When a new digital marketing trend comes out, there’s a three step process we all follow.
- Your first step is to Google your given buzzword that you’re fighting with, and probably download about 100 whitepapers that glaze over the topic. You’re then entered into mundane, ineffective lead nurturing campaigns that will spam you on a daily basis trying to sell you something you don’t want, need, or likely understand at this point.
- Then, you sign up to some enewsletters, follow some people on Twitter, join some LinkedIn groups, and troll for a couple of weeks, trying to pick up that 140 character nugget that’s going to change your life. Instead, you retweet a few things, glaze over a salesman answering your LinkedIn question, and spam-box some newsletters.
- Your next step is to go to a conference or convention and listen to top level consultants explaining the benefits of trend X and how it’s the future of marketing. You’ll be bamboozled by theory and attacked with case studies, and walk away with more questions than answers… and nothing tangible that you can take back to the office and implement.
The thing you have to bear in mind it harks back to 1896 in Dawson City, a village in the Klondike, an unforgiving region in the Yukon Territory in the frigid, extreme north of Canada.
Dawson City exists where no city should. The average daily high temperature in January is a bone-chattering -21.8 C (-15F), and when adding on the wind chill it’s more like -51 C (-59.8C).
Add on 27cm of snow (10”) and less than six hours of daylight and you can imagine that it’s not somewhere you would move by choice.
Back in 1896, the southern gold rushes (namely California, Columbia, and Kootenay) had all but finished, and prospectors were gradually heading north and east.
The thing is, travelling by land back then was unforgiving (in fact, it still is now, and if you’ve ever been caught in a traffic jam on the Trans Canada Highway you’ll know what I mean!) so any locales that could be accessed by water were preferred.
The Yukon sits just north of a tiny bit of Alaska that connects the Alaskan mainland with the panhandle. You could board a ship in San Francisco, Seattle or Vancouver and head up to Skagway, from where you could get to Dawson City by way of a simple three or four day land journey.
The prospectors arrived in masses and yee haw! They struck gold. Not just a nugget, but a veritable mountain.
It was one of the biggest finds of gold since California. And guess what? 100,000 people tried to make the trek up, although only a small percentage actually made it.
Nearly overnight, Dawson City ballooned from 500 people in 1896 to over 30,000 in 1898. If you’re counting, that’s a 5900% increase in two years!
Hey wait, I’m sure I’ve seen this before…
Picture yourself in Dawson City – a collection of ramshackle, wood-framed tenements on the outskirts, and a main street littered with countless saloons, brothels, and casinos.
You could drink the finest champagnes in some of the most extravagant watering holes in the world. You could hire ‘ladies of the night’ with a couple of dollars, or if you were lucky for a bottle of whiskey.
You could put a nugget of gold down for a game of dice and if you were lucky pay for your boarding house for a year as a result!
By 1899, all of the good stakes were taken and mostly barren. In the end, only about 3,000 prospectors found gold, or a 3% hit rate if you’re counting.
Of those 3,000, most of them could barely pay off the $1,000 it cost to voyage to this rich little pocket in the middle of nowhere. Only a handful of people actually left Dawson City with a profit. That’s less than 1% for you mathematicians out there.
Dawson City today is a different place. The latest census puts its population at 1,319, most of whom work either in tourism or for the government.
There’s still a couple of old saloons with some tired, wrinkly can-can dancers shaking their stuff for a veritable pittance. The streets reek with an air of what could have been It is a forgotten city, the victim of vice, avarice, and capitalist vengeance.
Does this sound familiar?
Why am I regaling you with this tale? Because the digital marketing industry rushes to the online version of Dawson City every year or two.
Take Web 2.0. Social media. Big data. Content marketing. Native Advertising.Whatever, the list goes on.
Each of these has been a gold rush, and marketers pile aboard a steamship heading north. They buy their gold pans and pickaxes, kiss their families goodbye, and embark upon a long, expensive journey to an unknown, savage, and unforgiving hellhole.
And yet, the same fact always rings true, the only people who are making money are those selling the gold pans and pickaxes.
I’ve seen it happen time and time again.
First, you start hearing buzz about this wondrous new channel that is going to change your life. This is like the telegraph signal heading down to the south, letting people know that there’s riches to be had in them there hills, way up in the boondocks of northern Canada.
Every time there is a new trend that comes out, within a month there are self-described “gurus” or “ninjas” or “experts” offering their expertise for a pretty price. They are like the people who open up shops in boom cities and charge extortionate rates for pickaxes.
Before long, there are a bunch of conferences, conventions and trade shows that crop up across the world, who promise that a thousand of your industry peers will attend and that it’s a can’t-miss event.
These are the saloons where you can drink a shot of whiskey but might get shot for your efforts.
And who gets rich? The telegraph company, the shopkeeper, and the saloons.
What’s my point? In the gold rush, you had a better chance of financial success if you stayed in the south and did normal things.
If you tried to go up north and pan for gold, you’d either die en route, find a few scraps and drink yourself broke, or, if you were really, really lucky, get rich.
In the digital marketing universe, this is my point of my meandering metaphor: the tried and tested tactics work the best, irrespective of channel and buzzwords.
Many marketers focus on trying the latest trends before they truly understand what they mean to their customer ecosystem… and forget that the quickest way to improve your marketing results is to do the basics really, really well.
Marketing is about making money, not wasting it. There may be gold in the hills but instead of chasing it, start digging in your own backyard first. What you find may surprise you.
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