We all love a good fad every now and then, but hitching your marketing wagon to a marketing fad is a short-sighted way to waste time and miss the whole point. When it comes to marketing your business, you are better off sticking with long-term trends even if it means more work and stiffer competition with a campaign. There is no fast, easy way to achieve marketing glory these days.
It takes time, effort, and remaining consistent with your marketing objectives in order to build a campaign that will enable long-term success.
A recent Google Insights article from Google’s Brand Lab talks about this specific topic. In Google’s “5 Fixes for Your Online Video Marketing Strategy” author Kim Larson talks about remaining consistent with your long-term goals. “January is peak season for unsustainable diet trends and fitness fads. We’ve all tried one. You see incredible results for a week or two and then suddenly you’ve fallen off the wagon.” This is absolutely true whether it pertains to a New Years resolution or whether you are trying to tie-in your marketing campaign to a Ken Bone spin-off (remember him?).
In Ms. Larson’s column, she describes the fad of the running man challenge. A (very) short lived dance craze that burst on to the scene, only to all but disappear within just a few weeks (see Google Trends graphic). Instead she suggests that focusing on a long-term strategy, while more competitive, is the better option. According to the metrics shown in the Google Trends graphic, while the running man challenge had a spike in searches, over the course of several months, the total amount of searches was no where close to a more mainstream search like, “how to dance”.
The same goes for just about any other marketing trend. Services that we thought were going to be really popular like Google+ Authorship, or embedded Facebook widgets on websites turned out to have short-lived lives, but things like white-hat SEO and content blogging have remained powerful assets to a marketing campaign for years. So don’t get caught up in a new, hot marketing fad. Stick to the tried & true and know that there is no quick way, to achieve marketing success for your business.