Marketers can get certifications for
Posted: Mon Dec 23, 2024 4:19 am
Direct mail takes time to grow. Unlike Facebook ads, it can take months or even years to grow.
Nevertheless, within my first three months at the agency, I had the basics. I started seeing opportunities for direct response strategies everywhere—even in blogs—about data segmentation.
During my tenure at the company, I created a soccer blog. It was a single blog—three summary posts a day—but it became one of the most popular and commented on blogs on the Internet.
This was thanks to direct response strategies. For example, in each post, I tested different CTAs to entice people to leave a comment and optimized them accordingly.
Blogging taught me that direct response strategies were not only for the Internet, but would become one of the driving forces behind online consumer behavior.
Many people didn’t realize this yet. It was the early days of the Internet and digital marketing was in its infancy; optimizing performance was not yet a common practice.
Seven years later, marketing would be unrecognizable.
Direct response before and after digital disruption
Source: MarketerHire
Inside a digital agency circa 2010
My blog was acquired by a venture-backed startup, which led me out of the agency world and into startup marketing. It wasn’t until 2010 that I returned to the agency world and started my own agency: Offside Media.
We focused on emerging digital strategies, and I leveraged my connections in both sports and startups to build one of the few digital agencies serving both industries.
Interestingly, both industries were facing the same digital marketing problems, but for different reasons. Global sports brands were just beginning to realize that digital marketing was here to stay, and were asking questions like “Should we open a Twitter account?” and “What should we do on Facebook?” Startups knew that digital marketing was here to stay—but they also learned that the same was true for marketing, and they needed a stronger strategy than just trying their luck at getting TechCrunch coverage.
Ultimately, this meant that all of my clients were in a state of ambivalence. They were hesitant to try digital channels—they had been successful without them—but they realized they had to.
[My clients] were reluctant to try digital channels—they had been successful without them—but they realized they had to.
Digital marketing was where the market was going.
However, they didn’t know how digital marketing worked, and neither did many traditional Mad Men-style agencies. Most digital marketing channels were new; Facebook’s newsfeed was only four years old. There were no established experts in these channels, but there was a big demand for those who could figure them out.
I loved that there was a gap in the market that I could fill—I was one of the few marketers who was both at the forefront of digital and had big agency experience. I quickly earned the trust of clients like Real Madrid and Squarespace.
However, at a macro level, the digital transformation meant that business as usual suddenly became dangerous. As an industry, marketing entered a new era of experimentation and uncertainty.
This shift created a lot of opportunity, but it also created confusion and distrust in the marketing space that continues to this day.
How did the marketing market change?
The short answer is: it became riskier.
I view the digital marketing market as a high-risk market that is unlikely to produce great results.
In a high-risk market…
…buyers buy reluctantly.
…sellers vary widely in quality.
…what’s bought and sold keeps changing.
Let’s take a slow walk through this.
Buyers buy reluctantly.
In 2010, Sean Ellis and his friends in the Bay Area startup scene were tired of marketing. To them, marketing meant throwing money at billboards. They needed something new: a capital-efficient, engineering-focused growth strategy.
Over beers, they decided to call this new discipline “growth hacking.”
There was nothing new about it. It was all still marketing—just an extension of marketing’s technical capabilities. Airbnb’s most famous growth hack temporarily turned Craigslist into a marketing channel; product-led growth simply means using your own product as a marketing channel.
It’s still marketing. There’s a reason why “growth marketing” has surpassed “growth hacking” in startups.
Yet Ellis’s attitude has held sway for nearly a decade since the term “growth hacking” was coined. I met a bunch of startup founders who thought they didn’t need a marketing team. They just had to follow Airbnb or Slack’s playbook.
That was the era when startups had a romantic vision of the path to growth.
Startups romanticize the path to growth.
The democratization of ad buying made it worse. Buying ads used to require weeks of planning and building relationships with publishers and media libraries; suddenly, anyone with an internet connection and $100 could create a Facebook ad campaign in no time.
Creating a successful Facebook marketing campaign is getting harder and harder — and people are increasingly understanding that. Still, there’s a lingering feeling in some circles that marketing is optional or easily DIYable.
Compare the way people talk about marketing to the way they talk about engineering, and you’ll see what I mean.
The quality of sellers varies.
This is true in every industry, but it’s especially true in marketing. Accounting has the CPA exam; law has the bar exam.
There’s not a lot of that in marketing today.
proficiency in specific platforms from Facebook, Google, and Hubspot, but those certifications quickly become obsolete. There’s no gold-standard credential that clearly separates qualified from unqualified marketers.
If you’re not a marketer yourself, it’s hard to know who to trust. Established agencies can be slow to adapt to technological changes or overstate the breadth of their expertise. Meanwhile, marketers who’ve worked at established companies or hyped startups vary in their contributions to those success stories.
(Read: They might be 20-somethings winging it.)
Hiring marketers can be a real gamble.
Digital marketing is always changing.
The pace of innovation in digital marketing changed with the numeros telefonicos de brasil rise of the internet. Prior to that, we’d relied on the same few marketing channels for nearly a hundred years: radio, TV, outdoor advertising, and direct mail.
Consider this (non-comprehensive) timeline of paid channel launches.
Non-comprehensive timeline of paid channel launches. Sources: FCC, Quartz, Study, Search Engine Land, Mashable, Facebook, Twitter, Axios, and Tech Crunch
More than half of the above channels originated this century, and new channels like Clubhouse and Discord continue to emerge, each with its own unique culture.
Even established marketing channels are constantly changing. In 2021, Facebook has overhauled its advertising platform to comply with Apple's new privacy updates, and Google will update its search algorithm in May. Google recently announced that it will abandon all user-level tracking next year.
