Marketing myths owners repeat: five things your last agency told you that are not true

Five claims travel from agency to owner and back again. Reach is sales. Followers are customers. Traffic equals leads. A first-page ranking can be promised. A report full of green arrows means the work is paying. Each sounds like progress, and none of them is an order. Below are the five, each with a test you can run on your own records without asking anyone's permission.

Myth 1: Reach is sales

Reach counts how many screens your post or ad appeared on. It is cheap to buy and easy to report, so it turns up in reports. A buyer who scrolled past you has not been reached in any sense that matters to a till.

Test: list the last twenty enquiries and, for each, write what they saw before they called. If you cannot link a single one to an ad or post you paid for, the reach number is decoration.

Myth 2: Followers are customers

A follower is a person who tapped once. A customer is a person who paid. They overlap, but only by accident unless your page is aimed at buyers.

Test: scroll through your latest hundred followers. Count how many could plausibly buy from you: right town, right trade, right size of purchase. Then count how many have ever sent a message asking a price. Those two small numbers are your real audience.

Myth 3: More traffic means more leads

Traffic counts visits. A site can get a thousand visits from searches for the wrong thing, such as people hunting for a job at a company like yours or a free template. Their visits flatter the chart and pay nothing.

Test: open the search terms or pages report and read the top ten queries aloud. Would a buyer type each of them? Then check how many visits ended in a call, a form or a WhatsApp tap. If visits rose while those taps stayed flat, the extra traffic was the wrong kind.

Myth 4: A page-one ranking can be promised

Search engines decide the order of results, and they change how they decide. An agency can improve your pages, fix technical faults and build proof. It cannot guarantee a position, and anyone who does is promising something that is not theirs to give. Nor can anyone honestly promise a date by which you will rank.

Test: ask for the promise in writing, and ask what the agency will do, specifically, if you do not rank. Then ask for something they can control: pages published, errors fixed, enquiries tracked.

Myth 5: A report of green arrows means it is working

Reports often lead with whatever went up. An arrow beside "impressions" tells you almost nothing about your cash. If the first page of a report has no enquiries, no orders and no cost per order, ask for them before reading the rest.

Test: put one question to every report. How many of these became enquiries? How many enquiries became orders? What did each order cost? If the report cannot answer, it is not yet measuring your business.

All the arrows green: a block-print exporter in Bagru

This is an invented case: a Bagru exporter of hand-block-printed bedcovers whose agency sent a deck now and then, with reach up, followers up and traffic up. The owner felt busy and asked why overseas enquiries had not moved.

The owner ran the five tests over a weekend. Of the last twenty enquiries, none traced to a paid post. Of the hundred latest followers, many looked like other textile units, and none had asked for a price. The top search terms behind the traffic included "block print fabric price list free download" and "block printing unit job vacancy".

The first instinct was to call the whole programme useless and change agency at once. The better move was narrower. The owner asked for the next report to open with enquiries by source, answered or not, and cost per enquiry, and to turn the traffic towards the buyer terms that had produced mail from importers. The agency could do the first part straight away. The second part meant removing pages that had been drawing the free-download visitors, and the traffic chart fell, which the owner had to accept.

A word on tone with whoever sent the old reports. Ask the questions as questions, not accusations, and ask for the figures in a sheet you can keep. Some agencies simply report what their tools show by default, and some will change the front page once you tell them what you want to see. Others will not, and that tells you something too.

What a good agency does when you ask

A good one should be able to answer, because the figures sit in its own tools. If you hear that your question is "too basic", or that the numbers cannot be pulled, ask why. The post on what to ask before hiring a marketing agency gives a longer list.

When these myths are not myths

Reach is useful for a launch the whole town must hear about. Followers matter if your trade sells on a personality, as a tutor or a chef might. Traffic is the starting point of everything online. The point is not that these numbers lie, but that they are the first rung and not the last. Use them as inputs to enquiries and orders, never as the result.

Run one test on Monday

Pick the myth you suspect most and run its test on your own numbers. If you need the baseline figures to run it, a marketing audit is one way to get them, and the marketing section covers the rest of the ground. Write down what you find, then tell us what you need.