“What do you do for work?” he asked aggressively.

I started to respond. “I do digital marketi…”

“WRONG. That’s wrong,” he interrupted patronisingly.

My interest in speaking to this fellow agency owner evaporated immediately.I’d known him all of five minutes.

Wonderful, I thought. I’m about to get an earful of semantics.

“Do you want to know how I answer that question?” he asked.

I suspected I was going to hear the answer regardless of whether I said yes or no.

“I move money from the customer’s bank account to the client’s bank account.”

Right. Great. Been drinking too much of the LinkedIn “Thought-Leader” juice, have we?

The analogy was made more impactful when he started sliding his phone and wallet around the table to represent various bank accounts. Just in case his superior level of thinking had been lost on me.

I asked what he did that enabled him to transfer such enormous amounts of wealth as we both sat drinking a coffee someone else had paid for.

“I use tools such as Google Ads, Meta, SEO, Email and some other things.”

Well, paint me green and call me a pickle. I never would have guessed.

If only there was some collective word or phrase that described using those tools to convince customers to spend their money online.

Nobody Wants To Know

I understand that Digital Marketing isn’t the most interesting industry in the world. Maybe trying to think of a more enticing way to describe our work would be beneficial.

When I moved house, I met my new neighbour for the first time. As I told him I worked in digital marketing, I could feel he had no interest in hearing any more.

Even people that work in digital marketing show no real interest in talking to each other about digital marketing until they are ten drinks deep on a Friday night.

But I’ve never dedicated any time to thinking “What’s the most obnoxious way possible I could describe my job?” in a vain attempt to make my work sound more interesting.

I certainly couldn’t have thought of something quite as arrogant as “I transfer money…”

Things Have Changed Since The 60s

When people think of advertising, they think Don Draper in Madmen. Bold suits, three-martini lunches, flashy cars and Lucky Strike’s “toasted” cigarettes.

They don’t think Nathaniel the Meta Ads Specialist who works at Slorp Digital.

The former was a multi-award winning show that ran for six seasons. The latter is a 6-month stint at an unheard-of agency before Nathaniel moves to Flange Digital and starts a fresh life as a Meta Ads Growth Engineer. 

One was glitz, glamour, scandal and intrigue. The other is soy lattes, juice cleanses, ping pong tables, and confusing buzzwords.

But the problem is that digital marketing is just too complex for people outside the industry to understand how interesting it can really be.

Do You Find Puzzles Interesting?

We have PPC, Social Ads, SEO, email marketing, organic social, branding, CRM, content, programmatic, automation and every other flavour-of-the-month tactic for which nobody asked.

It’s saturation. People can’t go much more than five minutes without seeing or hearing an ad somewhere. And those ads are so painfully dross that they simply fade into noise.

So digital marketing becomes a puzzle of figuring out how all the pieces fit together in a way that matters.

We need Google Ads to achieve that. But we can’t achieve that without first driving this, and we’ll need Meta for that. But how do we achieve long-term objectives? SEO should take care of that, but do we then have enough budget left over for TikTok? Our current audience doesn’t use TikTok, but in a few years, that TikTok audience will be our current audience, so what do we do there? 

That’s just talking about the platforms.

When we get the more fun stuff: the creative.

How do we say the same thing differently? How can we surprise people and get them to take notice? Our ideas are great but the client will hate them. How do we present those ideas in such a way that the client understands why we need them? How long should our video be, and how can we say everything we need to say in six seconds? 

Every single part of digital marketing is a variable; a balancing act where every part is actively pulling you in a different direction and nothing is consistent.

Then there are the numbers.

The picture of marketing psychology painted by analysis is truly mesmerizing to a certain kind of person.

The sheer volume of data and information you get about how people behave online is mind-boggling. The surprising trends when you see that people are more likely to convert if they use iOS than Android, but then you dig deeper and see that iOS only appears on iPhones whereas Android appears on a range of devices with smaller adoption, so you need to look into device brand and model engagement as well. Do you optimise for Android or iOS? Or iPhone & Samsung? Or Safari or Chrome? Or all of it?

And it’s your job to figure out what that means for the campaign.

Yes, it’s overwhelming. Yes, it’s exhausting.

But it’s never dull.

Apart from a campaign I worked on to sell seeds to the agriculture industry. That was, admittedly, quite dull.

And it’s certainly never the same twice.

But All That Costs Money, Right?

Well, yes. And quite a lot too.

But then you get to the other side of the puzzle: businesses that need to maximise their results with very few resources.

Every dollar matters and you don’t have the luxury of split testing. You’ve got to take leaps of faith and double-down on your strategy.

So how do you do that? Google Ads or Meta Ads? Maybe SEO? Do we need business now or do we have a few months to build up to it? 

And when those businesses say “Thank you”, it’s the best feeling in the world. Knowing you made a positive impact on that business. Knowing you’ve done something they didn’t think was possible for their budget.

Nothing beats it.

All That Sounds Boring

And I suppose, to many, it is. That sounds like hard work, and spreadsheets are dull.

You have to have a thick skin as you’re going to get questioned. A lot.

As soon as money is transferred from the client’s bank accounts to yours, the client inexplicably becomes an expert in digital marketing and everything is up for debate.

It’s long hours of staring at data going “where’s the golden nugget?” before more pessimistically asking if there even is one.

You follow up with “Am I the problem here?” more times than you care to think.

It’s round-the-clock sales. Selling your service. Selling your work. Selling the results. Selling yourself. There’s no time to sit back and relax because once one campaign ends, the other one begins and you do it all over again.

The digital marketing never ends. You can never finish the digital marketing.

Throw in every second person telling you that you’re going to be replaced by AI soon, and to many, working in digital marketing starts to sound awful.

It’s All Worthwhile

But there’s nothing quite like the feeling when you look at your work and go “That’s good!” 

You’ve got a killer headline and creative that stands out. You’ve taken a different approach than anyone was expecting but it’s come together and you’re certain it works.

The excitement is almost matched by the sheer disappointment when the client craps all over it, but that’s just part of the process.

And that’s what I love about digital marketing.

Sorry, transferring money from customers’ bank accounts to clients’ bank accounts. 

Doing the best you can with what you have.

Nothing is ever the same, nothing is ever easy, and whether you’re creative, analytical, empathetic, or a strong decision-maker, there’s something that everyone finds interesting.

And maybe categorising everything above as just Digital Marketing does undersell it. Perhaps we could change our industry name to something a little more glamorous, like Wealth Transfer Specialists. 

But the way I see it, digital marketing is the naff-looking pub in the city centre. Everyone knows it’s there, and it has a reputation for being a bit shit.

But no one you know has ever been inside.

So you go in one day and realise it’s a great place to be. The staff are welcoming. There’s a great range of beers, wines, spirits, and food. The seats are comfy, the prices are reasonable, and the music is just right.

But no matter how hard you try, you can’t convince anyone else that it’s worth a visit.

If only there was some way of letting the world know…

Well, I happen to know someone who specialises in transferring money from customers’ bank accounts to clients’ bank accounts. Perhaps we should ask him for help.