— While direct mail is mostly analog, blogs are purely digital
Nevertheless, within my first three months at the agency, I had the basics. I started seeing opportunities for direct response strategies everywhere—even in blogs—about data segmentation.
During my tenure at the company, I created a soccer blog. It was a single blog—three summary posts a day—but it became one of the most popular and commented on blogs on the Internet.
This was thanks to direct response strategies. For example, in each post, I tested different CTAs to entice people to leave a comment and optimized them accordingly.
Blogging taught me that direct response strategies were not only for the Internet, but would become one of the driving forces behind online consumer behavior.
Many people didn’t realize this yet. It was the early days of the Internet and digital marketing was in its infancy; optimizing performance was not yet a common practice.
Seven years later, marketing would be unrecognizable.
Direct response before and after digital disruption
Source: MarketerHire
Inside a digital agency circa 2010
My blog was acquired by a venture-backed startup, which led me out of the agency world and into startup marketing. It wasn’t until 2010 that I returned to the agency world and started my own agency: Offside Media.
We focused on emerging digital strategies, and I leveraged my connections in both sports and startups to build one of the few digital agencies serving both industries.
Interestingly, both industries were facing the same digital marketing problems, but for different reasons. Global sports brands were just beginning to realize that digital marketing was here to stay, and were asking questions like “Should we open a Twitter account?” and “What should we do on Facebook?” Startups knew that digital marketing was here to stay—but they also learned that the same was true for marketing, and they needed a stronger strategy than just trying their luck at getting TechCrunch coverage.
Ultimately, this meant that all of my clients were in a state of ambivalence. They were hesitant to try digital channels—they had been successful without them—but they realized they had to.
[My clients] were reluctant to try digital channels—they had been successful without them—but they realized they had to.
Digital marketing was where the market was going.
However, they didn’t know how digital marketing worked, and neither did many traditional Mad Men-style agencies. Most digital marketing channels were new; Facebook’s newsfeed was only four years old. There were no established experts in these channels, but there was a big demand for those who could figure them out.
I loved that there was a gap in the market that I could fill—I was one of the few marketers who was both at the forefront of digital and had big agency experience. I quickly earned the trust of clients like Real Madrid and Squarespace.
However, at a macro level, the digital transformation meant that business as usual suddenly became dangerous. As an industry, marketing entered a new era of experimentation and uncertainty.
This shift created a lot of opportunity, but it also created confusion and distrust in the marketing space that continues to this day.
How did the marketing market change?
The short answer is: it became riskier.
I view the digital marketing market as a high-risk market that is unlikely to produce great results.
In a high-risk market…
…buyers buy reluctantly.
…sellers vary widely in quality.
…what’s bought and sold keeps changing.
Let’s take a slow walk through this.
Buyers buy reluctantly.
In 2010, Sean Ellis and his friends in the Bay Area startup scene were tired of marketing. To them, marketing meant throwing money at billboards. They needed something new: a capital-efficient, engineering-focused growth strategy.
Over beers, they decided to call this new discipline “growth hacking.”
There was nothing new about it. It was all still marketing—just an extension of marketing’s technical capabilities. Airbnb’s most famous growth hack temporarily turned Craigslist into a marketing channel; product-led growth simply means using your own product as a marketing channel.
It’s still marketing. There’s a reason why “growth marketing” has surpassed “growth hacking” in startups.
Yet Ellis’s attitude has held sway for nearly a decade since the term “growth hacking” was coined. I met a bunch of startup founders who thought they didn’t need a marketing team. They just had to follow Airbnb or Slack’s playbook.
That was the era when startups had a romantic vision of the path to growth.
Startups romanticize the path to growth.
The democratization of ad buying made it worse. Buying ads used to require weeks of planning and building relationships with publishers and media libraries; suddenly, anyone with an internet connection and $100 could create a Facebook ad campaign in no time.
Creating a successful Facebook marketing campaign is getting harder and harder — and people are increasingly understanding that. Still, there’s a lingering feeling in some circles that marketing is optional or easily DIYable.
Compare the way people talk about marketing to the way they talk about engineering, and you’ll see what I mean.
The quality of sellers varies.
This is true in every industry, but it’s especially true in marketing. Accounting has the CPA exam; law has the bar exam.
There’s not a lot of that in marketing today.
proficiency in specific platforms from Facebook, Google, and Hubspot, but those certifications quickly become obsolete. There’s no gold-standard credential that clearly separates qualified from unqualified marketers.
If you’re not a marketer yourself, it’s hard to know who to trust. Established agencies can be slow to adapt to technological changes or overstate the breadth of their expertise. Meanwhile, marketers who’ve worked at established companies or hyped startups vary in their contributions to those success stories.
(Read: They might be 20-somethings winging it.)
Hiring marketers can be a real gamble.
Digital marketing is always changing.
The pace of innovation in digital marketing changed with the numeros telefonicos de brasil rise of the internet. Prior to that, we’d relied on the same few marketing channels for nearly a hundred years: radio, TV, outdoor advertising, and direct mail.
Consider this (non-comprehensive) timeline of paid channel launches.
Non-comprehensive timeline of paid channel launches. Sources: FCC, Quartz, Study, Search Engine Land, Mashable, Facebook, Twitter, Axios, and Tech Crunch
More than half of the above channels originated this century, and new channels like Clubhouse and Discord continue to emerge, each with its own unique culture.
Even established marketing channels are constantly changing. In 2021, Facebook has overhauled its advertising platform to comply with Apple's new privacy updates, and Google will update its search algorithm in May. Google recently announced that it will abandon all user-level tracking next year.
— While direct mail is mostly analog, blogs are purely digital