Content MarketingEmail Marketing & AutomationSearch MarketingSocial Media & Influencer Marketing

Stop Calling Marketers Lazy!

20110316 091558This week, I read another post where marketers were called “lazy”. It always seems to be some non-marketing industry pundit that pulls the “lazy” trigger and it’s finally gotten to me. An email delivery guy who never managed a campaign calling his client lazy. A mobile marketing rep talking about their clients not using their application because they’re lazy. A social media guy talking about marketers not monitoring nor responding when mentioned online… lazy.

So… time for one of my rants.

Being a blogger, speaker, or even a so-called “expert” – a subject matter expert – is easy. We get to walk around and point fingers at everyone and tell them what they’re doing wrong. It’s easy work… and work that I truly love. If you have a very good understanding of the industry, you can help a lot of companies without really digging too deep. But it’s always easy to tell folks what they’re doing wrong when you don’t actually have the responsibility to execute and accountability to get the results.

Being an employee is not easy. Being a marketer is even more challenging. While most jobs have simplified themselves over the years, we’ve added ridiculous amounts of channels and mediums to our marketers’ plates. At one time, being a marketer just meant testing an ad or two on television, the radio or in the newspaper.

Not anymore… we’ve got countless mediums in social media alone – never mind traditional and online marketing. Heck, we’ve got EIGHT methods of marketing just on a mobile phone… SMS, MMS, IVR, Email, Content, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Applications and Bluetooth.

At the same time that we’ve exponentially increased the number of mediums, the methods of monitoring and analyzing them, and the means on how to optimize and improve each… as well as getting one medium to feed the other, we’ve been reducing the resources internally that marketers have typically had in the past.

Today, I was on the phone with an international logistics company that has 4 different websites in 4 different countries and a team of 1… himself. He’s expected to continue to optimize each site regionally and grow their inbound marketing – without a budget and without a content management system that is search-engine friendly.

Subject matter experts don’t have meetings, office politics, reviews, budget constraints, technology limitations, resource shortages, layers of management, lack of training resources, and schedule restrictions to obstruct their progress with like a marketer does. The next time you decide to call a marketer lazy, take a few minutes and analyze their environment… could you achieve what they have?

I work with some companies where it requires months of planning just to make a small edit to the theme of a website… months! And it requires countless meetings and layers of uneducated managers that need to evaluate and approve the process. What some marketers are able to pull off is nothing short of a miracle nowadays given the challenges and resources.

Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr is CMO of OpenINSIGHTS and the founder of the Martech Zone. Douglas has helped dozens of successful MarTech startups, has assisted in the due diligence of over $5 bil in Martech acquisitions and investments, and continues to assist companies in implementing and automating their sales and marketing strategies. Douglas is an internationally recognized digital transformation and MarTech expert and speaker. Douglas is also a published author of a Dummie's guide and a business leadership book.

Related Articles

Back to top button
Close

Adblock Detected

Martech Zone is able to provide you this content at no cost because we monetize our site through ad revenue, affiliate links, and sponsorships. We would appreciate if you would remove your ad blocker as you view our site.