The myth of the “magic bullet” in marketing.

A few months ago, a friend in the home building industry flipped me an article she had received. The headline was eye catching, saying something to the effect that traditional means of advertising were dead. Since this friend had asked for my opinion of the piece, I took a look at the work.

What I read was something that I used to get a lot of when I was running brands in my client-side days. The proverbial script was as follows:

• Aren’t you, Mr. or Mrs. Client, wanting better marketing ROI?
• Well, have you looked at the way you’re doing things? Mainly, the “traditional” methods and tactics no longer work. In fact , they’ll soon die off
• My agency has a way of solving for that problem. (And the body copy frames the solution in a way that suggests that only their agency and their solution is the only way to fix the marketer’s problem)
• A final call to action of click here to see how we can address this problem once and for all.

The article that my friend sent over was just another version of this tried and true script.

You know what I told my friend?

I told her that there’s no magic bullet to solving these challenge. Sorry to burst her bubble. I also sent her a link to an article I wrote previously, “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me” (https://medium.com/ammunitionagency/its-still-rock-roll-to-me-542ebf4de6ec) and told her to read it.

The thing is, I still kept on thinking about this exchange as, I think my answer was a little incomplete. So, allow me to dig in a little deeper on this topic. What I failed to tell my friend is that when evaluating the results of any campaign, you need to answer a bunch of questions.

• Did you ever test the messaging strategy with your target audience? If not, how do you know of you have a basic problem with your overall messaging not delivering on your objectives, versus an execution problem?
• Did you ever learn about your target audience’s path to purchase, who influences her journey, how and when is she most receptive to your messaging? If not, how do you know if you are addressing her via the right channels with the right message depending on where she’s at in the purchase cycle?
• Did you ever test the creative with your audience to see if it delivers against your messaging strategy? Does it have the right tonality? Is this ownable to your brand?
• Did you ever talk to your audience to understand how they relate to your brand today and why they may or may not be using it? What unmet needs does she have? Can your brand deliver against them or not?

Net, when looking at a piece of data about marketing campaign results or a white paper from an agency touting their solution, have you done the necessary homework to truly understand what you need to solve for to truly grow your business?

Too many times, I have seen brands take significant shortcuts on this, only to find their results not where they need to be or to do something that alienates their target audience.

What I would tell my friend, if I had a mulligan, would be “there’s no magic bullet. No panacea to solving your marketing challenges. Hate to break it to you, but you gotta do the pick and shovel work and dig into the numbers to make sense of them to truly understand what you need to do “.

So, do your homework. Take the time to understand what’s going on. Because if you do that, you will see right through the BS that many folks put out there when they claim there’s a magic bullet to solving their marketing challenges.

Looking for help on this? Drop me a line.