When it comes to marketing, everyone acts as if they are an expert. The industry is rife with common misconceptions and concepts that are not based on facts but simply opinions that have been repeated so often that people believe them to be facts. It’s important when you’re starting out to be able to recognise the difference between what’s real and what isn’t.

We’ve compiled a list of 10 common misconceptions about marketing:

1. We’re too small to need a marketing plan
It doesn’t matter what size you are at the moment. It’s vital that you create a marketing plan that will map out how you’re going to reach your company’s goals.

If you, like most, wish to grow both in size and sales, you’ll need to factor in your lead generation channels, this is the essence of your marketing plan. Who you will be targeting, how you will reach them and convert them. This is a central business function so even small business and startups need to spend time fleshing out a robust marketing plan.

2. We can’t afford marketing
Marketing is scalable, every small business can afford some level of spending. If you think your budget is too small, consider the channels you’re focusing on. A lot of the time streamlining and pushing all resources into only the most important channels can help with affordability.

Research can be key to ensuring your marketing is affordable. Discovering what channels work best in your industry and what your competitors or others in your industry are focusing their resources on, you can avoid wasting resources.

3. We’re running ads, that’s good enough
Ads are an essential part of marketing, ads go hand in hand with other methods, be it content or SEO. Ads can be a quick way to judge and test interest in your products and services, as well as the way in which you communicate with them.

But so much more needs to be done; as a small business you need to be on top of your SEO optimisation, social media presence and your advertising. Leads need between 5 and 12 touch points with your business or brand before becoming customers, and trying to do this all with ads will be incredibly difficult, time-consuming and of course, costly.

4. We only need to market to potential leads, not our existing customers
This is just wrong. Customer retention is vital for your small business to grow. Plugging the leak of customers leaving, at the same time keeping them warm by building and maintaining a relationship with them will allow you to develop a foundation of reliable repeat customers who require minimal spend to convert in comparison to new leads.

It’s key to remember that your existing customers are not only potential sales, they’re also an extension of your brand and part of your marketing team.

Existing customers should be marketed to in a different manner than potential leads, but should not be forgotten.

5. Sales are down, we need to cut our marketing budget
With limited budgets, startups and small businesses have to constantly be frugal. Unfortunately, some marketing activities can be seen as a ‘nice-to-have’ rather than an essential business resource. Often when sales are down, one of the first things to be cut is marketing budgets. But this is counterproductive.

Yes, as a small business, it’s especially important to run your finances very strictly, however cutting the budget on what is essentially the start of your lead and sales generation funnel, is more than likely to speed up the decline in sales.

When sales are down, it’s at this time more attention should be paid to marketing. Analysing the ways in which you communicate your message and where. The aim should not be to reduce your overall budget but to focus it on the best performing activities, in order to bring sales back up.

6. Video is a bonus
Videos can be one of the best forms of content. Videos allow your content to be more engaging and fit more platforms and device usage patterns.

Part of this misconception is the belief that video needs to be expensive and expertly polished. But this is not the case, there are different ways to get your message across via video, from affordably made videos (which can be sourced from websites like Fiverr) to high end, custom-made, polished adverts. Simply choose a level that suits you. As a small business, especially if you are a startup, there’s no harm in creating a short video animation to communicate your message, and what’s best, this is easily achievable even for the smallest of budgets.

The other reasoning for this is the belief that video doesn’t suit all industries. This is also incorrect. Much like content, as long as you are addressing likely customer issues and creating with the intent to be informative, there is always a place for video.

7. Digital can’t help with B2B
This one crops up now and again, and where exactly it came from is puzzling. Digital can help every time of business, especially B2B businesses. Not having to rely on trade shows and old school mediums allow small businesses to target other businesses on a limited budget and achieve measurable results.

Businesses can be targeted on Paid search, through organic means on search engines as well as through social media. LinkedIn is one of the best ways to target decision makers in specific types of businesses and if your business targets other small businesses then facebook communities and groups can be a great way in.

You can go as far as to say, not only can digital help, it’s the best means you have.

8. Your industry is too boring for content marketing
There is a simple rule to create content for any industry; answer your customers’ questions with your content. Ask yourself which questions keep cropping up, what areas of your industry or services do customers find hard to navigate. Content should be created to share knowledge at its core.

By answering questions with your content, be it video or blog posts, you will increase the likelihood of engaging with potential customers, as they are likely to have similar questions.

Subject matters don’t necessarily have to be interesting or entertaining, however, they do need to be useful. This type of content is evergreen and will be revisited time and time again on the basis of its usefulness.

Don’t view content marketing as all entertainment, every industry and therefore every business can make use of it.

9. Social media takes up too much time
This is not necessarily true. There is no shortage of tools to maximise your time and impact in regards to social media. Tools like Hootsuite allow you to create dashboards in order to cut the time needed for each individual channel.

Making use of scheduling, hashtag and mention monitoring, as well as lists can cut down your social media management time, by hours.

The key here is resource and time management. Working smart and not hard. Streamlining the activities you carry out on each channel, and the number of channels you are active on in the first place.
There is often a temptation to spread the brand across all channels, but consider which are the most relevant, and start with them. There is no harm in creating accounts and parking them until you have the time and resource to manage them also. It’s better to not be active on a channel that’s irrelevant than to damage your brand by managing it poorly.

10. Social media is just for the younger demographic
This is an outdated misconception. Yes, some channels skew to a younger demographic, such as Snapchat. However, most social media sites your brand will be dealing with will have a variety of age groups operating on them. Facebook especially has a very wide demographic and it’s highly likely you’ll be able to find your target age group there.

This doesn’t mean that Facebook should be the only channel you target. It’s important to research the current statistics around your target demographic to find out what trends you can capitalise on. Don’t go into social media marketing with any preconceptions. The demographics you can reach depending on which channel you opt for. Choose wisely.

Marketing is one of those things that every company of every size needs to think about and every other agency and upstart is offering to tell you about. It’s easy to be led astray by bad advice and often regurgitated misleading advice. Avoid these 4 misconceptions and you’ll skip past some of the pitfalls.

As always, Happy Small Business Marketing!