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Online Marketing: Are Most Online Marketers Clueless? | Marketing Ninja

Thu, Dec 31, 2009

General

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:

  1. They don’t spend money according to the tenets of results-oriented marketing.
  2. They don’t document what has and has not worked historically.
  3. They jump into the latest social media fad / gizmo / gimmick without really understanding it.
  4. They don’t develop real plans with actionable, quantified goals.
  5. They don’t understand that not all web traffic is created equal.
  6. They play things safe until they realize that they’ve been left behind.
  7. They try to apply old tactics to new mediums, which fails more often than it works.
  8. They cling onto bizarre ideologies about what is truly in the “spirit of the Internet.”*
  9. On the flipside of point #8, they come storming in to a new online channel without understanding the proper etiquette.
  10. They never properly segment their traffic.
  11. They spend more money acquiring customers than they could ever earn over the lifespan of those customers.
  12. They don’t have a process for any aspect of their operations – it’s all seat-of-the-pants.
  13. They don’t do any research half the time.
  14. 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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