Your feed is full of confident marketing advice. Five plain questions will show you which of it deserves your budget, and which is only well told.
A post in our feed this week made a fair point: not all data is created equal, and neither is the advice flooding LinkedIn. It poked at the familiar opener about a chat with a Fortune 500 executive. Maybe the chat happened. You can't tell, and that's the trouble.
An owner reading this stuff has a real problem. Every post sounds certain, most of them disagree, and any of them could cost you a month of budget. You don't need a statistics degree to sort it. You need a few questions.
| Question | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Who is saying this, and what are they selling? | A vendor's study can be accurate, but it isn't neutral |
| What was measured? | Clicks and followers aren't the same as customers |
| How many, and who? | Ten agencies aren't a market |
| When was it true? | Marketing platforms change, so a date matters |
| Would this apply to a business like mine? | A national software brand isn't a local roofer |
You can see the size problem in how polling works. Pew Research Center explains that a simple random sample of 1,067 people has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. Look at a subgroup of about 160 people from a survey like that, and the margin grows to plus or minus 8.
Those figures come from election polling, and marketing surveys are often less rigorous, since many aren't random samples at all. So when a post quotes a percentage of marketers with no group size or source, you have no way to know how much weight it can bear. A number without its sample is decoration.
A single success story tells you it happened once. It doesn't tell you how many others tried the same thing and failed, because those people rarely post about it. The stories that reach your feed are mostly the winners.
Advice is also strongest near its own experience. Google's guide to hiring an SEO offers a useful habit: interview people, ask for past work and client references, and be wary of anyone who guarantees rankings. Apply the same test to a stranger's post. Would they show you the work?
Good advice can come from anywhere, and it doesn't need a study behind it to be worth trying. It just shouldn't get your whole budget on the strength of being well written.
How WebKing runs this
We check a claim against your own numbers before it touches your budget, and tell you when the evidence is thin.
Look for the original source, the sample size, the date and who paid for the work. If a post can't point to any of those, treat the number as a talking point rather than evidence.
Smaller groups give less certain answers. Pew Research Center shows a random sample of 1,067 carries a margin of about 3 points, while a subgroup of about 160 carries about 8.
No. Useful ideas appear there often. Treat them as ideas to test rather than facts to act on, and try them small before committing real budget.
Google's guide suggests interviewing candidates, asking for past work and client references, and being wary of anyone who guarantees rankings or keeps their methods secret.
Sources
The Lab is original analysis by WebKing. We summarize and interpret developments from the sources above for industrial, commercial, and small business owners. Figures are reported as published by their sources.
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