3 unpopular marketing opinions from the team!

Picture the scene, it’s a rainy Tuesday, I’ve ran out of snacks already, I’m working from home, there’s nothing in the diary, so in order to stir up some drama and heated conversation I asked in the The Digital Maze x Boom x Frogspark slack channel, what’s your unpopular marketing opinion?

Well, it turns out we’re an opinionated bunch and I had to narrow the opinions down to 3, and also cut out some of the most controversial marketing opinions that would get us cancelled in the marketing world. So, without further ado, here’s 3 controversial marketing opinions from the The Digital Maze teams.

“It doesn’t matter if you like your website. It matters that your customer does.”

As a creative agency, we do sometimes have to tell customers things that they don’t want to hear. This is often one of them, but it’s really important to bear in mind that we aren’t building your website for you, we’re building it for your customer. You might like the fancy navigation, the bright colours and showing everything on one page, but does your ideal customer? If not, then it’s not going to be something you need on your website.

“Budget doesn’t guarantee success, good strategy does.”

This might be a strange one to some, but throwing money at a campaign with no strategy behind it won’t make it a successful campaign! It’s much better to have a smaller budget with a solid strategy behind it.

“Content isn’t just there to serve SEO”

This was promptly followed by: “copywriters are the real MVPs of SEO” and as a former copywriter, I’m inclined to agree.

We spoke to Rebekah Conway, Content Strategist at The Digital Maze to ask her to expand further:

“When you look at content as purely an SEO marketing tool you’re really limiting its power. Sure, content is an optimisation tactic that can be used to achieve SEO goals, but it’s also a way to build relationships with potential and loyal customers, help solve their problems, answer their questions, or just ‘be friends’ with them. Because these things are difficult to quantify, I think people sometimes have the habit of falling back on what they can prove – increased rankings for example.

I think people seeing it as just an SEO tactic can be quite damaging because SEO can be made up of small, quick fixes. As in, [5] things are involved in page speed updates etc, but those 5 things can be relatively quick to sort out (I appreciate there are always anomalies) but content is taking longer and longer to get right – and that puts limitations on it because it’s seen as something that takes drastically longer than other SEO strategies and so isn’t invested in as highly.

Content also comes in many different formats – written, spoken, video etc and should change depending on whether you’re communicating on-site, via social or paid channels, which doesn’t always fall within the SEO remit.”

Which leads us on to our bonus 4th opinion:

“Comic sans is ok.”

We can’t justify this one, we’re as speechless as you are. Sorry Pete.