Why I Don’t Think Digital Marketing is an Innovative Field

This is directly at the entire field and no individuals. If Digital Marketing makes you happy, do it forever because you are blessed to…

This is directly at the entire field and no individuals. If Digital Marketing makes you happy, do it forever because you are blessed to find something that makes you happy. With that said, I don’t think it’s a very innovative field. This post is more of a rant, by the way.

I spend a lot of time on Blab.im. If you go on there in between the hours of 9am and 5pm (in your time zone), you will find a several different rooms talking about something related to digital marketing (Content Marketing and Social Media Marketing specifically)

There’s a similar trend with both of them. Let’s break it down.

Content Marketing — Talking about things going on in the world of marketing, educating people with information that will help them, hoping that you gain their trust so they will eventually buy from you.

Social Media Marketing — Talking about how to reach more customers and enchant the world one post at a time. They chat about how to optimize pages, posts, how to engage their audience, and how to find the right audience in the first place.

A marketer might critique those descriptions but I want to keep it basic for now. There’s two trends I see when I hear people chatting about CM and SMM. They are talking about the now, and how to optimize what currently exists. Facebook makes an algorithm change and everyone wants to talk about how to optimize for it. It’s reactive.

Secondly, they can only talk about what the big boys feed them. Meaning, if Zucks decided to stop updating Facebook and leave it the same forever, the marketers would run our of things to talk about. That isn’t a viable example because that isn’t likely but it is viable in explaining why that whole field is far from innovative. Broken down, the reasons are

1. They analyze today versus creating tomorrow (Reactive vs. Proactive)

2. They can only analyze what the creators of tomorrow create

To give them some credit, there are innovative practices that can be done inside of that bubble, but they can’t break out of it. If they do, they are out of a job. Innovation should be limitless so when there are limits on it, like there are in that industry, I don’t consider it to be very innovative.

I’m Mat. I run PubLoft, I am a mover in the Phoenix startup scene, and I have no idea what i’m doing. If you don’t hit ❤ below, I will take it personally.

Want to connect? I’m active on Twitter, Facebook, and starting to experiment with telepathy.