You’ve prob­a­bly heard of a ‘fad diet’. The ones that promise fast results with­out doing more exer­cise. (I cer­tain­ly know a few in my fam­i­ly that always appear to be start­ing a fad diet after falling off the dietary wag­on.)

Here’s the mar­ket­ing equiv­a­lent — every time you hear the words ‘let’s cre­ate a viral cam­paign’. (It’s actu­al­ly mak­ing me smile just typ­ing this.) Of course, when your strat­e­gy is to ‘go viral’, near­ly every­one is going to fail.

In SEO, I think the fad diet equiv­a­lent would be Link Buy­ing. The “let’s buy lots of links, rank for terms where we wouldn’t nor­mal­ly be expect­ed to rank at the top and cash in for as long as we can get away with it” men­tal­i­ty.

What is Fad Marketing?

Recent­ly, we’ve seen lots of new mar­ket­ing trends. Mar­ket­ing Automa­tion, Con­tent Mar­ket­ing, Influ­encer Mar­ket­ing, Brand­ed Pub­lish­ing, Retar­get­ing, Pro­gram­mat­ic Adver­tis­ing, Account Based Mar­ket­ing are just a few.

Are these Fads? Well, it depends on how they were used — in many cas­es, brands may have engaged in any one of these to achieve their mar­ket­ing objec­tives, and per­haps even achieved amaz­ing results. For oth­ers they will have been a mas­sive time and resource night­mare. I’ve cer­tain­ly got a few hor­ror sto­ries to tell you one day.

The dan­ger is how these mar­ket­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties are dis­cov­ered, planned for, exe­cut­ed, mea­sured and then built-upon and improved. Let me describe one night­mare that still repeats itself.

SEO is a chan­nel that every busi­ness knows it should doing and man­ag­ing pro­fes­sion­al­ly. So it has a bud­getary line in a mar­ket­ing spread­sheet. The resources assigned, strat­e­gy cre­at­ed, strat­e­gy exe­cut­ed, mea­sure­ment and report­ing is all too often woe­ful­ly sub-opti­mal when com­pared to chan­nel usage as defined by con­sumer usage and the oppor­tu­ni­ty. SEO, the chan­nel that for many was once a fad mar­ket­ing tac­tic, now needs to become part of a busi­ness­es every­day mar­ket­ing lifestyle. It’s part of how we live, breathe and trade.

Lifestyle Marketing

The same is true with lots of oth­er mar­ket­ing chan­nels. Which is where the com­pli­ca­tions comes in. So what does good and healthy Lifestyle Mar­ket­ing look like.

In a world of increas­ing mar­ket­ing com­pli­ca­tion I think our life-raft is to keep return­ing to some of the rules of Lifestyle Mar­ket­ing.

1. Con­sumer Cen­tric­i­ty: Know your audi­ence, who they are, where they are, what they want to see, think and do.
2. Prod­uct is King: If you’re try­ing to sell a prod­uct that’s not good whether it’s a piz­za or a cam­era, you’re going to get found out in search results, on YouTube, on Face­book and every oth­er place we chose to vent or con­sumer dis­plea­sure. So make and sell bet­ter stuff if you expect to thrive. What’s more, it’s nev­er been so easy to imag­ine, plan, fund, cre­ate, mar­ket and dis­trib­ute a prod­uct — think Kick­starter. So if you’re a cor­po­rate, you need to raise the bar high. Not to men­tion share our delight when we find and use a prod­uct we love.
3. Plat­form & For­mat Neu­tral­i­ty: Your prod­ucts and con­tent are going to need to appear on an ever increas­ing vari­ety of plat­forms and for­mats. This cre­ates a mas­sive organ­i­sa­tion­al chal­lenge. The sen­si­ble answer appears to be that you put your con­tent and prod­uct assets in a place and for­mat that serves all devices and you become device and plat­form neu­tral. This cen­tral hub serves your web­site, your apps, point of sales devices, cus­tomer ser­vice, and any oth­er view that is and might come to pass.
4. Con­tent is King: I use this phrase because it’s true, you there­fore know it, and the chances are much of your dig­i­tal con­tent is not very good and there­fore you’ve ignored it or don’t believe it.
5. Be Gen­uine: Peo­ple don’t laugh because you say you’re fun­ny. They laugh because you’ve told them a fun­ny joke. What worse is when you say you’re fun­ny and you’re not. You get trust, respect and loy­al­ty when you are hon­est and authen­tic. Con­sumer are not as trust­ing of what you say is true and they can check you and what you say out in a few clicks. So be smart with what you say and how you say it. Just tell fun­ny jokes. So fun­ny peo­ple want to re-tell them.
6. 80/20 Plan­ning: When I was a media plan­ner buy­er many moons ago we planned 80% of our media in places we knew worked and 20% in new emerg­ing places. Putting too much resource is un-test­ed places is risky, so is putting no bud­get in new places. So plan smart­ly. For my night­mare SEO exam­ple, this means pro­por­tion­al resources to con­sumer demand, oppor­tu­ni­ty and ROI.
7. Be Bold: We’re in dig­i­tal. Who knows what will hap­pen next month or next year. We need to be bold and agile. Con­sid­ered but not risk averse.

2016 and 2017 marketing trends

It looks like 2016 / 2017 mar­ket­ing trends are going to come thick and fast and include:

Loca­tion Based Mar­ket­ing: Can we mar­ket to you in real-time whilst you’re in the ‘right place and time moment’. All achieved through via your dig­i­tal devices in com­bi­na­tion with Loca­tion Based Ser­vices, iBea­con, Radio Fre­quen­cy Iden­ti­fi­ca­tion (RFID).

Ephemer­al Mar­ket­ing: Can we cre­ate a bril­liant short to the point and not annoy­ing mes­sages via medi­ums like Twit­ter, Snapchat, and YouTube.

Direct Mar­ket­ing: The label ‘Iden­ti­ty-based Mar­ket­ing’ is get­ting some trac­tion. Now this makes me smile as Direct Mar­ket­ing was my cho­sen pro­fes­sion over 20 years ago. It was and is all about the idea of 1‑to‑1 mar­ket­ing. The real­i­ty was it wasn’t always real­ly 1‑to‑1, but wasn’t one to many either. The move to show ads to indi­vid­u­als because of their dig­i­tal iden­ti­ties which include their email address and phone num­ber, has begun and might change how paid adver­tis­ing works entire­ly.

Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty: Slight­ly fur­ther out, will brands we required to offer a VR expe­ri­ence in the same way hav­ing an web and app chan­nel is a basic require­ment.

Which of these you chose to adopt, how much effort and resource you put in, how well you exe­cute them will all depend on you.

Like health trends like spin­ning class­es and cross­fit, if they work and can become part of your week­ly rou­tine, that’s amaz­ing.

If you’re look­ing for a quick fix. Think again.