Tales Of A “Strategic Marketing Expert”

When the emperor has no clothes, you can just make stuff up. SEO is still a haven for unemployed corporate bureaucrats, peddling their wares to the unsuspecting– like a fat person trying to tell you how to lose weight. Let’s look at one recent example– we are not making this up!

Exposing these self-proclaimed “internet marketing experts” is easy– while they waste their time writing senseless reports about how they will drive traffic, you can simply drive traffic. Utilize social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to reach out to millions of users at little expense. Create public profiles, and engage the community. Respond to users’ comments and suggestions to ensure they continue to participate in the conversation. Write blog posts to promote your product– which will increase brand awareness and inbound linking. Not only are these methods of little cost, they are measurable. People fall into two categories: they either talk about doing things, or they roll up their sleeves and actually do something proactive.

One of my clients recently hired a “strategic marketing expert” (not sure what that quite means) with good intentions– to help market and drive traffic to the new site. What did this expert have to offer that my agency didn’t? I decided to take a look at her website to find out.
The site is DR0, with no inbound links and absolutely no unique content. But she did graciously put up a link to our client’s new website, which is a sure way to get some serious link juice.

Her mission statement says, “We create innovative marketing campaigns, products, and promotions from idea to implementation so that worthwhile companies can reach more people, make more money, and do more that matters.“ To me, this says “I don’t know what I’m talking about, so I’ll use buzz words to impress people. And when I say “implementation,” that means I’ll create lists and Google documents to prove my importance. And every time I use a buzz word, please ring a bell so I can feel satisfied with myself.”

She’s such an SEO expert that she somehow forgot to add meta descriptions to her website. I guess she was so busy providing valuable strategies to her clients that she simply forgot or didn’t know how to. After all, it’s really difficult to add proper metadata with CoffeeCup HTML Editor.
She doesn’t have any client references or testimonials on her site. Probably because she’s very humble and doesn’t like to brag about herself.
She’s got one page indexed on Google. My personal blog has almost 400 pages indexed on Google, and has a PR2 after only a couple of months. Again, she’s probably too busy providing “strategic marketing plans” for her clients, leaving her little time to tend to her website.

Her website has no analytics tied in, so I would assume she has never used Google Analytics. But I’m sure she has some secret proprietary method of determining traffic sources.
Now, let’s take a look at her blog. Oh, wait—she doesn’t have a blog. That’s okay because blogs aren’t important to us marketing folks.
To top it all off, she inserted herself above our agency as “CEO of Marketing” on this client’s project. It wasn’t long before we exposed her—we drew up our own plan to drive traffic. We boiled it down to actionable tasks that would show results, something she wasn’t capable of. Now, she can focus her time where it is best suited—writing internal documentation with one hand while stroking her ego with the other.

These people believe what you post on YouTube should be different from what you put on TikTok. Twitter should be text-based, while on Instagram, you need to focus on reels. YouTube content should be long-form, while LinkedIn is for your resume or business tips.

From a consumer’s perspective, that’s true. But we work for our clients to drive sales, not just entertain or inform. When I’m on social media, my goal is to drive sales, not target everyone on LinkedIn or TikTok.

On TikTok, I can target older people or any audience by focusing precisely on who I want to reach and the content I provide. It’s channel-independent. 

  • Goals: Drive leads under $200 or whatever it is.
  • Content: What type of content works independently of the channel? It can be repurposed to fit the format. For example, shortening a video to 30 seconds for TikTok.
  • Targeting: Who exactly are we targeting? Use custom audiences, 1% lookalikes, or lateral targeting like job titles and related products.

With Goals, Content, and Targeting (GCT), you have a strategy. These building blocks don’t mention YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn, or any specific platform.

The platform doesn’t dictate the strategy. What matters are your goals, content, and the target audience (GCT). These three elements make a campaign successful, no matter the platform.

I’ve even had meetings at LinkedIn’s headquarters with their head of global marketing and other folks about how we can do B2C marketing on LinkedIn. You can run video ads and boost posts which might cost a bit more. You do have the ability to better target job titles on LinkedIn, and your email match rate for businesses is higher—80% compared to 20% on Facebook.

Dennis Yu at linkedin 1
Dennis Yu at LinkedIn HQ

Why Channel-Level Players Fail the Importance of a Strategy

You cannot be a social media strategist or an SEO strategist the minute it’s a channel-level thing, it’s tactical. Things change all the time. Google changes its algorithms, TikTok releases new features. You don’t change your strategy all the time. Your goals, content, and targeting stay the same. If they change, then you don’t have a business or a strategy. But you always zero in on that client strategy, then you execute it across the channels. It’s not a hypothetical distinction between strategy and tactics. It’s actually key because most agency people confuse themselves or worse—they just do SEO or they just do YouTube ads. Then, they have zero strategy. They’re just a channel-level tactical player.

So I don’t care about YouTube or TikTok or whatever. It’s whatever works. I run all the pixels, put them all inside a tag manager or a container, and trigger whatever events we’re tracking, whatever that conversion event is, all from the same container. Maybe you can use Shopify Analytics if you’re in e-com or Marketo Hubspot active campaign when you’re lead gen.

I like to track everything centrally and then have Google Analytics as the central source of truth for marketing, not all these other places. I want to tie everything to the pixel and tie it inside GA (Google Analytics), especially now that everyone is forced to use GA4, which is event-driven, not page load-driven.

Dennis Yu
Dennis Yu
Dennis Yu is a former search engine engineer who has spent a billion dollars on Google and Facebook ads for Nike, Quiznos, Ashley Furniture, Red Bull, State Farm, and other organizations that have many locations. He has achieved 25% of his goal of creating a million digital marketing jobs because of his partnership with universities, professional organizations, and agencies. Companies like GoDaddy, Fiverr, onlinejobs.ph, 7 Figure Agency, and Vendasta partner with him to create training and certifications. Dennis created the Dollar a Day Strategy for local service businesses to enhance their existing local reputation and make the phone ring. He's coaching young adult agency owners who serve plumbers, AC technicians, landscapers, roofers, electricians in conjunction with leaders in these industries. Mr. Yu believes that there should be a standard in measuring local marketing efforts, much like doctors and plumbers need to be certified and licensed. His Content Factory training and dashboards are used by thousands of practitioners.