Why Digital Marketers are full of shit

Digital Marketers are all full of shit

• ROI includes both ad spend and their fee
• development and marketing need to go hand in hand and work together
• marketing is always subordinate to development

• Long tail keywords as progress

• Tied back to revenue as sign of progress

• Landing pages – takes time to craft

• Content stuffing blogs

• Back linking, SEO damage

• ‘Optimisation’ takes forever

• Good traffic vs bad traffic – bots, people who will buy

• Seo is basically PR now

• There are no silver bullets

• Social is transient for one day or one hour

• they know nothing about code a lot of the time and their ability to get anything effectively done relies on someone being able to correctly put in, test and validate the tools that they use e.g. Adwords or Facebook Conversion tracking code, GA Universal analytics, Funnels & Goals, Event and Listener Tags, Schema Tags, Open Graph and Twitter Cards. If they don’t know how to do this themselves just wait for the blame game to start and ‘it’s not my fault’, ‘I didn’t have this’ etc they are basically useless and flying blind
• they can be cheap or expensive but don’t expect them to be rewarded based on their ability to deliver you ROI unless you’ve already proven you can sell online and you’ve done all the hard work already and then their job is basically to optimise something that’s already working and not trying to get something to work
• they promise quick results and the simple fact is that it’s impossible to get quick results unless you have a massive budget and are happy to go for glory (but this alone is no recipe for success or even learning). Firstly you have to do your research and analysis (if you have data), set up all the architecture to ensure you can collect data, test it all out and validate it works, then set up a new campaign, wait a few weeks (especially when there is little traffic), measure results, try and learn something and then try and test new things and learn again. This is not something that is simple, clear-cut or manageable in a lot of instances, especially when working with legacy systems. Just wait for the excuses ‘we’re making progress, we just need more time’ etc etc.
• they are lazy – a lot of the time they are looking to do cookie cutter work and will outsource some or all of the work to places like India to do the ‘heavy lifting’ of structuring generic campaigns. In other words, they don’t give a crap about your business or your customers
• they are usually strong in one area and know little to nothing about anything else that makes up the smorgasboard of marketing. So someone who is strong in Adwords, will not really know how to do SEO (which is basically I/A), analytics, or email marketing effectively and usually there’s one thing that’s going to drive the most traffic to your business but you also want to know what other options are out there
• Digital marketing is not just content creation, it is equal parts data analysis and more often than not these digital marketers lack fundamental skills to actually analyse data properly and don’t give you any useful insights or suggestions that you can actually use to drive value in your business
• Successful marketing is consistency, and that means not just a siloed view of marketing of one channel in isolation but actually incorporating it into absolutely everything you’re doing, knowing what parts you want to test, what parts are flexible, how and where you want to present things and having a holistic view of your promotion, channels, look and feel and language.