I’m serious.
I am by no means a veteran in online marketing. I have the pleasure of working with and learning from people who have 10+ years of experience in online marketing, but I didn’t start riding shotgun with them until last year. I’ve talked to dozens of other online marketers, attended meetups, webinars, seminars, conferences, and any other gathering of marketers that you can name. The lay of the land doesn’t take long to understand, at least the surface of it.
However, every time I’ve been to one of those marketing get-togethers I always leave thinking the exact same thing: “are those other marketers totally clueless or am I clueless?”
Being the overly self-critical person that I am I’ve ruled out my own cluelessness via proof by exhaustion – I’ve scrutinized all of my work to date and found a lot of things that I can improve upon but my performance indicates that I know what I’m doing.
I agree with the notion that online marketers as a whole are an imperfect lot, but I’d take it a step further and call most of online marketers “dysfunctional.” Here’s a short list of why I think so:
- They don’t spend money according to the tenets of results-oriented marketing.
- They don’t document what has and has not worked historically.
- They jump into the latest social media fad / gizmo / gimmick without really understanding it.
- They don’t develop real plans with actionable, quantified goals.
- They don’t understand that not all web traffic is created equal.
- They play things safe until they realize that they’ve been left behind.
- They try to apply old tactics to new mediums, which fails more often than it works.
- They cling onto bizarre ideologies about what is truly in the “spirit of the Internet.”*
- On the flipside of point #8, they come storming in to a new online channel without understanding the proper etiquette.
- They never properly segment their traffic.
- They spend more money acquiring customers than they could ever earn over the lifespan of those customers.
- They don’t have a process for any aspect of their operations – it’s all seat-of-the-pants.
- They don’t do any research half the time.
- They don’t test anything properly at all – multiple variables at once, invalid controls, statistically insignificant sample sizes, etc…
Were it not for the fact that I have a lot of copy to edit in the morning I could probably get this list up to 100 bullets in length, but you get the idea – online marketers are a disorganized bunch. What else do you think we could add to this list of online marketing dysfunction and chaos?
*How many people are praising the genius of the purist jackass at Microsoft who passed up paid search in 1998 because he thought that it was “unethical” to promote paid search results over organic search results for his due diligence to the morality of the world wide web?
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Comments 7
I’d say that it’s not just online marketers who fall into this category. It’s pretty much true of the bulk of marketers in general – which is good for those who actually do track results and adjust their marketing theories as they go. I’ve often said that the common sense is what most essential to successful marketing. Unfortunately, common sense doesn’t seem to be common any more.
Posted 28 Jan 2009 at 12:24 pm ¶Well, you’re just meeting with the wrong Web marketers, that’s all.
There are lots of pretenders out there, yes.
Posted 28 Jan 2009 at 12:29 pm ¶Marketing Ninja–first of all nice site! It is refreshingly spare.
And b, I will bookmark you. I’m a marketing VP working at my first SaaS company, and learning hands on the world of online marketing. It’s a whole new world, and I agree that many practitioners are clueless. I’m lucky to have a couple of very talented people on my team who actually know what they’re doing, and have been doing it for several years, so we’re perhaps middle of the pack or better. I for one kinda hope that the big guys don’t figure it out very soon.
Posted 28 Jan 2009 at 12:40 pm ¶Do you think ‘they’ are clueless, or do you think that their bosses are clueless? I’ve found it pretty often that the marketer can be open to ideas, and may even have a few plans of their own when they first arrive at a brand and start trying to figure out how to really do things the ‘right’ way. Within a few months, their COO or CEO who is 20 yrs older than they are, have crushed the online life out of them, and just give in to the way their boss wants it, because they are tired of banging their heads against a wall that isn’t going to approve anything that wasn’t being done 20 yrs ago when the boss was in marketing/advertising?
Posted 28 Jan 2009 at 12:50 pm ¶I feel that sometimes their goal is to bolster their own personal brand by looking cool and avant-garde rather than get any measurable results for their clients.
Posted 28 Jan 2009 at 12:59 pm ¶I have been in the online marketing business for about 10 years, in various roles, on both the client and the service provider side. I believe the biggest hurdle between good and great programs usually ties back to a perception problem in the organization. Online marketing is less expensive, and can be easily tracked for the most part. Decision makers see a profit of $10 dollars today, and decide that if they double the program it will make $20 tomorrow. I’ve met tons of talented marketers with great ideas who are stifled by the very thing that makes our space so powerful.
Posted 28 Jan 2009 at 1:32 pm ¶Of said dilemma, this is fundamentally due to the imperfections of marketing as a discipline. Over 20 years ago at a top business school I was already challenging the premises of marketing all the while going through the courses.
What you’re part of and witnessing is the unraveling of marketing as we know it for exactly all the reasons you’re uncovering by discovery
Posted 28 Jan 2009 at 3:17 pm ¶Post a Comment