Many people earn a living by providing digital marketing and design services to their employers and clients. PPC managers, search engine optimizers, ecommerce directors, information architects, and web designers are among the many professions in this field. Yet, platforms like WordPress, Shopify, and others have made it easy for people who lack such technical skills to quickly and easily launch professional-looking websites. At the same time, Google, Bing, and others have improved the machine-learning algorithms into their pay-per-click advertising platforms to the point where almost anyone can see a return on ad spend for their marketing dollars, without hiring a professional account manager. With these things in mind, is digital marketing and web design a dying field?
Staying Ahead of the Curve
It’s highly possible that these specific career choices will no longer be an option in the next 5, 10, or 20 years. Automation is taking over virtually every industry that includes programmable mechanical tasks, or which rely on big data to produce results. Cashiers are nearly extinct as self-checkout gains prominence. Self-driving trucks are already in beta testing. And, the field of digital marketing is no exception. So, how does a digital marketer stay ahead of the curve?
Work as if the Future is Already Here
At my digital marketing company, I work as if automation has already replaced everything that I do for my clients. What does this mean? Put simply, I imagine that AI has already figured out the best ways to promote websites, and that website templates are already fully-optimized for search engines. I then ask myself, “what can humans do better?” In my view, the answer to this question should be obvious: human beings are creative creatures.
Content is Still King
It’s true that there are already numerous AI companies that can produce creative ideas. Supercomputers are designing more fuel-efficient aircraft parts. Intuitive AI is producing (albeit often ugly) highly efficient aircraft designs. In the marketing space, there are also content platforms that generate (and often spin) lengthy articles that you can plug-and-play into your website. However, the articles that they produce are currently awful.
What does this mean? Simply put, marketers still have an edge over automation in the creative aspects of their work. To stay ahead of the curve, they should therefore continue to increase the creative aspects of their services, while embracing automation as our inevitable future.
