By Gini Dietrich
Gordon Plutsky, the chief marketing officer at King Fish Media, recently wrote a post about the nine marketing tactics that will be dead in the next five years.
In it, he included things such as travel (yay!), company-provided technology, salespeople, and silo’d marketing departments. These things make sense.
He also included the cubicle and the 9-5 job, customer engagement, personal branding, wide-net sales tactics, and the printer.
Some of these marketing tactics are already dead (when was the last time you used a printer?) and some have a longer shelf-life than five years.
Of course, growing a virtual company, we know the cubicle and 9-5 job and company-provided technology are already dead for some. And, as co-author of Marketing in the Round, we hope silo’d marketing departments are already dead for some.
But personal branding, customer engagement, salespeople, and travel (as nice as that would be)?
Personal Branding
The death of this marketing tactic doesn’t make sense. He describes a world where people no longer have resumes. True. A world where a digital footprint is made up of everything we do on the web. True.
Very few people will still have an old-school paper resume. Instead we will have a curated (and in some cases not-so-curated) digital footprint — consisting of a LinkedIn profile, blog, social profiles, images, and other items that surface in a Google search. These will be the go-to resources for companies looking to hire new talent and people looking to vet nascent personal relationships.
Also true.
So why is this one dead if it continues to be important to manage your personal online reputation?
Sure, there are going to be instances where you can delete what is online about you (Paul Sutton has a guest blog post coming up about that and what’s happening in Europe), but that is still personal branding and reputation management.
Customer Engagement
What he describes here is the old way of doing market research and providing products based on a demographic.
That definitely is dead.
What’s not dead, though, is customer engagement, as we’ll soon discover when Jeannie Walters extols her wisdom in today’s free webinar, customer engagement is the future of PR.
Salespeople
There are plenty of decision-makers who still believe seeing the whites of people’s eyes is the way to sell. That isn’t going to change in the next five years.
Sure, some of the back slapping, golf-playing, cigar smoking sales days are over. People use the web to get the information they need. And more than half make their decision before a salesperson enters the door.
But it will be a good 10 years or more, particularly in B2B and professional service organizations, before meeting a person live doesn’t close the deal.
Travel
We live in a technology-driven world that allows us to replicate the in-person experience from behind our computer screens.
This is extremely exciting, particularly for someone who loathes the TSA, airport lines, and taking everything apart just to put it back together in security experience.
But nothing is the same as being with someone in-person.
Because of this, conferences will evolve, but they will grow in popularity.
In-person meetings will become more strategic and focused.
Until we can be beamed up and back, travel will continue to be important.
Marketing Tactics Live On
It’s certainly interesting to watch how the world continues to evolves at a breakneck pace.
Technology has afforded us many opportunities we thought possible only in movies or fiction. It also has created a crutch. One that we rely on to do business when some of the “old” ways work better and much more efficiently.
While things will evolve and the way we do business will continue to change, some of these marketing tactics live on.