5 Things That Have Always Worked For Digital Marketers, Until Now

This is the 10^th and the last blog of the course, thought I’d end it on an interesting article I read on Entrepreneur. The author listed 5 things that have always worked for digital marketers, but no longer work.

5. Twitter – the author claims Twitter might be more the problem than the medium itself. Boring tweets, low engagement with followers and over-selling (or only selling) products can all lead to poor Twitter returns.

I have always questioned the value Twitter adds, so I have to agree with the author on this.

4. SEO Technical Tricks – The author claims that SEO tricks such as adding keywords, links and content with no images, no longer work after Google updated their algorithm as part of Panda and Penguin updates.

Given that we spent 2 class sessions on SEO, and I took lot of notes on this topic during the class J, I am not willing to accept this without further research and testing to validate if this is true. Also curious to know what the professor thinks about this?

3. Coupon Sites – the author claims that coupon sites no longer work; he used Groupon as an example and claims that Groupon sales do not incentivize new customers and can lead to profitability issues for the business in the long run.

I think the author is correct about Groupon, at least when it comes to small and medium businesses. I recently interviewed over 50 retailers and consumers as part of customer discovery for a project and almost all small business owners said they do not like to promote on Groupon because the more Groupons they sell the more money they lose.  Consumers don’t like to use Groupon because of the restrictions and the bad experience they had when trying to use the coupons.

Having said that, I don’t agree that all coupons don’t work anymore and I think this issue is Groupon specific.

2. Fake Instagram followers – the author claims that digital marketing companies were taken for a ride by a personality who they believe has a niche following that they can capitalize on, but in fact were fake accounts. A couple of years ago, Instagram cleaned house and did a mass purge of all their fake accounts.

Ok, I have to admit – I did not know that there were massive numbers of fake accounts on Instagram; but it doesn’t sound impossible. It is certainly possible, so I am going to just accept the author’s view on this. Also, such a cleanup would only benefit digital marketers.

1. Batch and blast email campaigns – the author claims that blast email campaigns and boilerplate templates no longer work, especially with millennials.

We spent a class session on email in which we learnt that email is still the preferred method of digital marketing and that is where small and medium businesses are spending the most. I also think we talked about using boilerplate templates. I am not a millennial (as much as I wish I were), but based on my own experience, I think email marketing still works. I delete a lot of marketing emails, but I do look at emails from certain brands and companies.

Also, I think the author is missing the point on email templates – the templates do not have to be static, they can be dynamic and be customized for the target user.

We are at the end of the course and while I cannot claim that I have become a digital marketer, but based on the knowledge I gained in the course, I can say with confidence that I know a lot more now than I did before.