Myth #1: “Inbound marketing, content marketing, and SEO are competing ideologies.”

Let’s put this one to rest, shall we? Content marketing is the creation and distribution of quality content for a clearly defined targeted audience. So, naturally, content marketing is integral to every stage of the inbound methodology: attracting, converting, closing, and delighting. You can use targeted content to help accomplish all four of those actions.

But content marketing is just one piece of the inbound marketing equation. Search engine optimization (SEO), for example, is another. With SEO, you’re making it easier for people to discover your website and content, which is particularly helpful for the attract phase of the methodology. Bottom line: this myth assumes a “this-or-that” approach to marketing. In reality, content marketing and SEO are both part of the broader inbound marketing family. Inbound is a holistic approach, combining many different marketing disciplines.

Myth #2: “It’s impossible to prove the ROI of inbound marketing.”

It’s totally possible. But, admittedly, the numbers could be better. In a 2013 survey, 41% of marketers said they could prove inbound ROI for their company.

9% said inbound didn’t show ROI, while 34% couldn’t or didn’t try to calculate it. So unfortunately, about a third of marketers are struggling with -- or ignoring -- the data/analytics that could prove (or disprove) inbound ROI. But of those marketers who did do the math, the majority saw that inbound marketing delivered.

Myth #3: “Inbound marketing and traditional marketing can’t play nice together.”

For years, we’ve been pretty outspoken about the evils of traditional or “outbound” marketing. It’s interruptive, the messaging is untargeted and (as a result) often irrelevant, and -- more generally -- it isn’t a sustainable long-term strategy. With inbound, you’re growing an organic audience that will keep your sales funnel full of qualified leads for years to come. With traditional marketing, you’re paying for a temporary audience; an audience that is less likely to convert.

That’s not to say, however, that traditional marketing can’t be helpful, especially in the early stages of inbound marketing adoption. Building up a library of helpful, targeted content and growing an audience organically takes time. When you’re a marketing organization staring down monthly and quarterly goals, using traditional tactics as a supplement to your inbound strategy can make a lot of sense.

Myth #4: “Inbound marketing is a fad.”

Pogs were a fad. Tamagotchis were a fad. Pet rocks were a fad. They were all incredibly popular for a small blip of time, and then, poof. Something new came along and replaced them.

Even if you ignore the adoption numbers, inbound marketing clearly doesn’t fall into the same category as the items above. For starters, inbound marketing isn’t a toy (nor is it a rock pretending to be a toy). But more importantly, inbound isn’t a single tactic; it’s the foundation that underlies a multitude of tactics. Even if one particular tactic eventually proves ineffective, your underlying methodology will remain in tact. Inbound will evolve with the times.

Myth #5: “No one is going to consume the content I create.”

If you’ve never done it before, creating content -- and publishing it consistently -- can seem like a daunting proposition. And this inbound marketing myth provides the perfect excuse: “Why should I waste my time and resources writing blog posts? I bet no one will read them anyway.”

But here’s the thing: if you create compelling content that’s targeted for a specific audience and optimized for search (i.e. easy for people to find), you will attract readers. And if you’re active on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and other social networks, and are building up audiences there, you’ll have even more opportunities to get people engaging with what you’re creating. Of course, you don’t just want anybody consuming your content, you want the right people -- people who are likely to convert into leads and close into customers.

Myth #6: “Blogging is a waste of time. It will never bring in customers.”

In fact, we’ve found that the more you blog, the more customers you’ll be able to trace back to your blog. Check this out: in our 2013 survey, 43% of marketers said they had generated at least one customer from their blog.

But when we look at marketers who were committed to blogging monthly -- publishing a post at least once a month -- 57% of them could trace customers back to their blogs. And finally, when we look at marketers who blogged daily, we find that a whopping 82% of them had generated customers from their blogs.

But don’t let this one dataset disprove the myth for you: I encourage you to read some real-life business blogging success stories.

Myth #7: “The best time to post to social media is on X day at X o’clock.”

HubSpot’s social media scientist Dan Zarrella once used 2 years-worth of data to figure out the best days and times to post to various social media channels. (Our friends at KISSmetrics turned this data into an infographic, an excerpt of which is pictured to the right.)

And while the data does indeed point to an ideal day and time to post in order to maximize shares, it fails to consider the uniqueness of the audience you are trying to target. It offers a general guideline -- but it doesn’t take your specific industry or customer knowledge into account. For example, “When is the best time to post in order to engage existing leads in my database vs. generate new leads?” is a question this data can’t answer.

