Why Marketers Think You’re An Idiot

As at September 2014, there were an estimated 1 billion websites and 2.5 million blog posts written daily depending on the statistics you use. Content saturation is clearly a problem and there will obviously be a decided amount of crap to wade through before finding a blog with information worth a damn.

What surprises me is the sheer scale of rubbish available to read. Even so-called ‘top’ blogs are smeared with faecal matter masquerading as information and most ‘popular’ blogs are about as interesting as a political speech by David Cameron, Ed Miliband or any of the other leading lights who do a great impersonation of the Roman God Janus with their duplicitous nonsense.

Perhaps you are an avid reader of such blogs and are offended by the notion you’re wasting your time on vanilla content. If you’ve been reading blogs for any duration; especially on content marketing, you’ll come across more or less the same turgid dross time and again.

Hell, I’ve been guilty of the occasional bland post which contained all the personality of a professional football player but no more! Typically, you can expect to see the headlines I outline below though the content will be a tad ‘different’ this time.

3 Tips To Getting Your Company Seen Online

Attracting customers to your website is really important if you want to make sales (you don’t say?) The following tips are generic horseshit I pulled from my ass and have been combined into a neat 300-400 word article because I am patronizing my readership. I will claim to do so for the sake of ‘convenience’ but in reality, I believe you have the attention span of a goldfish, are functionally illiterate and have dumbed down the content accordingly. Happy reading imbecile!

1 – Make Your Homepage Copy Stand Out

In other words ‘make sure the first page your visitors see is really good and filled with nice stuff’. We were going to say you need to provide useful information but in actual fact, good marketing appears to be an antidote for a lack of talent or mediocre products/services (analyse the career of Roy Hodgson for proof).

Basically, you just have to con, sorry ‘convince’, your marks, sorry ‘customers’, that they need your pointless services when they actually don’t. Great homepage copy makes the reader think ‘Wow, I never realised how empty my life was without these fancy shoes I’m only likely to wear twice a year.’ The goal is to drain the wallets of your customers and be sure to sell products with sub-standard durability as you want repeat purchases.

2 – Embrace Social Media

You need to become a superstar of social media because there are hundreds of millions of possible customers on Twitter, Facebook and the other networks. My marketing company will continue to peddle the notion that social media makes millionaires despite a complete inability to accurately measure the metrics associated with supposed ‘social media sales’.

We will also claim it’s a ‘quick and easy’ way to market even though it actually takes up a ton of time, involves constant reputation monitoring and can be rather expensive if you intend on really making money. Obviously, if you are an umbrella maker in Wigan, you need to reach out to customers in Wisconsin, Sao Paulo and Pyongyang.

3 – Content Is King

Even though we have already said virtually the same thing in tip #1, we are desperately padding our flimsy post at this point in order to ensure it resembles a ‘deep and meaningful article’. We champion fresh and unique content but all this actually means is taking a detailed article where the writer has actually performed some damn research and regurgitated it into a much shorter post that is ‘easily digestible’.

Naturally, this is a euphemism for ‘writing short posts because we have zero respect for our thicko readers who think The Sun newspaper is the pinnacle of journalism’. [By the way, The Sun is a nasty rag and a poor excuse for ‘journalism’ and I can’t emphasise this enough.] With great content, you can pretend you give a toss about your target audience when all you really want is their dirty, filthy cash.

The next time you come across a blog post written in the manner outlined above, know that the writer is having a lazy day and realise the complete pointlessness of the post and treat it with the scorn it deserves.

(Mick Baker)rooster via photopin cc
gruntzooki via photopin cc