The web
is drowning in a sea of ill-informed advice on content marketing. Countless websites
are updated every day with enumerated hints, tips and pointers on how digital
marketers are incomplete until they master a plethora of other professional
disciplines.
The guff these self-appointed experts expound is profoundly disrespectful to other professions – and their own.
Digital marketing requires a substantial skill base not least of which is marketing minus the digital bit. Strategy, research, campaign planning, managing statistics and understanding consumer behaviour are just some of the must-have talents for the modern marketer. On top of this, they need to use a growing and ever-evolving number of ICT tools, including social media platforms.
A load of bloggers
But according to the content marketing spivs, that’s only the half of it. A digital marketer can easily match the skill of the camera operator, the video editor, the graphic designer, the script writer, the journalist, the copywriter, the copy editor, the sound recordist, the broadcaster and the producer. The tech is easy peasy and experience and sensibility counts for nothing. A load of bloggers say it, so it must be true.
It’s remarkable, therefore, that these self-appointed gurus rarely display basic professional writing standards such as economy of style, the inverted pyramid of information and factual accuracy. And they almost always fail to follow the popularly understood truism that consumers are pressed for time, have shorter attention spans and therefore value brevity.
So in the true spirit of online writing, here are four words that apply to their output with examples, naturally. (Sorry this post is so long but at least I've used the mandatory chummy style here with extra chumminess indicated by italics and parenthesis).
Ordure
The guff these self-appointed experts expound is profoundly disrespectful to other professions – and their own.
Digital marketing requires a substantial skill base not least of which is marketing minus the digital bit. Strategy, research, campaign planning, managing statistics and understanding consumer behaviour are just some of the must-have talents for the modern marketer. On top of this, they need to use a growing and ever-evolving number of ICT tools, including social media platforms.
A load of bloggers
But according to the content marketing spivs, that’s only the half of it. A digital marketer can easily match the skill of the camera operator, the video editor, the graphic designer, the script writer, the journalist, the copywriter, the copy editor, the sound recordist, the broadcaster and the producer. The tech is easy peasy and experience and sensibility counts for nothing. A load of bloggers say it, so it must be true.
It’s remarkable, therefore, that these self-appointed gurus rarely display basic professional writing standards such as economy of style, the inverted pyramid of information and factual accuracy. And they almost always fail to follow the popularly understood truism that consumers are pressed for time, have shorter attention spans and therefore value brevity.
So in the true spirit of online writing, here are four words that apply to their output with examples, naturally. (Sorry this post is so long but at least I've used the mandatory chummy style here with extra chumminess indicated by italics and parenthesis).
Ordure
So that’s what the big writing in the newspaper is for. If you need more insight click this coloured text.
And from the same source comes...
Bunkum
The phrase, 'healer, heal thyself' springs to mind.
Hokum
The
following is Hubspot’s self-created example of “entertaining” content. More
like professional harakiri.
No doubt you would like to see the slideshow for yourself, purely for research purposes, of course. Well I've sprinkled another bit of content marketer's magic on this coloured type.
Crapola
And finally, if you can suffer it, here’s 1,888 words under the headline,“Reality Check: How to Tell if Your Marketing Content Is Actually Valuable”. This article contains the following bon mots:
And does the writer follow his
own advice? Read more, if you dare.
Perhaps the most amazing thing is that all this output aims to attract custom. Geek-freemarketing.com and Hubspot.com have been deleted from my email subscriptions. Good job with content marketing, folks.
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