If 63% of marketers are planning on a big job change, where are they going?

All marketers have left the building

If you’ve been watching the employment reports lately, you would probably be aware of a few things:

• Employers are short-staff across the board with some sectors more affected than others

• Employees are demanding more WFH options with some resistance from employers

• Everyone seems to be quitting their jobs

And if you’re still not sure how that is impacting marketers, the 2021 Rosie Report tells a tale of a new world order. The report includes a survey of 423 US-based marketers, which found a whopping 63% of marketers planning a big job change this year.

I asked We Are Rosie for a breakdown of the demographics of their survey and this is what they had to say.

 — @RosieReport

It’s important to recognize the size of the population before we can assign any confidence in survey results. Please excuse my pedantry, but if the data needs qualification, we should do that early on. According the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are 270,200 Marketing Managers, as of May 2020. Estimates of all marketing related jobs range from 620k to 824k, depending on who you ask and what categories they group together.

With that in mind, a more optimal sample size would be north of 2000 respondents. However, we can still work with what we have as long as increase the error margin to 5%.

So now that we know we can live with an error margin of 5%, where are all the marketers leaving to? That’s higher than the global trend of 41%.

1 in 3 Independent marketers are never going back to Full-Time Employment

This is very significant, because it shows that marketers did like Katy Perry and liked it. The newfound independence of flexible working schedules and the ability to choose the projects they want to work on have never been more attractive, primarily because employers are now more willing to hire remotely. The trend is to work on projects without the long-term commitment.

“Every full-time job I’ve had started out as a freelance gig — and every time I regret signing on as a ‘real employee’.” — Creative Director

This quote from the report aptly sums up the sentiment. Marketers have commitment issues. They’re just not into you. They’re not ready to settle down just yet. They want to explore and see other people.

It’s not surprising then that we would find another 27% of those surveyed not concerned with upward mobility. It’s almost as if marketers have decided to go on backpacking through Europe on a self discovery journey.

Allow me to put this in a way that employers can understand better.

Marketing careers suck

It’s that simple. If people aren’t bothered with it and are looking for project-based work, it is a clear indicator that whatever career paths exist today are nowhere near as attractive as they need to be.

It’s not about the money though. It is obvious that marketers are making a decent living skipping FTE. I suspect this has more to do with working conditions than financial compensation.

WFH struggles: what a difference a year can make

Looking at the chart above, we can conclude that there are some clear benefits from Working From Home. As people become more competent in their use of technology, difficulties decrease. As more people join the WFH movement, loneliness decreases as they have more people to relate to. However, the problem with time management rears its ugly head once again.

Time management is an especially serious problem, as Americans put in more working hours than most industrial nations. According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the US is the 10th most overworked country (2018). If we were to to couple this with WFH and the inability to unplug from work, we have a recipe for mass burnouts.

Measuring productivity changes with WFH

I’m a huge fan of measuring productivity and have done so extensively in the past. But productivity is not always measurable or quantifiable. A 9-month long study of 16,000 call center workers [PDF] reports an increase of 13% in productivity. Call center work is a lot easier to measure. A marketing manager’s productivity has a lot more moving parts, making it tricky.

The push-pull between companies and employees continues with employees quitting over Apple’s hybrid work policy, while Ford expanded their hybrid policy, and Facebook doubled-down making WFH policies permanent.

The debate continues with proponents declaring that productivity has either increased or remained the same. Some people even mock managers for wanting to “monitor” them at work by visually confirming they’re working. This oversimplification makes it difficult to address the real challenges brought by WFH.

For example, building meaningful connections that would facilitate professional growth is more difficult for entry level workers. Creativity-based work isn’t about the number of hours you spend, but is sparked by casual mindless conversations.

This is not to say that we cannot find WFH alternatives to achieve comparable results. It is, however, a very important factor to consider as we examine ways to adapt.

Creating clear actionable goals for marketers that we can hold them accountable to would be more productive than worrying about the number of hours they are clocking on the job.

Vaccination messaging and censorship

COVID-19 vaccination can be a divisive issue and has become needlessly politicized, due to many factors internal and external.