However, -- and this is the reason why this myth is plausible -- you can totally answer questions like the one above. By using a social media tool that integrates with your contacts database, you can determine your own, personalized best days and times for posting to social media.

Myth #8: “SEO is a scam. It can’t help me attract the right people to my site.”

SEO has been getting a bad rap lately, mostly due to its association with black hat tactics. Buying inbound links, participating in shady link-exchange programs, stuffing keywords into your content ... it’s all bad stuff that most marketers are smart enough to avoid.

Modern SEO does away with the black hat tactics and instead shifts its focus from search engines to searchers. The goal isn’t to trick a robot into pushing you higher in the rankings, it’s to appeal to actual human beings by providing quality results that those humans want to click. Organic search leads are some of the highestconverting leads around.

Myth #9: “Creating unique landing pages is a waste of time.”

Au contraire! Creating unique landing pages (e.g. creating a new landing page with a distinct URL for each and every one of your gated ebooks, webinars, etc.) is an indispensable part of inbound marketing. Without landing pages, you’ll have a much harder time converting your website’s visitors into leads. According to our 2013 survey, companies with 30+ landing pages generated 7 times more leads than companies with 1 to 5 landing pages. Meanwhile, companies with 40+ landing pages generated 12 times more leads than those with 1 to 5 landing pages. Clearly, landing pages and lead generation go handand-hand.

What it comes down to is that the more landing pages you have ranking in search engines, showing up on social media sites, and getting forwarded through email, the more conversion opportunities there’ll be for potential leads.

Myth #10: “Landing page forms should always have as few fields as possible.”

The logic here seems solid. Fewer fields on a landing page form means more people will fill it out. That, in turn, means that you’ll generate more leads, which is good, right? Actually, it depends.

As Ginny Soskey, the head of HubSpot’s marketing blog, notes in her post “10 Common Landing Page Myths: Busted,” the ideal number of fields for a landing page form depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. “Are you trying to get a ton of new leads? Keep the form short,” says Soskey. “Are you trying to get really qualified leads? Make the form longer. One is not better than the other -- they just address different goals.”

Myth #11: “Targeted CTAs won’t help my lead conversion rates.”

To clarify, by “targeted CTAs” I’m referring to CTAs that utilize dynamic content (i.e. they can display different messaging depending on who’s viewing them). For example, you wouldn’t want to show a “Subscribe to This Blog” CTA to people who had already subscribed to your blog, would you? With a targeted CTA, you can show those folks something different, something that’s more in line with the actions they’ve already taken on your site.

At HubSpot, we recently analyzed data for 93,000 CTAs, which had amassed hundreds of millions of views over a 12-month period. Through this analysis, we discovered that targeted CTAs (or “Smart CTAs,” as we like to call them) had a 42% higher view-tosubmission rate than their static counterparts.

Myth #12: “A/B testing is complicated and ineffective.”

Statistical significance, p-values, levels of confidence ... we get it: this stuff sounds a bit complicated. And as much I want to assure you that it can be simple (especially if you have an A/B testing calculator), it is entirely plausible that you could find it all a bit confusing.

That being said, there’s no denying that A/B testing can help you improve your key metrics. For example, A/B testing different blog CTA variations has been shown to increase clickthrough rates by 200% ... or higher! What’s more, our 2013 survey showed that marketers who conducted A/B tests were more likely to prove inbound ROI.

Myth #13: “Inbound marketing software won’t help me convert visitors into leads.”

Having your blog, CTAs, and landing pages integrated into a single platform sure sounds like a great setup for generating leads. But to find out for sure, we brought in some outside help.

Myth #14: “Inbound marketing software won’t help me convert leads into customers.”

The misinformed marketer may think of inbound marketing software as only being effective at filling the top of the funnel. The reality, however, is that inbound marketing software can help with all areas of the marketing funnel, including the very bottom.

According to our 2014 inbound ROI study, 69% of HubSpot customers saw an increase in sales revenue after implementing our inbound software. And 74% of these customers experienced this revenue increase within 7 months. The bottom line: Inbound is about more than writing blog posts and setting up landing pages. Nurturing leads is a crucial component, and that’s where email and marketing automation come into play. (More on those next.)

Myth #15: “Email is dead. Or it’s dying. Or it’s very sick. (Or something.)”

These “[Fill-in-the-Marketing-Tactic] Is Dead” headlines make the rounds every so often. And they usually don’t end up holding any water. This is definitely the case with the “email is dead’ argument.

