Nearly every professional marketer I know is searching, all the time, for a sleek and innovative new marketing technique that might win them clients quickly and easily — a silver bullet, essentially, which might give them a leg up over the competition.

But allow me to let you in on a little secret: silver bullet solutions don’t exist.

What’s more is that marketing solutions dressed as silver bullets — solutions which promise quick and easy wins — simply don’t work.

But you know what does?

Authenticity.

Marketing isn’t about slick tactics. It’s about connection.

Too many of us exhaust our mental marketing resources on crafting the perfect sales presentation, or designing the perfect online advertisement which tricks users into clicking or giving up their emails. We think of marketing, in this sense, as a coldly tactical thing.

It’s not.

My brands and my companies, to date, have generated a billion dollars. I personally connect with listeners all over the world. And I didn’t do that through conventional thinking. Instead of trying to trick listeners or hook users, I sought to connect with them. To first understand them and what they’re struggling with, and to then share with them things that I genuinely believed could better their lives.

Truly successful marketing stems from that authentic sort of ambition. Customers can tell when it’s lacking.

Instead, customers will opt to partner with people and companies who make them feel understood.

This might be the most important lesson I’ve learned over a lifetime of selling: to truly better your customers’ lives — which should be the key aim of every entrepreneur — you have to get to know them. There’s simply no way around that.

In other words, you have to be authentically empathetic.

Unfortunately, most marketers today get this backwards; they approach the science from a self-serving point of view. They focus on making audiences understand them. On convincing audiences of the greatness of their products or their team.

Sure, selling people like this might work sometimes — it’s helpful in selling people who aspire toward more material ends — but that’s not how you forge a more authentic connection.

Try to understand your customers’ worries, ambitions, and fears.

When customers feel that the person on the other end of the podcast or speech or online advertisement gets them? When they feel as if they have been through the struggle which they’re solving for? They’re more likely to believe in them.

They’re also more likely to become customers who are not only excited about your product, but loyal to your brand.

Remember: the best products solve real problems. They alleviate genuine anxieties. And trust me, if you develop a product that does that, and if you package it with genuine passion and love in a way that conveys that youbelieve in the product as much as your marketing suggests you do, you’ll immediately begin outselling your competitors.

But that, of course, can be tough to do.

To pull it off, you have to go beyond simply wanting to connect with your customers and instead get boots on the ground and put your money where your mouth is:

• Converse with your customers where they live or work.
• Seek to understand them on a personal level.
• Identify what troubles them and what they wish they had but don’t.

In other words, enter the conversation that’s already going on in their minds.

From there, you can start taking more informed steps to both provide them with that tool or service which might get rid of that pain and fear, and you can start packaging your product with the sort of authentic messaging that conveys the genuine inspiration for it.

We live in an era of authenticity.

This, ultimately, goes beyond marketing. We live in a world today where more people demand truth and transparency. The marketers, companies, and leaders who provide that transparency — and who prove themselves to be authentic rather than sneaky — will win the game.

That’s the bottom line. In today’s world, authenticity is what sells.

Forget the silver bullet. Be true instead.

That’s the only marketing tactic you need.