Marketing gurus- Has the bubble bust?

It was a lazy Sunday afternoon, when I decided to update my LinkedIn and expand my connections.  I also saw a few profiles (or rather stalked) and found a plethora of creative and never heard before designations like

•       Startup Enthusiast
•       Design Ninja
•       Marketing guru
•       Growth hacker/Growth marketer
•      Creative superhero among others.

Most of these designations are related to digital marketing. The digital world has expanded and more people are coming online than ever before, leading to exponential increase in digital marketing. But only a select few actually know what they are doing in social media or other search networks.

I often draw parallels between digital marketing & teenage sex. Everyone knows a little bit about it, very few have tried everything, but everyone talks like an expert.

One such upcoming breed are the ‘digital marketing gurus’ who claim to know everything about this industry. But do we have too many of them? Let me show you results of some generic keywords

Digital marketing jobs India	3,40,00,000 results (0.48 sec)
Digital marketing agency India	1,07,00,000 results (0.32 sec)
Digital Marketing Professionals India	1,09,00,000 results (0.32 seconds)
Digital Marketing experts India	About 56,60,000 results (0.40 seconds)

Some observation from the above data:

• For every job, there are three digital marketing professionals. i.e. ratio of professionals to available jobs is 1:3
• This is a gem. The number of agencies in India is almost equal to the number of digital marketing professionals.

•  Every second digital marketing professional is an expert. i.e professional to expert ratio is ~2:1

As I said earlier, there are more people talking about digital marketing than the number of people actually practicing it.  With the IT sector reaching maturity, digital marketing is definitely going to be the next big job spinner in India.  The aim I feel should be create more doers. I would consider this done, only if the professionals to job ratio is reverse of what it is now and the professionals to expert ratio is a bit widens a bit. 

Let your work do the talking, not your ‘creative’ designations.

P.S: I am a digital marketing professional, just learning the tricks of the trade now :P. Far from even being the G in guru. ;)