I was doing some competitor research yesterday and was looking at a bunch of digital marketing agencies. There are some good ones, but a lot made me gag. Powerful marketing tools to drive customers to your website! Results-driven methods! Get you on the top of Google! The sites just feel like they’re yelling empty promises at me, which stresses me out.
This kind of stuff reminds me why I hate traditional digital marketing. Because it’s so removed from how humans actually want to interact.
In a post this week, Seth Godin contrasted online marketing with marketing online. Online marketing is about SEO, tricks, and code, where “Marketing online, on the other hand, is what happens when the work to serve our audience arrives in an electronic form.”
Most people get too stuffy and robotic when they try to promote themselves online, because that’s what they see everybody else doing. Most people do it wrong! Do what works in real life! Say things on your website that you’d actually say to potential customers in real life.
And if you do that, suddenly marketing online is just a matter of translating what you’re already good at into a different medium.
