A Demoralizing Time for Marketers?
Table of Contents
The Digital Marketer Role
It’s the best time in the world to be a Digital Marketing Specialist. We have already passed the introduction phase we faced during the early 2000s. Companies are now aware they not only need a marketing team — they need it to be digital.
The second stage we faced as professionals was a season where the Digital Marketer was in a very confusing position. Is it a social media manager? A designer? An SEO specialist? And so on. For a while, we were all of them. But today’s market is more aware than ever about the branches and professionalization of every position.
The natural evolution of the role is for companies to start understanding exactly what type of digital marketing team they need to build — whether that’s a lead generation focused team, an organic growth and brand building team, and so on.
A Creative Field
As a freshman in college, when I chose Marketing as my career, I thought it was mainly a creative field. In the following years I learned the more technical side of it — research, data collection and interpretation, workflows and processes — and I thought I had it all figured out. Marketing is not a fully creative field.
Well… I was wrong again. By definition, being creative is the ability to produce original or imaginative ideas. This applies to almost every corner of marketing — not only your monthly calendars, designs, CTAs, or strategies. Approaching challenges and finding solutions requires this ability as well.
For most of the 2010s, digital marketing was booming. We were creating not only imaginative content, but the platforms started evolving to meet our needs — lead generation, sales, and audience retention. At some point the technology peaked and audiences started getting tired of the same approaches.
The curious thing is that there wasn’t a real change in our channels, methods, strategies, or content types. We just stopped creating.
The New Era of Digital Marketing
I’ve noticed that more and more colleagues are using AI more frequently — in fact, 88% of digital marketers use AI in their day-to-day tasks. I’ve already shared my opinion on overusing these tools, so I’m not gonna go knee deep on the subject.
The real problem isn’t that marketers are relying on AI to carry their strategies. We are teaching other departments that our jobs are replaceable and inconsequential. From time to time I encounter scenarios where someone sends me a prompt suggesting strategies and ways to approach my day-to-day work. As a professional, it’s my duty to go through it and decide for myself whether it’s relevant.
This is where I started noticing a pattern. AI algorithms learn from whatever information they have access to — which in theory is great, because we should be feeding the algorithm so it evolves with us. The real problem is that we’re not doing that.
Let me use a quick example. Remember the “How to,” “Best way to,” “Top 3” type of content? It was around 2021 when every account and every community manager was using these formats to engage audiences and climb search rankings. Now I’m noticing a massive resurgence of the same trends. Was it really that powerful that to this day we haven’t found a new way to reach the top?
So much has changed. We are prioritizing generic content that focuses on answering queries — the difference now is that the goal is to reach the top by being referenced in AI search engines. But real users are getting tired of this approach.
A Demoralizing Time for Marketers
Niche marketing is not about replicating workflows for a specific segment. It’s about creating workflows that adapt to the audience’s needs. That’s the real demoralizing part for marketers — we are now trapped in a loop where being creative is no longer a skill. We are being measured by a prompt.
Being creative is an ability. Like any other ability, we need to actively put it to the test so we can keep learning and growing. If you don’t use it, you lose it!
At least I know that the next time I need to present a strategy, I’m not going to rely on an AI tool to build it.
