The Myth of the Marketing Silver Bullet

Have you come across a marketing tactic, some type of a technology or a platform or a strategy, something that seems almost too good to be true, but if you’d just apply it to your business, the leads will start flowing in, or customer revenue will go up dramatically, or customers will stay with you twice as long?

These silver bullet tactics are tempting because it seems like if you just invest in that one thing, everything will change. I want to share three reasons that may not be true and that you should be very careful and diligent before you decide to invest in these silver bullets.

One size does not fit all

First, every company is different when it comes to the marketing they need to do. That’s because who they are selling to, if they’re marketing well, they have a very unique audience that they’re trying to attract, and what they are offering to them is also unique to the world. If that’s not true, you’re in a commodity situation. So you need your marketing to be customized specifically to your situation. So it makes it really hard for a single technology or application to work for everybody the same way. So you wanna make sure that whatever that silver bullet opportunity is can be adjusted and applied in your particular situation.

One experience is not enough

Secondly, single experiences by themselves do not sway 99% of your prospects and clients. What brings them to you is an orchestrated experience where they have several touch points and they get to know you through those different experiences over time, and as they move closer and closer to learning about your solution and buying from you. If you focus on one silver bullet solution, your clients are getting one experience with you for that single thing. And while sometimes that can work, most of the time, that by itself is not gonna stick with them. They won’t remember what they see, if they see it at all, or if they experience it at all. So you wanna make sure that this silver bullet is working within your overall marketing ecosystem to add to that customer experience that’s already in place or that you need to put in place so that your clients can get to know you.

Things change

And third, we do not live in a static world. So, something that may seem like a silver bullet today, may not be a silver bullet in six months or a year or in five years. So you wanna make sure that whatever that is, you think is the secret sauce and is gonna solve all these problems. You have the ability to learn as you apply it and evolve the solution and evolve the experience over time as your market changes, as your clients change, and as your product changes.

It’s not that there’s not an opportunity to apply a really powerful marketing technology or application. They are out there and they exist. The key is to remember that your customers will experience you by how they interact with all of the people in your company, your product, your communications, and all of that together, is what’s important. So anyone relying on any one technology is probably not gonna give you the results that you think you might be getting.