In your career as a marketer, there will be plenty of folks who just don’t “get” what marketing is or why it is so important. They have heard chatter about what marketing is or have had some brief experience with it in the past. Some of these people confuse marketing and advertising; others believe that marketing solely involves designing logos and giving away free stuff to attract new clients, and some people even believe that marketing is a simple task that anyone can do.

The reality? Marketing is an integral, and often complicated, aspect of any successful business.

That is where you come in. You are the master of moving a qualified lead from the top to the bottom of the buyer funnel. You know how to target your audience with tailored content. You are constantly reading blogs and articles to stay abreast of the hottest and most effective marketing trends. You are a lean, mean, marketing machine…

But sometimes, having the skills to know what NOT to do, and having the evidence to back this up when the non-marketer is pushing for the company to make a bad marketing move, is just as important as all the other tools in your repertoire. Market like a pro and avoid the advice in the below marketing myths.

Thanks to the internet, there are virtually no limits to the amount of content you can publish and share. But just because you can doesn’t mean you should. Think about someone in your life that talks a lot… too much, in fact, to the point that they annoy people around them. Do you listen to everything they say? Or, at this point, anything they say? Don’t let your company be that person. Stick with great content tailored to your audience and delivered in a consistent and nonintrusive way. Your audience will appreciate it.

This is just plain bad advice. Marketing costs time and money-especially if you want it done well-and weak marketing practices can negatively influence your brand. Unless marketing is well-planned, smart, and you can justify it with a substantial projected ROI, your shop may not be ready to start marketing.

While marketing does cost time and money, it can be done well with just one or the other. Investing in a high-tech marketing program capable of executing many marketing activities at once and contracting or hiring experts to run this setup for you is an excellent plan if you have the budget to do so. However, small businesses don’t have to break the bank to establish good marketing practices. There are many effective ways to achieve marketing success on a modest budget, but they do take time.

Wrong. Sales and marketing the two most important aspects of your business, and they need one another to function successfully. Be sure your salespeople and marketing folks are speaking the same language. Yes, there is a difference between selling and marketing, but there two different jobs need to work together like a well-choreographed dance; the marketers priming leads, the salespeople ensuring that the leads are digesting the marketing content and moving them down the funnel towards closing. While the marketers create the content, the salespeople can be champions of the content, keeping a campaign alive and in the minds of potential buyers.

Do you want to know why there are so many social media platforms out there? It’s so folks with different interests and different tastes for how they want to receive their content can find the platforms that suit them. Just because crop tops are having a moment right now doesn’t mean that your grandma should wear one, right? Good marketers use data to identify which platforms are driving the most traffic to their site, and leave the other networks alone.

Quality is important, but don’t undervalue targeted reach. More fans and followers mean you’re gaining access to their fans and followers, and this is especially lucrative if they’re an influencer. Influencer followers and fans can pump your content and brand with marketing steroids, making your already great content seem even more fantastic in the eyes of the influencers’ followers. Not to mention, their clout with your target audience transfers to you by association.

Monday through Friday may be your idea of a “work week,” but that doesn’t necessarily correlate with when your target audience is using social media. Don’t sell yourself short by assuming that the weekend is time off for your social media marketing campaign. Do your research and find out if weekend tweeting or posting is needed to help boost your campaign… your competitors are doing the same thing.

Believe it or not, can actually generate value beyond just engagement from social media. Social media drives leads and customers.

• According to the “Social Media Update 2014” report from the Pew Research Center, 73% of online adults use social networking sites.
• In the “2014-2015 State of Inbound Marketing” report from HubSpot, social media lead conversion rates are shown to be 13% higher than the average lead conversion rate.
• The same HubSpot report also claims that 74% of all marketers say Facebook is important to their lead generation strategies.
• An article on the Nielsen newswire claims that roughly 46% of online users use social media when making a purchase decision.

While some products are purchased based on price alone, perceived value is often just as powerful as actual price. Just look at the diamond industry if you need a reminder of this. Set a price that your bottom line can live with, but focus on marketing the value of your product or service if you want to foster customer loyalty.

You set your marketing plan into motion. Congrats! However, the job is only half done. Marketing strategies are iterative and evolving. To be truly effective, marketers must watch, analyze, and tweak their content and messaging based on how their audience responds and interacts with it.