The US Surgeon General Jerome Adams recently posted a series of tweets admitting that his advice in the early days of the pandemic against masks was the wrong call. He appears to apologize for everything, but his actual fault.

 — @JeromeAdamsMD

In his tweets he claims that what he and Dr. Fauci said was based on the “science and conditions at the time”. In a now-deleted tweet from Feb 29, 2020 the Surgeon General clearly and in plain English said that masks are NOT effective.

I remember watching Dr. Fauci on TV explaining why masks aren’t effective for the general public. He explained how they are notoriously difficult to keep on properly and that the untrained public’s constant adjustment of the mask would lead to an increase risk of infection. Can you believe that? I will never forget this because I’ve had a lot of long arguments about this where I defended Fauci’s position and now feel stupid for it. Examples of how masks were effective in Asia during the SARS outbreaks did not dissuade me.

The science did not change, despite the lies Dr Jerome Adams continues to spew. Something far more sinister has happened. People of science broke the public’s trust. The unwritten contract we had was simple: you give us the unfiltered facts as you know them.

Allow me to demonstrate. Imagine visiting your physician for a medical checkup, and she tells you that you have lung cancer knowing you’re a smoker. You don’t have lung cancer, but she lied to you so you can be incentivized to quit smoking. If you condone that type of behavior from your healthcare provider, then you will find Dr Fauci and company’s action acceptable. If not, then you would find it absolutely reprehensible.

Scientists are not in the business of lying to the public for the greater good or for any reason for that matter. This has always been the domain of politicians. So is it any wonder that skepticism in our institutions continues to dominate?

Instead of addressing the erosion of trust in the CDC and other instrumental institutes, politicians are quick to blame social media platforms for disseminating misinformation. In a stunning sound-bite, President Biden declared that “they’re killing people”.

 — @thehill

Facebook was quick to respond with data showing that 85% of Facebook users in the US have been vaccinated or plan to. Of course that is not going to stop politicians from using FB as a punching bag. But there is more danger than FB’s feelings.

New language is emerging to label COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy as inciteful. The vaccine that the FDA has only issued Emergency Use Authorization because they still have questions. A legitimate cautious approach that you would expect from a science-based organization.

 — @davidfrum

Most disturbing is the censorship coordination between the White House and social media platforms, which allow the government to effectively skirt the first amendment by outsourcing it to private companies.

“..current constitutional doctrine doesn’t clearly lay out how much government coercion of a private actor’s speech decisions it would take to constitute a First Amendment violation.” — Noah Feldman, opined.

Expect more of social media platforms cracking down on content that they deem inappropriate. It is definitely a development that we will be watching very closely.

In an interview with Marketing Brew, Hill House and Communité both came out swinging at metrics measuring influencer marketing campaigns. Surprise: creatives don’t want to be held accountable for their work.

Gems like, “CPM is wack” from Danielle McGrory, founder of Communité or amazing oversimplifications by Hill House Home’s CEO Neil Diamond such as, “followers don’t matter.”

It’s not new to hear creatives look down on measurement and metrics as irrelevant. They see their work as art and therefor impossible to quantify. Then of course there is this curious selection criteria:

One of Diamond’s favorite influencers of the 13 selected for [..], not only because she is Hill House’s first trans influencer, but also because…

Wow. I understand the desire to pander to the trans community because of their relatively outsized voices, but can we go back to choosing creators for their creativity alone? I sincerely don’t understand what someone’s gender identity has to do with their work. What I do know is that when a marketing agency says they’re looking for “marketing appeal”, they are really just saying “trending subculture.”

I don’t know what Neil is talking about, but no one looks at “follower count” as the deciding metric to choose an influencer. It’s particularly disingenuous coming from someone in the industry, because he surely knows better.

When we look at influencers, we look at their reach including engagement levels. Micro-influencers are particularly interesting because of the high engagement levels and trust levels with their followers.

We also know that it is more effective to have 10x microinfluencers with the same level of follower count than 1 influencer with 10x the follower count. This is, simply because of engagement.

So, Neil saying follower counts don’t matter is of course true, but also bullshit because no one is making that argument anyway.

