I wanted to make a more general point to all the people who misunderstand marketing. Actually, the overwhelming majority of people associate marketing with advertising or design on flyers. The point I wanted to make is geared towards people in startups who misunderstand marketing and thus completely avoid the topic, which more often than not, reflects on their success.

It also leads to inventing terms like "content marketing", "inbound marketing", "growth hacking". Oh, the irony with the last one. A marketing term, to trick people who hate marketing, to do marketing...

I'm sure it pans out great for people like Rand Fishkin, Dharmesh Shah and Sean Ellis. The problem is, the people who fall for these neologisms get disconnected from the much, much larger marketing community. They get inside of an echo chamber. Instead of reading thorough articles, by authors which credentials are checked, claims are investigated and arguments - reviewed by peers, they get moz.com and quicksprout and kissmetrics, unbounce and optimizely. Well, I guess people get what they ask for - something easy, which does its "magic".

My last line in the previous post was a cheap shot and uncalled for. I'm sorry about that.

Marketer here.

What exactly is wrong with data and insights from a variety of sources that might include Moz, Optimizely, etc? These are marketing technology companies and have a unique bird's-eye perspective of raw data across numerous companies. Further, people like Rand Fishkin know their shit. You might disagree with it, but I guarantee if you had a conversation with him and voiced your arguments, he'd be able to cite plenty of data to back up his claims and have an honest debate about it.

Marketers who take what they read as gospel concern me, and I fully agree with that. People need to do their due diligence and figure out how things apply to their business. They should also read broader respected industry news sources (ie. searchengineland, searchenginejournal, etc.), and be active in communities of people tackling similar challenges with similar experience to trade notes.

I agree with the other comments though on the fact that building a great product isn't necessarily marketing. Informing great product design through solid market research could come from marketing, but that is very different than physically building a product. The "build it and they will come" fallacy is a dangerous one. Communicating that you have a product is the act of marketing. Even placing it on a website with content is marketing because you may get organic search traffic, or referral traffic if people link to you, etc.

I don't doubt Rand Fishkin as a marketer. I just don't like misleading people via inventing new terms for already known concepts, like "content marketing" for PR. It disconnects his followers from a lot of knowledge and they keep on reinventing the wheel.

Or optimizely's A/B testing, which depending on your definition is anywhere between wildly imprecise and outright fraud. And this is by design, because they know their customers just won't put the effort into learning experimental design, sampling, normalizing, distributions, hypothesis testing and validating. It's just much better to charge clueless people a monthly fee for what is essentially a redirect script with a WYSIWYG editor, while telling them what they are doing is scientifically sound. And off to the echo chamber they go. Changing a button's color improves CTR by 90%. You can read that on pretty much any blog. Moz, ConversionXL, unbounce, kissmetrics, SEJ, any blog/publication which passes for "industry authority". Sorry, I just don't have the time to sift through all of this self-serving bullshit.

Fully agree there is a lot of fluff out there, and some of that is people trying to generate ongoing news or indexable content where there isn't really anything worth putting out.

That said, I'm not sure I agree with your take on the new terms. Sure they are buzzwords to some degree, but I see content marketing as distinct from PR in that it largely focuses on content creation, has considerations for SEO, etc. One could argue that PR has those components as well, but I see the distinction as PR focusing more on outreach to key individuals in the media, handling issues management, etc. Again, some overlap for sure, but I don't see content marketing efforts doing everything PR does or vice versa.

Again, people need to read a variety of sources, and part of the problem is there is no great way to tell whether a source is credible. But I think it is better that people start going down the rabbit hole than wander around completely oblivious.

Since you seem have a high threshold for what you consider value sources of industry info, do you have any recommendations for how others might discover those on their own? I'd be curious what you consider reputable sources.

ISSN: 1573-059X; 0022-2437; 0022-2429; 0732-2399; 2164-3970; 1520-6793.

https://www.informs.org/ (a couple of the journals are published by them); their Analytics magazine is also good, as well as their site.

ama.org

Any book published by Springer, Emeral Insight and Taylor & Francis Group.

for websites - the emarketer.com, meclabs family, econsultancy, conversion-rate-experts.com, distilled, butleranalytics.com, dmnews.com, kaushik.net, analyticsvidhya.com, ppchero.com, internetretailer.com, targetmarketingmag.com, SELand.

I don't like SELand much, but haven't found anything better when it comes to news about search. Do you have any suggestions?

Thanks for sharing your list. I have to say I find it a bit interesting that you knock on Optimizely, Rand Fishkin and co but then reference ppchero, conversion-rate-experts, etc. They all have a range of quality, but I've seen high-quality pieces from both the sources you discounted and the sources you like.

I LOVE the Meclabs properties. MarketingExperiments.com is absolutely fantastic in particular. Definitely a fan of the others you listed as well. Avinash Kaushik is my analytics hero and I often find myself linking to his pieces when trying to educate about attribution or how to look at data.

SearchEngineLand is pretty decent for getting raw industry news, but some of their pieces are definitely skewed based on the biases of the authors. Believe it or not, there is actually some decent discussion that happens on Reddit in /r/ppc and /r/adops as well as every now and then in Quora.

My biggest problem right now is finding time to digest all the info. I used to be able to carve out a decent chunk when that was a large part of my role in the agency world, but now that I'm client-side my days are filled with many other items, so I have to fit it in where I can.

I'm sensing a marketing academic. I agree with some points and the echo chamber is very real

However, while I wish there were more people reading peer reviewed journals and debating the full spectrum of marketing, the literature is unfortunately 5 years behind what's actually going on in businesses and online (we are talking about SaaS here).

Research and empirical work takes time but consumers move quickly, especially online, so by the time reports and data are published it's out of date. The only half decent way to keep up with developments is to buy into some of these "neologisms" or you will be left behind.

> the literature is unfortunately 5 years behind what's actually going on in businesses and online

Did you come down to this conclusion by yourself, or did you read/heard it somewhere? Also, I'm not an academic.

this is actually great advice. what would you recommend reading?

ISSN: 1573-059X; 0022-2437; 0022-2429; 0732-2399; 2164-3970; 1520-6793.

https://www.informs.org/ (a couple of the journals are published by them); their Analytics magazine is also good, as well as their site.

ama.org

Any book published by Springer, Emeral Insight and Taylor & Francis Group.