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 keep participating 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 self-proclaimed “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 PR0, 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 meta data 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 ok, because blogs aren’t important to us marketing folks.
And 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 will 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.