For those that are just starting a business, it can be challenging being able to identify what information available on the Internet is actually going to be useful and what is not. Everyone claims to have the right answer on how to handle marketing efforts, and which are the most efficient strategies and methods to use. Content creators or business owners that handle their own marketing, should be careful with the information they choose to follow. Here are few of the most common marketing misconceptions you should be aware of.

As we all should know, quantity does not equal quality. However, publishing content too often could in fact equal low-quality information. Many bloggers and content marketers have the idea that they should be publishing a piece of content almost every single day to stay relevant. This could not be further from the truth. What these people might not realize, is that Google penalizes those websites that do not present accurate, high-quality content by making them rank lower. A good blog article could take about a day or two, but if you are publishing content more than once a day, it might be in your best interest to take your time to do some research on topics that are current and then compiling information that is accurate. The size of your audience is important too. Small businesses and new bloggers might have smaller audiences, so limiting posts to twice or three times a week would work for them. Bigger companies, on the other hand, have bigger audiences to entertain and more people that write, allowing them to publish daily. The bottom line is that anyone who writes content for a website, needs to understand the audience what they like, and adjust their efforts to meet expectations.

The blog section of your website is the space you have to allow your audience to get to know your business in a more personal way. This is the space that you can use to persuade your customers of doing business with you, without explicitly asking them to buy your products. Content that is published here should not serve promotional purposes only for what you are in business for. Although you can have an article about that, you should expand into other relevant and current topics that fall within your industry. Visitors will be discouraged if all they can find in a blog section is more information on what you sell and how they can buy it. Blogs should serve content marketers as an opportunity to share pertinent material that would be of interest to those who decide to visit your website. It is also a resource to help you build authority within your industry and confidence in your business. If your blog has useful information, then people are more likely to come back. The goal is to get your audience engaged with your business. Nowadays, businesses should not aim at simply talking to their audience; instead, they should try to establish a conversation where both parts can interact with each other.

How social media has radically changed online marketing is a fact that is undeniable. However, there is a misconception as for what impact social medias has had on e-mail marketing techniques. Many marketers seem to believe that using e-mail is no longer effective, which is simply not true. Although more and more people are turning to Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram everyday, the reality is that e-mail is still the preferred mean of communication when it comes to marketing. For every $1 marketers spend, they can expect and average return of $44.25.It is also the most effective as well, since it is the channel that drives more conversions than any other one, including social media. E-mail marketing is far from extinct and it can perfectly co-exists with social media. Businesses should take advantage of both, since social media is good to let people know about who you are as a brand, and e-mail is better at conversions.

When it comes to brand awareness and getting people to do business with your company, your customers need to know they can trust you first. Trust is something that needs to be built and it can take some time, especially for startups that have just started. It can be very frustrating for a business when it invests a lot of time and effort (and money) and results do not show right away. Hard work pays off, but sometimes it can take a while until you start noticing long-term results. Developing new strategies and marketing efforts takes time, which makes it even harder because you also need time until you can determine how much value they are actually adding to your business and if they are not, then you have to go back to the beginning. That is why patience is key. There are a few things, however, a business can apply to try to see short-term results, like being updated with keywords, having positive interactions with customers, answering online reviews, creating Facebook ads, among others.

When it comes to marketing, there is no magic method that will immediately generate thousands of leads, even though there are many websites on the Internet saying otherwise. Unfortunately, a lot is founded on trial-and-error basis. A content marketer may have done a fair amount of research to write an article that has all the keywords, or maybe he or she designed a Facebook ad that is visually appealing and highlights the benefits of the product, but nothing guarantees that these will be successful. It is very hard to predict what reactions people will have because there are many factors that can have an impact. Predicting the future is impossible, but looking at the past might help you estimate it. Conducting a Predictive Analysis, will help you estimate future performance based on past event’s data, such as interactions with your posts, how engage people were, what their comments say, etc.