Digital Marketers: We Have a Lot to Be Thankful For

With another Thanksgiving holiday upon us, it seems only proper that we digital marketers take a moment to reflect on the fact that we have a lot to be thankful for. After all, whether by fate or design, we find ourselves working in a fast-growing field where our skill sets are currently highly sought after, and are expected to be in even greater demand in coming years.

The attendant notion of a looming digital skills gap in marketing is not my own; I first came across it in an article in The Guardian written by Lorna Walker, senior lecturer at Regent’s University London Business School, who noted the following: “By 2018, the US is predicted to lack around 1.5 million managers and analysts with sufficient technical and digital know-how to make effective decisions, and the picture in the UK is similar. Big data, web analytics, mobile, content marketing and social media are the future of marketing, but they are also the most difficult skills for which to recruit. This presents a challenge for both marketing employers and educators.”

To my ear, this sounds like a recipe for future job security, a prospect for which all of us should be truly thankful. However, for those who objectively recognize their good fortune as a digital marketer but still can’t stand their job, remember, things could always be worse—you could be in print.

Anyway, for all you digital marketers who may be searching for just the right words to share over this year’s turkey dinner benediction, I offer this Thanksgiving prayer.

A Digital Marketer’s Thanksgiving Prayer

We give thanks to

The Internet, which offers a limitless playground for us to ply our various virtual talents (imagine where we’d be without the interwebs? Slinging drinks or penning radio jingles, I suspect).

We give thanks to

HTML, the ubiquitous markup Language that brings our web pages to life. We give thanks for all body elements: every tag, header, and child.

We give thanks to

Ad Retargeting, which allows us to place our marketing messages in front of the right people at the right time. With ad retargeting, we can easily track users who visit our website and then display retargeted ads to them when they visit other sites online. In this way, ad retargeting connects users with our message not just once, but multiple times, increasing conversion rates.

We give thanks to

Near Field Communication (NFC), for advancing the practice of location-based mobile marketing by connecting nearby consumers with retailers and offering a frictionless means of payment at the checkout line. NFC technologies like Bluetooth LE provide new ways to finally bridge the gap between bricks and clicks; for this we are eternally thankful.

Kundschaft, or “customers,” in German (hey, we’re a nation of immigrants, and anyway, many of the English present at the original Thanksgiving were of Anglo-Saxon descent. Besides, “K’s” are hard to find…just go with it). We digital marketers are obsessed with enhancing the customer experience, and with good reason. It is the customers, after all, that make the digital world go around.

We give thanks to

Social Media, for revolutionizing how we engage with our target audience, and for allowing us to form deeper connections with new prospects and existing customers alike.

We give thanks to

GIFs, for animating the Web, and for giving snarky programmers and designers a ready means of creating virtually endless streams of silly cat memes.

We give thanks to

Internet of Things (IOT), a world in which a growing array of devices are transmitting a seemingly unending flow of data onto the Internet. In the rapidly evolving IOT landscape, we digital marketers face the daunting prospect of not only having to create personalized web and social interactions for each segment of our target audience, but also for each of our audience’s bevy of smart devices. Many thanks for that…

We give thanks to

Vine, for forcing us to rethink how we engage with our audience, and for opening up “ephemeral marketing” as a legitimate line-item on marketing budgets.

We give thanks to

Instagram, for providing a social medium on which to tell stories through videos and pictures. A picture, after all, is worth a thousand words…which makes things a whole lot easier for us content writers.

We give thanks to

Newsjacking, for giving us a reason to hijack popular news stories and use them as fodder for real-time marketing initiatives.

We give thanks to

Google; we offer our final benediction to the Internet’s de facto digital majordomo, whose market-dominating search engine drives much of our SEO and content marketing efforts (whether or not we like to admit it).

A Happy Thanksgiving to all! #GobbleGobble