Numbers + negative action = magnetic effect. Any decent marketer knows how to write a good title.  But this article is not a tutorial on marketing.

It’s a rant. Read it if you’ve been a marketer or if you are already one. Read it if your life revolves around Google spreadsheets, meetings, calls, and presentations. Read it if you don’t know what the heck you are doing as a marketing person.

1. Everyone knows marketing except you. Please understand this fact. You are that guy who is paid to do marketing but everyone else thinks you have no idea what you are doing.

2. You have a so called marketing plan which nobody understands or cares about.

3. Your Google Drive has a whole bunch of spreadsheets you spent months to prepare, but it gets outdated every 3 months.

4. Nobody actuallly reads your decks, reports and powerpoint presentations.

5. You are managing a team of marketing analysts. Wonderful! You have no idea what they are doing and who is telling them what to do. Remember – everyone understands marketing and they have an opinion on what is to be done and how customers are to be acquired.

6. When none of the above works, it’s your fault. Always.

7. Your non marketing colleagues think you are playing on Facebook and Instagram when you are actually creating campaigns. Don’t be surprised when they say “Oh I know how this works, I’ve tried this many times to get traffic to my wix site.”

8. Developers won’t inform you before making a change or won’t ask you anything while setting up their app. URL Structure, sitemaps, meta data – they know it all. You are not important. Until that day comes they realise they need customers for their app. Then you automatically become a villain for not getting them a truck load of customers within one month timeline.

9. You are not a content writer. You are a marketer. But only you know the difference. Nobody else does. And nobody cares.

10. You are supposed to know coding. If you don’t, maybe you are not taking your job seriously. Remember, everyone else already knows marketing. So why don’t you know a little bit of coding, design, sales, customer service and everything else under the sun? Do yourself a favor and learn everything.

11. When everything is going well and things are smooth sailing, there will always be at least one person who will say “we need to re-brand the whole thing”. Good luck with that.

12. “Let’s launch a new channel” Good luck getting approval and navigating through endless calls and meetings.

13. You are managing a huge marketing budget spending thousands of dollars and getting customers all year long from Google Adwords. One bad month, and all of the past achievements are forgotten.

14. The website is broken, the speed is slow, the content is not good quality, the design is dated. You are answerable for all of the above.

15. Out of nowhere, a random chap will join your team and screw the whole thing that you built for months. Unlike development, there is no way to undo that effect except for the excuse you give to yourself “market dynamics”

16. You lie quite a bit. If you don’t, you are not a marketer.

17. You spent the whole night configuring Google tag manager, setting up triggers and events to ensure you can track and give data on what elements are being used by customers. You track everything for 3 weeks and prepare a deck. But at the end of the day, people choose the new design anyway, even if it does not perform.

Logic – “New is better” (data aint important)

18. The worst possible content gets you organic signups and the content which you crafted for weeks does not even rank. You wonder who wrote the Google search algorithm and why on earth you chosed this profession.

19. “Let’s get on a call” – let’s debate and argue over ideas and opinions and then conclude that “Nothing can be done” OR “Let’s wait until X gets over”

20. Marketing manager creating a process to organize things, writing SOPs, Google docs, videos what not. But remember, nobody is going to read those documents and understand what is the procedure. Unless you pull them in a call and tell them how it is supposed to work and what they are supposed to do. The next time they have a doubt, they will do the same thing. “Explaining the same thing over and over again” is part of your job description.

21. Trello, Asana, Basecamp – all these fancy tools are fine but remember, nobody will comment on the cards and update the last status of stuff or communicate on time. We’ll stack up cards and move from one list to another. Communication and clarity can wait for Sunday.

22. Developers will not give you an ETA of when you can expect a delivery. Getting married is easier than getting an ETA from a developer. I have done the former successfully.

24. Sprint, Sprint, Sprint. Run, Run, Run. After 3 sprints, you are back to square one. Nothing improved. And you don’t know why.

25. Half the money you spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is you don’t know which half.

26. “Oh my god I have to prepare the report before 3 PM today” Hey hey hey, don’t panic. Read point #3 and point #4. Take a deep breath, drink a glass of water if possible. Then prepare the report anyway. Then read point #3 and point #4 again. Realize that the earth is round and that one day life will come a full circle.

27. You – “I am a Digital marketer” –
Your friend – “Oh so you are that guy who sends spam emails and show ads on porn sites trying to trick customers”.

28. Your boss has no idea what you are doing. Because chances are he is a marketer himself.

29. SEO is any marketer’s worst nightmare. Because you are dealing with a system you don’t know how it works and you are expected to show results. That too quickly – working with content, design, development which are absolutely not in your control. Deal with it.

30. The SEO audit you are doing will never get completed and by the time you actually end up finishing it, it will become outdated because someone else decided to change the “design”, “Look and feel” or some developer quit his job. Don’t worry, someone else will find out a “better” process and then we will all repeat the same thing over and over again.

[Developing list]

I was quite bored when I wrote this. Not to be taken seriously (by non marketers). Marketing people understand what I am talking about.