Those guys keep talking about content creators and calling them influencers because it’s convenient. Hill House are not hiring influencers, they are hiring content creators to get really cheap freelance work with some minimal distribution.

This is admittedly a brilliant strategy that was put in focus due to the pandemic, but will likely continue to grow. Why? Cause people crave authenticity and you have a much better chance to uncovering authentic amazing talent with a wider net.

Not all content creators are influencers and not all influencers are content creators. It’s really not that complicated a concept. You can be an influencer and not necessarily create any meaningful content.

To put it in an easier way to digest, content creators are focused on their content whereas influencers are focused on engagement. Every now and then you come across someone who is both, and those are stars in their own right.

What’s Wrong with Metrics?

One word: vanity. Clients can sometimes insist on certain metrics that don’t make sense outside of vanity. This can be frustrating to agencies who find it would penalize them unfairly. It doesn’t always have to be this way though. We could, *gasp* actually measure things that affect the bottom line. I mean, isn’t that why we’re doing all this?

I would be very wary of any agency that completely rejects accountability by claiming they are “wack”. Any successes such an agency may have would be nothing more than a fluke. The “gut” instincts of one executive that is not possible to scale nor replicate. Hill House Home and their likes are causing more harm to the industry than they realize.

By rejecting accountability without offering an alternative, they are a breed of agencies that I find troubling.

If you’ve ever been tempted to purchase mailing lists for your business, I want to tell you to take heed from my experience. I learn from doing and if you are not going to take my word for it, do it on a limited scale to find out for yourself.

Because that’s exactly what I did.

Spam and Porn, Same Difference

I’ve never come across someone who openly admits to spamming. I’ve also seen way too many spamming practices by big and small companies alike. Each have their own way of doing it. Some are brazen, others get technical about it where the lines get blurred. Much like porn, everyone does it but we’re all appalled.

Ok fine, it’s an exaggerated analogy, but the point is the same. It’s far more common than people would admit to. It’s kind of “dirty”. But I have to get started and I have to look at all the possible options. Some things, I recognize, are temporary measures to get the ball rolling.

Purchased lists present themselves as the perfect way to get started while you build a real list. So, I found a list of 2500 emails of users of competitors for $600. The list appears to be legitimate.

Sanitation: Safety First

If you plan to work within the main existing ecosystem of internet services, then you will have to maintain a minimum level of indiscretions. For example, mail service providers will put a pause on your account if a lot of emails fail to be delivered. It will raise questions about the origins of that list.

An easy and quick way to weed out the bad emails, older emails, deleted email accounts and the likes is to use a an email verification service, like kickbox. You upload your list and they give you back your list in groups, based on risk.

Generally speaking, “Risky” is an acceptable level to use, but anything above that is untouchable.

Now that you have a clean list, it’s time to figure out how to send out emails to them. Don’t use your primary marketing email provider. When dealing with the unknown, you don’t want to ruin your relationship with your current provider.

It’s not just your mail provider. You don’t want your domain to be blacklisted because of being flagged by recipients. Find a similar-sounding domain and use it. It doesn’t matter what. Think of it as a domain you’d use if you had a branded URL shortener.

Running the Campaign

Read this from the bottom up. You will notice that the number of recipients keeps dropping, this is a result of bounced emails and unsubscriptions. Also, notice how the open rate also continues to drop, despite removing all the bounced emails and the drop in unsubscribes.

Ignore the clicked stats as they don’t reflect page loads and are mixed with server side queries. What is notable is that generally speaking, it’s a pretty good list for a purchased list. Clearly, recipients find it relevant.

But then what? What does it translate to? 2. It translated to 2 registered accounts. So, let’s do the math real quick. It cost $300 per user, all while acting like a total douche spamming people.

Thins You Can Do With Your Useless Purchased List

So now that we have demonstrated what a clean list of your target audience looks like; and what a spectacular failure it is, here are some ideas of what to do with it:

• One last ditch to opt-in: Email the list asking them to opt-in if they wanted to continue to receive emails. If they don’t, it’s over.

