I’m in the midst of a discussion on Linked In about marketing trends, and whether following what Hilton Barbour calls Bright Shiny Objects Syndrome is an effective marketing philosophy.
It’s so easy to get distracted by the platform of the moment that has exploded and was bought by Google or Mark Zuckerberg for a gazillion dollars.
There’s a parallel in healthcare that I recall from my years in PR at a large hospital system. If there’s a comparable field that moves at the same technological speed as digital marketing, it’s surgical procedures. There’s always a newer, cooler, faster, smaller way to cut someone open and fix them. Companies are developing new medical devices because – just like in digital media – there’s a great hope that there are gazillions of dollars to be made if the thing that you make is effective and results in good, speedy outcomes.
Surgeons like those new things. They like to be seen as “on the cutting edge.” (Pun totally intended.) It means they’re smart, that they pay attention to new trends, and are continually moving forward in a field that seeks to save lives in the most efficient and effective manner possible.
BUT.
Sometimes, they know they have to revert to the gold standard. To the tried and true method to get rid of the cancer, fix the hernia, repair the artery. The gold standard is old school, and it may not be as neat and tidy, but they know it works.
At Rally Marketing, we’re sticking to our gold standard database development, but we have a shiny new name: Rally Prospecting. We’ve re-articulated our name to more accurately reflect what we do – prospecting for companies who need to find more leads. We’ve kicked it up a notch with Prospecto™, our new prospecting automation platform that automatically tracks and scores electronic behavior so that sales teams knows who’s interested in what and how interested they are. It also nurtures those who aren’t ready to engage, feeding them tasty bits of helpful information that keep them sated until they’re ready to order.
The consensus on the Linked In discussion is to carefully research marketing techniques to determine which one will get you to your prospect. Shiny things are pretty, but if they don’t help you and you get too distracted by them, you end up chasing rabbits that don’t end up in the stew.
Research the gold standard, even in this technological age that seems to produce a new, never-seen-before platform every day. Our prospecting automation platform, Prospecto™, is new, but the bones behind it are our tried-and-true database-building platform Drive Train. Time has told us that Drive Train was an effective way to build an electronic database of targeted prospects for B2B companies. Our shiny, new platform Prospecto™ takes it up a notch and will (hopefully) soon be considered a gold standard way to find new leads and nurture prospects.
