No More Silver Bullets - Dale Bertrand - Leadership in Action - Episode #019

Businesses new and old are all looking to digital marketing to provide the one cure-all solution to all of the company’s challenges. Here to shatter this wistful illusion is Dale Bertrand, the founder and president of Fire&Spark, who has a lifetime of experience with digital marketing. Learn how to assess and approach digital marketing for businesses of all sizes, why you always need to be talking with your customers, and how to experiment with and implement digital marketing tactics   Takeaways: It may not be what you want to hear, but there is not a single silver bullet digital marketing tactic that will fix all of your business woes. If digital marketing is even right for you the approach you take is entirely dependent on your company’s unique situation. For young companies, it’s more important and valuable to focus on finding where the first customer is going to come from than where the millionth customer comes from. Try to think about just one customer and what you can do now to really wow them. It’s a myth that if you use a digital channel, you won’t have to talk to any customers and you can still be successful. Talking with customers informs you on the effectiveness of your messaging, what interested them in the product and why they bought it.  For companies that are just starting out, call your customers and understand why they bought, and listen carefully to what they say and what words they use. This can help you understand the ‘why’ behind the story of the data you’re seeing. Established companies have more mature marketing, however, they should constantly be improving their messaging, targeting, and product or service so it’s remarkable within that space. In established companies, try out $500 experiments that run for two weeks each. Try different channels, regardless of how they performed in years prior as your messaging, targeting, and product offerings have improved since then.  Don’t attribute the failure of a $500 experiment to the channel, the failure is likely more because the combination of messaging, targeting, etc. was not optimized. Find what worked in the campaign and what didn’t and apply those lessons in the future.    Links:  Twitter: @dbertrand LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/dalebertrand Website: https://www.fireandspark.com/   Quote of the Show: “Let’s think about where’s customer number one going to come from, not customer one million” - Dale Bertrand   Book Recommendation: The Thought Leader’s Practice - by Matt Church and Peter Cook   Shout Outs: Bureau of Digital Carl Smith Entrepreneurs Organization EO Accelerator Program   Ways to Tune In: Apple Podcast - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/leadership-in-action/id1585042233 Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/2t4Ksk4TwmZ6MSfAHXGkJI Stitcher - https://www.stitcher.com/show/leadership-in-action Google Play - https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubGVhZGVyc2hpcGluYWN0aW9uLmxpdmUvZmVlZC54bWw Amazon Music - https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/4263fd02-8c9b-495e-bd31-2e5aef21ff6b/leadership-in-action YouTube - https://youtu.be/_pzxCPfYY1w