– There is a gap in knowledge across agencies working in ecommerce around data, which is becoming more evident with privacy changes.
– Many experts in the field have less than 5 years of experience and rely on certificates provided by vendors, charging high fees for common sense tasks.
– The focus on regurgitated best practices in marketing leads to a lack of meaningful social proof and a disconnect from the customer’s needs and preferences.Focus on creating meaningful experiences for customers instead of relying on regurgitated best practices.In my last few posts, I’ve highlighted the gap in knowledge across agencies working in e-commerce around data. These cracks are showing more and more in light of sweeping privacy changes. This is a ticking time bomb for brands. The majority of your experts have less than 5 years of experience and certificates provided by vendors. They charge you thousands of dollars to do things that are largely common sense and they are copying from whatever courses or resources they found online. There’s nothing new being pushed forward. The best accounts for agencies are fresh accounts – easiest to show improvement. The second best accounts are fresh off another agency’s screw up, which buys them time to figure out what went wrong and time to correct it if possible. Either way, it sounds like a guaranteed 90 days 😉 One does not become a marketing expert by being proficient in a platform. The platform shouldn’t matter. I won’t hit all the bs advice out there, but stop and pause for a second – “Provide social proof via reviews” we’ve all heard this echoed. How the hell are you supposed to provide meaningful social proof if you don’t know why the customer signed up and what matters to them in your offering? Pay attention to that word used – “MEANINGFUL”. The problem is that this modern niche agency model has led to too many people with too narrow of a focus based on regurgitated best practice bs. We’re celebrating the wrong “experts”. The flipside is a lot of people that try to do everything for a company often aren’t good at most of it. True story, I’ve seen some of the work when people try to go outside their core competency, it’s not pretty, nothing makes sense, or things are needlessly complicated just because. Trust me when I say that the smartest and most talented people don’t do best practices, they are aware of what people say are best practices and they work to prove them wrong, then create the best “experiences” for customers instead while staying laser-focused on the bottom line. Look at your inbox right now, the one reserved for subscribing to brands (you marketers know what I mean), and count the number of emails with offers in them or a sale or a discount. It’s far too many because in e-commerce, we have an epidemic of young “talent” that has never run a business and lacks the practical experience of knowing what goes into running a brand end to end. On that note, a special shout 📧🧲 Adam Kitchen still the only person in email that I recommend when people ask because he doesn’t think about the channel he thinks about the business. I’ve interacted with a lot of email people and people ask me for recommendations often as well, so far he’s the only one I can confidently recommend and someone I talk with daily about strategy. That’s saying a lot.If you don’t already follow him go do it and subscribe to his newsletter, what he’s working on is most closely aligned to where the entire email marketing industry headed.#ecommerce #marketing #businesshttps://www.linkedin.com/in/jivanco