Digital Marketing Professionals

The Culpability of the Tacticians

Excellent article Sean Blanda. I very much enjoyed the article.

After reading it, I was struck by how the everyday digital marketing professionals, a group to which I belong, contribute to these problems.

In the pursuit of traffic, gaining a link from a reputable “news website” by placing an article on the site, organically or via paid channels, is considered essential to a comprehensive digital marketing strategy.

This pursuit of links from news sites in the B2B context is especially prevalent.

These news websites have value because they have demonstrated to Google that people consistently consume and share their content.

This means they rank well and in turn, receiving a link from their website or social media channel can help confer authority, legitimization and traffic to a site and its owners.

The basic formula for digital marketing professionals involves content of some form + traffic from source + an attempt to convert or monetize said traffic.

In the end, we find ourselves trapped in a circular framework where the bottom line value of each company in the chain can be traced to the attention it garners online.

Thanks for reminding us of the implicit culpability of the digital marketing professionals who strive for access to “legitimate news websites” as part of their digital strategy.

What I think will stay with me the longest is the idea that deceptive fluffy content is easier to monetize than accurate substantive content. We literally have no framework for making great, accurate, useful and transformative content profitable. Holy moly.