app with a number of different use cases in mind, but one of the most important was to help marketers truly understand their audience and their marketing efforts.

For example, what are people saying about your product on social media? If you are generating organic shares and recommendations, this is a huge boost to your business. As many as 91% of 18- to 34-year-olds say that they place the same trust in online customer reviews as they would a review from a friend or family member. Tracking these additional metrics can give you a far better picture of the success of your efforts than simple sales data.

Learn more about the success of your marketing and plan your next campaign with engage™

One of the key use cases for engage™ is to help product marketers get more from their campaigns. These marketers can draw upon data to learn more about their audience, boosting their product marketing efforts with more insight. They also benefit from simplified workflows, as collaboration and data sharing is facilitated in a secure manner via the all-in-one cloud solution. All of this is geared toward a far more agile and flexible approach to marketing — something that has a profound impact on results.

Digital marketing myths are harming businesses and holding them back. Set yourself free with data-driven, agile processes. Reach out to our team and request a free demo of the engage™ platform and app.