.
If I were allowed to keep only one piece of advice in my marketing career, that would be, "question conventional wisdom." It's easy to blindly follow the old preachings of industry experts. It's riskier, and often more effective, to take new directions and experiment with the unknown.
We want to take you down the latter path. Our new ebook, 6 Deadly Marketing Myths Busted challenges some widely held marketing theories. Authored by HubSpot Social Media Scientist Dan Zarrella, this ebook relies on real data to protect you from superstitious bits of bad marketing advice. (The ebook is free and available to all, so make sure you grab your copy today.)
Myth #1: Social media is for conversations, not broadcasting.
Dan's research showed no significant correlation between the number of comments a blog post received and the amount of traffic that blog post generated. In other words, the conversation didn’t drive traffic.
Interestingly enough, Dan also proved that there may be no useful relationship between the amount of feedback (comments and likes) on a Facebook wall post and the number of people who see that wall post. Finally, his research on Twitter showed that highly followed accounts tend to have a lower percentage of their overall tweet stream starting with an “@” sign. In other words, they’re less conversational.
Myth #2: “Please ReTweet” doesn’t work.
Dan's research also showed that tweets containing the phrase “please retweet” received more retweets than tweets that didn't contain either “please retweet” or "please RT." The lesson here is that marketers shouldn't forget to include calls-to-action in their tweets. As Dan writes in his ebook, "If you want someone to take a specific action, you have to actually ask them to do it."
Myth #3: Don’t market on the weekends.
Dan has found that articles tend to be shared on Facebook far more on weekends than on weekdays. Similarly, in his Science of Email Marketing research, he found that emails sent on the weekend had a much higher click-through rate (CTR). The lesson here is that marketers should embrace contra-competitive timing and question conventions.
Myth #4: Don’t call yourself a “guru.”
When Dan analyzed more than five million Twitter accounts using data from Tweet Grader, he found that accounts containing the word “guru” in their bios had 100 more followers than the average user. This shows that you shouldn’t be afraid to identify yourself authoritatively.
Myth #5: Send less email.
In The Science of Email Marketing, Dan found that there was no major drop off in click-through rates when sending more email messages. Instead of worrying about the number of messages you send to your database, what you should be concerned about is your subscriber recency. Dan's research showed that the older a subscriber was, the lower their response rates were.
Myth #6. Klout is worthless.
The argument has been made that Klout isn’t a useful measure of marketing influence. Dan compared Klout score to two other unrelated measurements of marketing effectiveness (inbound links to a website and website traffic) and found a relationship between high Klout scores and incoming links and traffic. This goes to show that social media and other marketing channels are tightly connected and impact each other on levels that we are often unaware of.
Are there any other marketing myths you'd like us to debunk? Share them in the comments below. Don't forget to download the ebook for an in-depth description of the research, including charts and graphs.
