Last week, MediaPost had an interesting piece on how the “It’s not my job” mentality of many agency search specialists is causing wide-ranging client dissatisfaction. They backed up their assertion with some fairly meaty survey data, which helped drive home the point with empirical evidence from the client pool.
I would argue that both in-house and agency specialists could benefit by doing away with this rather prevalent “It’s not my job” mentality. I would also argue that this overarching theme applies to virtually all online marketing disciplines (email marketing, display, SEO, web dev, etc…) and not just paid search.
All too often, I come across examples of individuals who are entrenched in their siloed ways, refusing to become proficient at disciplines outside the scope of their typical deliverable set. This is especially true of specialists that work for larger, enterprise-level companies.
The problem with this approach is that it prevents an individual from understanding the full context of what it means to market a product or service online, thereby rendering the individual useless in terms of overarching strategy for the client/employer. That’s a scary reality, because in my experience, the only way for an interactive agency to truly grow an account and become its agency of record across multiple channels is by providing strategic recommendations that extend out across multiple disciplines and metrics.
And that brings me to my next point, and I’ll keep it short and sweet:
Regardless of your particular discipline, make sure you’re an expert when it comes to analytics!
There’s nothing worse than supposed “specialist” who can’t speak the language of analytics beyond the silo-specific reporting for their particular marketing channel (or doesn’t even know how to log in to their client’s analytics account). Learn how to use Omniture, Google Analytics, etc… and then learn how to analyze your channel, other channels, and even direct referral and referring site data (and if you don’t know what those last two phrases mean, ask around ASAP).
Otherwise, you risk becoming obsolete as the online marketing consumers refine their approaches to evaluating and selecting online marketing service providers.
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