There’s a lot of confident nonsense floating around about digital marketing. Some of it comes from people selling a service, some from advice that was true in 2015 and hasn’t aged well. Either way, believing the wrong thing here is expensive. Here are the myths we hear most often, and what’s actually true.
Myth 1: “If I build a good website, customers will find it”
A good website is necessary. It is not a magnet. Publishing a site and waiting for traffic is like printing beautiful business cards and leaving the box in your garage.
Search engines need reasons to show your site to people, and people need a path to reach it, whether that’s search, ads, social, or word of mouth. The website is where you send people to. It doesn’t do the sending. Build the site, then decide how anyone will ever land on it.
Myth 2: “More followers means more sales”
A big follower count feels like success. But followers are not customers, and the two often have very little to do with each other.
You can have twenty thousand followers and a quiet inbox, or a few hundred of the right people and a steady stream of enquiries. What matters is whether the people following you are the people who might buy from you, and whether anything you post moves them toward doing that. Chasing the number for its own sake is how businesses end up popular and broke.
Myth 3: “SEO is a one-time job”
Plenty of people treat search engine optimisation like a switch you flip once. Get the site “SEO’d,” tick the box, move on.
Search doesn’t work like that. Your competitors keep publishing, Google keeps changing how it ranks things, and what customers search for shifts over time. SEO is closer to maintaining a garden than building a fence. Leave it alone for a year and you’ll watch your rankings quietly slide while someone more consistent takes your spot.
Myth 4: “Email marketing is dead”
This one refuses to die, ironically. Email gets written off as old-fashioned every couple of years, usually by someone promoting a newer channel.
Meanwhile email keeps quietly outperforming most of them. It’s one of the few channels you actually own. You’re not renting attention from a platform that can change its algorithm or shut your account overnight. A list of people who chose to hear from you is one of the most valuable things a small business can build, and it doesn’t cost you a fortune to reach them.
Myth 5: “Any marketing is better than no marketing”
This is the one that does the quietest damage, because it sounds sensible. Surely doing something beats doing nothing?
Not when “something” is scattered, unmeasured, and pointed at the wrong people. Marketing with no goal and no tracking doesn’t just waste money, it teaches you the wrong lessons, because you can’t tell what worked. A small amount of marketing done deliberately will beat a big pile of activity done on vibes, every time.
The thread running through all of these
Every one of these myths lets you skip the uncomfortable part: deciding what you actually want, then checking whether you’re getting it. That’s the real work, and it’s also where the results live.
If you’d like a straight answer about what’s worth your time and what isn’t, that’s what we do. No lock-in contracts, no jargon, no bullshit.
Book a free 20-minute call. You’ll leave with at least one thing you can act on this week, whether you work with us or not.
