By cdelprincipe@hubspot.com (Curt del Principe)

Let’s take a moment to commiserate, marketers.

Google is sending the whole planet to Reddit; your favorite social platforms are getting bought, banned, or abandoned; and your carefully crafted email just got pushed to a new category at the back of the inbox. Oh, and have you heard of this little thing called AI that no one is talking about?

But today’s master is no stranger to seismic changes in media. He’s been doing this since before the dot-com bubble. And he’s got a message you need to hear to survive this one: Stop peeing in the pool.

Brian Morrissey

Founder, The Rebooting; Former Editor-in-Chief, Digiday

• Claim to fame: Brian’s been covering digital media and marketing long enough to remember when Pets.com was a thing.

Lesson 1: Stop peeing in the pool.

When every digital marketing channel is in a state of change, all of the usual playbooks are out the window — but Brian Morrissey sees this as more of a correction than a catastrophe.

“Every business got used to distribution being a commodity that you could just purchase off the shelf,” he says. For years, you could pay for a nearly guaranteed audience on almost any channel. “But this is contrary to how marketing in general has worked… forever.”

Morrissey points out that the rise of performance marketing led (perhaps inevitably) to an era of growth hacks. A generation of marketers trying to find the one weird trick to go viral.

“Show me the incentives, I’ll show you the outcome. And the incentives have been about quantity, not quality.”

The result is that “there’s been a ton of mid-level to low-level content pumped out. And with AI, that’s going to become untenable. You can scale low-level content to infinity. It’s peeing in the pool. Everyone has to get out.”

To Morrissey, that means the Growth Hack Era is coming to a close, and he isn’t mourning.

“True marketing is not just looking for distribution seams before they close,” he says. “This shift is going to put an emphasis on having a truly great product, and it’s going to rely much more on word of mouth. You’re going to need to earn distribution.”

In other words, we’re back to the basics. Marketing 101.

Lesson 2: Keep what works. But build for the future.

Now, Morrissey isn’t saying distribution is or will be unimportant — and abandoning effective channels would be a costly mistake — but he does recommend taking a long view of marketing.

“It doesn’t mean all that stuff goes away,” he says. “But it probably stands to reason that, for example, marketers should plan for SEO to continue to go down.”

And the irony of what I’m about to say isn’t lost on me, but… pay attention to what you’re seeing, not just what the experts …read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog

Author: Aaron