Stop Falling For These Myths (Focus On THIS Instead!)
Today I'm sharing 6 marketing myths about launching, social media, and sales that could be holding back your growth and success. I'll break down the myths, what they are, and what you should focus on instead. Even if you pick one or two of these to focus on, you'll see a big difference in your results AND your time spent on marketing.
There's been a fun trend going around Instagram and Tik Tok lately about propaganda you won't fall for. I loved this trend and did my own version on Instagram of propaganda that I will never teach you as a marketing mentor. So, I want to break some of these down a little bit more in depth and share some other marketing myths that I want you to know not to fall for.
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General Myths
Launches
The first myth that I want to break for you today is about launching. And that myth is that if you have an unsuccessful launch, you don't meet your launch goals, then your product is destined for failure. I see this all the time, especially with new product owners. You see what's happening with other people—like a debut author getting thousands of pre-orders—and think that it’s the norm and set really lofty goals for yourself.
I'm all for setting high goals—I have very high goals for myself as well. But when we compare ourselves to others and then fall below that ideal, we might think that it's an issue with our product and that we just need to move forward and write another book and launch another book as soon as possible because that one will go better.
That's often not the case. So, if you have a launch that just didn't go as planned, I want you to know your product has many, many years ahead of it to find its people. Now, you still have to market it to find your people, but people frequently think the hype is going to end because their launch is over, so the interest is going to fade. If you keep marketing, that’s not necessarily true.
A lot of readers or people who are buying your products—whether you write music or you create products like jewelry, handmade things, all these types of creatives that I work with—your customer typically doesn't care when it was released. Some readers might like to read brand new books and stay focused on new releases. But when we go to the library to the bookstore, we're picking up books that have been out for a while because the cover, the title, the book description captures our interest or we saw the person marketing on social media and fell in love with the plot or we saw a review or whatever it might be. So your product has a lifetime of sales ahead of it if you keep going and you keep marketing it.
Constant Convincing
All right, the next myth is that you need to convince people that your art, your books, your products are worth it. One of my favorite things is helping people who hate marketing to start liking it and to find it fun or even enjoyable and to gain confidence in your marketing strategy. And a lot of times, as creatives, I work with a lot of introverts and sensitive folks who don't really like to be salesy to self-promote. A lot of us feel uncomfortable with that, and I do too.
However, when we have this mindset that marketing is all about convincing people that we’re worth it, about pulling people over the finish line to become a purchaser of our products, that does feel salesy, awkward, and uncomfortable. So I want to tell you today that, in my world, that is not how I see marketing. Marketing is letting the right people become aware of our products by raising awareness about them—talking about our products, giving people the facts about how amazing our product is, and letting them make the decision to purchase. That is marketing.
It's really just about awareness; making sure our products (and us and our brands) are getting visible. And so with that, we're not convincing people we're worth it because your art is already worth it. We're simply presenting it to the right people who it's perfect for.
CONTENT MYTHS
Repurposing
Next, I'm going to talk about a few different content myths when it comes to repurposing social media content. The first myth is that you should repurpose content on every platform. This was trendy at one point—maybe it still is—where you make a short form video (like a reel) and you post it to TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube shorts, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and so on, and it's out there everywhere so you're getting the most visibility. If that's working for you and you love doing it, great!
But in my world, I typically work with people who don’t want to be everywhere (I don't either), and who don't have the time to sit there and post to every single platform. Because here's the thing—when we're spread thin across all these different places, it's really hard to focus on just one to two platforms and actually see what’s doing well. This is how we see the most success, when you're able to look at the data, to analyze, and to optimize for that platform.
Growth Rate
The next myth related to social media is that there is a certain rate of growth you should be looking out for. This is another question that I get pretty often, where people are comparing themselves to others who maybe grew faster, or if there’s a certain number of views or followers we should be getting per post.
There really is no benchmark. I've tried to find data on this, comparing myself within my own industry and getting a sense to give you, but there really isn't. And there are many different factors when it comes to growth. The biggest comparison we want to do is with ourselves.
I don't really love comparison in general—I think it holds a lot of us back. But if you can compare to yourself, to your own growth, then you can see what’s working and where you might want to make changes. If you're someone who's brand new to social media (or you’ve started over fresh), please do not compare yourself to someone who's been doing it for a decade. We’re all starting from different places and have had different obstacles along the way. I’ll say it again:
There's no guaranteed rate of growth!
Unfollows
The last one that I want to tell you is about unfollows, because I've recently been thinking a lot about this concept and how I can reframe it for us. Unfollows happen, and as your audience grows, you might see a higher uptake of unfollows as well. For example, there's been weeks and months sometimes where I have more unfollows than I do new followers. I'm not panicked about that at all, and there are a couple reasons why.
One is that I've had my accounts for years now—nearly a decade—and there are a lot of people who maybe followed me those first few years that are no longer active on Instagram for any number of reasons. These platforms are constantly flushing out, deleting, deactivating old accounts, bought accounts, spam accounts, hacked accounts, all of these things.
Another reason is people simply are no longer interested. And I don't want people who aren't interested to follow me, because then they're never going to engage with my content. So we might see unfollowers or unsubscribes and think I'm doing something wrong or everyone's leaving. When I look at my analytics, I might see a thousand new people came in this week, and maybe a thousand people left. And that doesn't feel great. But now I have a thousand new people to focus on to bring into my community and show them why I'm so special. Whereas those thousand that left might be bots, might not have been on Instagram in years.
If you want to hear about another myth that is long dead, check out the corresponding YouTube video or podcast linked in the buttons below the image at the top of this post!
Foundational Marketing
There are so many marketing myths out there, but I want to tell you that marketing really doesn't change that often. The foundations of marketing stay the same because humans stay the same. However, there's a caveat to this, and this year especially, there is a bit of a change in consumer behavior and how marketing impacts that as the economy changes with AI really coming into play and affecting a lot of us creatives in my community that I work with on a daily basis.
Because it's changing a little bit, I'm doing a free video class breaking down everything that’s changing, and the shifts we need to make to our marketing this year. So if you don't want to miss out on that, make sure you're subscribed to my YouTube channel because it's coming soon!
You can also join my mailing list, because I'll be sending letting you know when the class is available so you don't miss it. Just head to marketingbyshelby.com and scroll down the footer of my website to sign up for my mailing list—it's called Marketing Monday. Or, you can get any freebie on my website and you will be subscribed to my mailing list from there as well.
I hope you found this post helpful! Thank you so much for joining me today. I hope you have a wonderful week ahead, and I'll see you in the next one. Bye!