For starters, email is still an incredibly popular medium amongst marketers (see the chart to the right). But perhaps more importantly, email still works. It still brings in business. According to a 2013 study from the Direct Marketing Association, 66% of consumers have made an online purchase as a result of a marketing email.

Myth #16: “Marketing automation is impossible to master.”

Where there’s a will, there’s a way. So here’s some motivation: According to Gartner Research, businesses that use marketing automation see a 10% (or greater) increase in revenue within 6 to 9 months of implementing it.

But motivation alone won’t help you master marketing automation. The reason why many marketers may find automation so daunting is because they’ve seen the complicated webs and branches that plague older automation systems. Those systems, admittedly, were difficult to master. Nowadays, however, we have modern, branch-free marketing automation software, which means no more tangled mess. Instead, you can easily build automated lead nurturing campaigns that are based around your buyer personas and goals.

Myth #17: “Marketing automation is only for email.”

While we often associate marketing automation with email, the reality is that you can apply automation to many marketing activities. With HubSpot’s marketing automation software, for example, in addition to automating lead nurturing emails, you can automate sending internal notifications, scoring leads, and even personalizing the content on your website’s pages for different viewers.

Social media is another channel where you can apply automation. With HubSpot’s automation software, you can create targeted lists of important contacts to monitor on social media and set up email alerts for when one of those contacts mentions you (or a specified keyword) on Twitter.

Myth #18: “Personalization is creepy and ineffective.”

Not going to try to argue this one: personalization can totally be creepy. It’s definitely plausible. (In fact, we have an entire blog post dedicated to how to personalize your emails without being creepy.) But in terms of effectiveness, using dynamic or “smart” content to personalize email -- as well as landing pages, homepages, and blog CTAs -- is clearly a good move (provided you’re not being creepy, of course).

For example, according to our Science of Email Marketing Report, including the first names of your recipients in your emails can increase clickthrough rates from about 5.8% percent to about 7%. And remember that CTA study I mentioned back on page 13, which showed a 42% higher view-tosubmission rate for targeted CTAs? That was another example of personalization driving results.

Myth #19: “It’s impossible to know when leads are ready to become customers.”

Understanding who’s ready to buy -- and when -- requires incredible attention to detail. But it can be done! For example, if you knew that a week ago a lead downloaded your new product guide, and that 2 days ago that same lead was checking out your pricing page, and that 1 day ago, at 11:27 a.m., that same lead opened that nurturing email you sent them, you could make a convincing argument that a purchase decision was near.

Of course, to get these types of insights, you need a tool that integrates your contacts database, website, and email client, and can send real-time notifications based on the actions you want to monitor.

Myth #20: “Delighting customers is a waste of money.”

According to the White House Office of Consumer Affairs, it costs businesses 6 to 7 times more to attract a new customer than to retain an existing one. But beyond the financial incentive, there’s another reason why allotting resources for delighting customers makes sense: happy customers are the best promoters of your business.

As Rachel Goodman Moore of the HubSpot Academy notes in her post, “Go Beyond Good Enough: How to Delight Your Customers,” every single interaction a customer has with your organization matters, whether it’s with you, your co-workers, your website, or your content. “The better that experience is, the happier your customers are, and the more likely they are to stick around and tell their friends about the great experience your brand provides,” says Moore.

Myth #21: “Hosting events won’t help my business.”

As we just discovered on the previous page, delighting your customers isn’t about throwing money away, it’s about investing in your business’s best promoters. Events present a great opportunity for you to bring all of your customers together so they can talk about your product, exchange knowledge, get to know your company’s employees better, and -- more generally -- have a great time!

According to a survey of event organizers and attendees that we recently ran with Eventbrite, 79% of people attend events for the specific purpose of learning. 84% of respondents agreed that attending events is an important part of their job.

Myth #22: “Customers will always see the same thing on my site as visitors and leads.”

Great news! The rise of dynamic or “smart” content means that you no longer have to show your customers the same marketing materials that you show visitors and leads. Instead, you can create tailored homepage, CTA, and landing page messaging that only your customers can see. This, of course, provides a great opportunity for you to delight your customers. For example, instead of offering a lead generation-focused ebook to everyone who visits your homepage, you could use dynamic content to offer your customers a guide on using your product more effectively. Instead of showing existing customers a CTA to schedule a sales call, you could show them a CTA to sign up for a customer webinar. The sky’s the limit!