We always talk about trends in our line of work, but just as important are the marketing tendencies, or what we do with those new opportunities once we see them. More often than not though, marketing people have the tendency of taking a perfectly good trend and making a mess of it.
And we should really stop doing that in 2012!
I’m still stewing over what happened to the article directories.
They were once a great outlet for proving one’s expertise to the masses, until someone got the idea they were just for getting back links.
Before long, their value was greatly diminished, because marketing tendencies told us nothing mattered as much as the back link and so quality went out the window.
The same thing happened with email marketing.
Emailing clients used to be how we’d keep them interested in our message. It was used discretely, with promotions tucked off into little boxes so the lessons took precedence.
People once looked forward to receiving emails, because they’d always walk away with some good information.
But now, email marketing tendencies are all promotions all the time. And it’s gotten so bad, even those who still try to give some value in their emails aren’t getting the open rates they once had, simply because email isn’t trusted anymore.
I could go on and on about the many ways business has suffered because of marketing tendencies that took viable resources and turned them ugly, but I think you get the point.
Look, we all want to make money, but if we’re not thinking in the long term by preserving what we have to work with, it won’t be long before all resources dry up.
Recently there’s been at least one marketer who’s been claiming you can make a lot of money with Kindle Books by converting everything you’ve written into Kindle format and selling it on Amazon. It’s even been suggested you can do this with PLR material.
And this may be so, but how long will it be before Amazon starts clamping down on low quality uploads?
Right now it’s fairly open ended. You just have to put something together in the right format, upload it to Kindle and you have a book. But the more we abuse this with junk, the quicker Amazon will change its requirements, and/or the faster their customers will get wise to it and stop buying Kindle Books.
We might say the same about mobile apps, which are still trending upward. People will simply stop buying them once they’ve spent enough money on low quality.
So while it’s reasonable to expect marketers would jump on new trends and resources as they come up, it should also be logical to assume marketing tendencies would be geared toward preserving them at all cost.
But whether it’s just the sheer number of people in the marketing business all looking to capitalize, or it’s because too many are listening to bad advice, our typical marketing tendencies inevitably destroy our resources.
Unfortunately, there’s no way of getting everyone to stop. Marketers like fast money, and they don’t always think of the consequences.
Yet, there are some who see the big picture, and do all they can to preserve the resources available to them.
I guess all we can do is hope that in 2012 the marketing tendencies of those who do things the right way begin getting some top billing, and more of us learn the value of quality over fast money.
In the end, whatever marketing tendencies win over depends on you as the individual marketer. We’ve seen what wild abandonment can do to our resources, so maybe you and all the rest of us might try doing things the other way this coming year.
Time will tell!
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