What is Fad Marketing? (And How to Avoid It)

The prob­lem with mar­ket­ing is that all too often we put exces­sive focus on the next big mar­ket­ing ‘fad’ in a bid to get fast results. Like fad diets, such efforts are doomed to fail…

Matt Roberts By Matt Roberts from Linkdex. Join the discussion » 0 comments

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.

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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.

Matt Roberts

Written by Matt Roberts

Chief Strategy Officer, Linkdex

Matt has worked in marketing for over 20 years with SEO being his focus for nearly a decade. As Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer, he is the driving force behind the Linkdex platform. Matt works with clients across the globe to discover opportunities to use data, insights, and processes to grow organic traffic and revenue – and give our clients an unfair advantage. Matt cycles and with a growing collection of road bikes, he is fast becoming a cycling geek.

Inked is published by Linkdex, the SEO platform of choice for professional marketers.

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