• Test bed for email subjects/copy/etc.: Keep the list around and periodically use it to test open rate, click rates and other metrics.

• Purge it: Just delete the list.

Today, I am proud to be fully GDPR-compliant, because it makes sense. I think that there are people who want to hear from you, and they will let you know. But, if you want to let people know about you, spamming them is not going to get you the results you’ve hoped for.

Much like diet pills and weight loss, the simple truth is that there are no shortcuts. Your list has to grow from people who voluntarily want to give you their contacts. Your time is better spent figuring out how to do that, than trying to get a purchased list to produce any meaningful returns.

Say it with me: purchased lists suck ass. Don’t do it.

A little background, I’m a techie by training and so I have a pretty reasonable understanding of the technical side of things. In short, Search Engine Optimization is the process by which you optimize a web page for a search engine. Pretty simple stuff. You format it properly and make sure the machine that’s about to crawl your site can read it and figure out what’s what. So let the geeks handle it.

Bring the geeks!

The geeks come in and clickity clack.. you got yourself a website with schemas that google likes, meta descriptions for everything, and headings are all labeled. You’re golden. Except, the search engines (and let’s be honest, we only care about google) don’t notice. It crawls and indexes your site, but so what?

They tell you, oh.. you gotta blog. If you blog, google will notice that you’ve been a good boy and rank you higher. Yeah, from #423948234 to #423948230. You blog and no one comes. No one cares.

What’s the point of fancy formatting and hiring geeks if nothing happens? And that’s an actually very good reason to be frustrated. The issue here is that Google cares about how popular you are and so the more popular sites linking back to you, the higher it ranks you. Backlinks are the real stuff of SEO and everything else is just housecleaning.

It’s also an area where many make mistakes, because up to this point, I haven’t said anything that most CEO’s don’t already know one way or another. The issue is, when a very high ranking site links back to you with a branded link (your company’s name links to your website), it doesn’t really do much for you. It improves your domain authority, but it doesn’t help getting you traffic from people who don’t already know they’re looking for you.

Just because you’re blogging about eye tracking technology doesn’t mean that google will start directing traffic to you. Only when people link to your pages using phrases with “eye tracking” (or a similarly relevant phrase) in it will you start seeing that kind of traffic. And for that to happen, people have to already be talking about you, a lot. Organically.

Or not.

Which hat fits me best?

Aaah.. so what’s going on here? Hiring an ‘SEO guy’ is not going to solve this problem, neither is yelling at your IT team. There are 3 ways you can approach this:

1) Black hat: You will find those on freelancer marketplaces, where one advertises linking to you from DA50+ sites or something like that. DA here stands for Domain Authority, and the number following is the level of authority a domain has. Higher is better. Problem with black hats is that they get flagged as spammy, which hurts your own domain’s authority. It may have some temporary good boosts, but ultimately, the algorithm figures it out and shuts you down. What you often find are domains with pages hidden deep under that no one clicks on, with links to you and every other sucker paying for the service. Just don’t do it.

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2) White hat: This is where people in the legal profession likes to live. Technically legal, but ethically debatable practices are fun to debate in college but they are real life. Here, you pay someone to go out and have other legitimate sites create very organic looking backlinks. For example, a blog post about eye tracking technology from a major privacy blog casually linking back to one of your pages as they talk about “eye tracking service”. This is expensive, but highly effective.

3) Do the work: There is no substitute to doing the work and engaging with your customers, creating a community that will compound your efforts. But getting there takes a lot of work and if you’re in a hurry, there are “hats” to approach.

Now that you have backlinks and you start seeing traffic, it’s very bouncy. That is, a visitor clicks on a backlink, sees your page and decides this is not what they’re looking for and leaves. Here’s the thing, you can’t bring people over and then not know what to say to them. If your site has nothing to engage with, visitors will bounce.

Creating content that answers visitors questions is a process of trial and error. It also takes us full circle to what it means to have an SEO strategy. It has so little to do with the technical structure of website, doesn it? It’s a lot of work that takes 6 months to even start seeing movement, but it is a compounding effort.

Everyone loves compounding, but you gotta get started.