It’s a Trap: 2013 Mar­ket­ing Trends That You Should­n’t Try 2014

What’s our fu­ture? Change.

Fast change. Con­stant change.

It used to be that mar­keters, econ­o­mists, and other pro­fes­sion­als whose job it is to pre­dict things could look a decade into the fu­ture, or at least a few years, but more and faster changes have made that kind of long view difficult.

For peo­ple in ad­ver­tis­ing, this has meant a shift to­wards con­stant vig­i­lance and try­ing to in­stan­ta­neously shift gears.

Un­for­tu­nately, not all trends are wise for every busi­ness to follow.

Here are some of the top mar­ket­ing trends of 2013 that you need to be care­ful with, and may want to avoid altogether.

Op­ti­miz­ing every­thing all the time. SEO has be­come such a ubiq­ui­tous and ar­guably im­por­tant as­pect of mak­ing your­self known on the web that pro­po­nents are sug­gest­ing that busi­nesses use key­words everywhere.

That means not only on the sta­tic pages of their web­site and in blogs (which makes sense), but also in things like white pa­pers, emails, newslet­ters, in guest posts, and even in the blurb that you cre­ate when you put your com­pany into di­rec­tory services.

In the­ory, all of these men­tions of “Idaho cheap tires” will raise your pro­file and bring more peo­ple to your busi­ness, but com­pa­nies would be wise to re­mem­ber the rea­son why search en­gines keep chang­ing the way they de­cide rankings—too much of some­thing adds up to a whole lot of noth­ing and turns off consumers.

Ig­nor­ing cam­paigns. With the in­stant feed­back busi­nesses have ac­cess to in today’s mar­ket­place, some gu­rus are sug­gest­ing that com­pa­nies es­chew the mar­ket­ing cam­paign al­to­gether and sim­ply act (or, rather, re­act) based on how peo­ple are re­spond­ing in real time. The prob­lem with this “fly by the seat of your pants” method­ol­ogy is manifold.

First, peo­ple tend to be in­cred­i­bly fickle, and if you’re try­ing to do an about face every time some­thing seems to change, you’re go­ing to end up chas­ing your tail. Sec­ond, ad­ver­tis­ing is a cre­ative en­deavor; you can’t just pull good ideas that stick with peo­ple out of the air—at least, not on a con­sis­tent ba­sis. Should your cam­paign have flex­i­bil­ity? Sure. But don’t sim­ply de­cide not to come up with one.

Just cre­at­ing con­tent. We’ve moved into a phase of mar­ket­ing where both every­thing and noth­ing is an ad­ver­tise­ment at the same time. What does that mean? Well, ex­perts know that peo­ple don’t want to be sold all the time (which you re­ally shouldn’t take an ex­pert to tell you), so they are con­vinc­ing more and more com­pa­nies to fo­cus on cre­at­ing qual­ity con­tent and mak­ing them­selves ex­perts in their re­spec­tive field.

This is done through meth­ods such as writ­ing blogs, sub­mit­ting guest posts on other big sites, cre­at­ing and giv­ing away white pa­pers and eBooks, and gen­er­ally just pro­vid­ing peo­ple with in­for­ma­tion and en­ter­tain­ment for free so that they’ll like and re­spect you and (hope­fully) keep com­ing back. Even­tu­ally, the point of this is to slowly lead peo­ple to­ward your prod­ucts and ser­vices so that they’ll be more likely to buy from you when they get there.

But the prob­lem is that a lot of busi­nesses spend so much time and en­ergy on the first half of this process that they ig­nore the sec­ond half—the part where they’re ac­tu­ally get­ting money by con­vert­ing browsers into cus­tomers. Get peo­ple to like you, sure, but don’t for­get that you need them to pay you, too.

Noth­ing but mo­bile. If you’re in ad­ver­tis­ing or own a busi­ness, you’ve seen the trends: peo­ple are us­ing mo­bile more than ever be­fore, and the num­bers just keep go­ing up by leaps and bounds. Com­pa­nies that ig­nore the mo­bile mar­ket are do­ing so at their own risk, be­cause that’s a lot of peo­ple to just write off. In fact, you might be smart just to put all of your mar­ket­ing re­sources into mo­bile and re­ally work to build that audience.

Wait, what?

While mo­bile is cer­tainly im­por­tant, no one short of a few com­pa­nies whose en­tire de­mo­graphic is mo­bile should for­get about the rest of their audience—which, by the way, is still the vast ma­jor­ity of al­most every sin­gle company’s cus­tomers. Yes, mo­bile is grow­ing by leaps and bounds but it’s still just a frac­tion of the rest of the market.