Shiny Ball Syndrome

It’s a given that your company must be tweeting, optimizing search, blogging, managing a YouTube channel and sponsoring a golf tournament. That’s how the Fortune 500 do their marketing, so that’s what you need to do in order to join their ranks someday.

Or, maybe not.

All the bells and whistles of marketing have value somewhere, to someone, but there’s always a question of whether those tools are valuable to any specific company at the present time. Frequently, management teams will become enamored of the latest and greatest technique, the one that all the cool kids are using, and invest in an irrelevant exercise that doesn’t meet their needs.

We call it Shiny Ball Syndrome, the tendency to become distracted by the latest technique that’s being heralded by the illuminati. As with investments and prescription medicine, though, your results may vary.

How can we protect ourselves from Shiny Ball Syndrome? Often, a simple smell test will suffice, and it consists of essentially one question:

Is this how customers identify and select firms like ours?

Do major businesses select a law firm, for example, by searching the internet for “law firms,” or do clients begin their search by connecting with their own trusted advisors? Do we find the right bankers for our firm by getting a list of all the banks in our area, or by seeking insight from colleagues with specific insights into the financial world?

If we’re selling a consumer product to a largely anonymous audience, and that audience begins its search online, we should definitely be there. If we’re selling to millennials who don’t have trusted advisors yet, our best approach might include targeted internet marketing, e-mail or YouTube channels.

Can we use big data to plot our course? If so, great, let’s do it. If not, what other types of analyses will direct us to the targets we want and the way those targets conduct their searches? For many B2B companies, the right approach might include trade associations, non-profit collaboration, seminars and various small-format exercises. In many cases, the dull, staid, very old school techniques might be the best, simply because they match the market.

The right type of marketing will vary with a company’s size, geographic reach, industry, current client base, price points, contract lengths and other factors. Corporate culture plays a role, as well. Every company has a culture that influences the types of clients that will come, and stay, the types of employees who will bloom, or wilt, and the types of services that will earn a profit, or not.

Finding the right match between our customers’ paths and our marketing approach can lead us to the next new thing, or it could compel us to redouble our cultivation in older, time-tested arenas. Whatever we discover in our analysis, the path that yields the most profitable, strategic, long-term customer relationships is the one to follow.