Relationship Marketing: Focus On People Before Your Pitch

Are you feeling anxious to jump into social media and tell the world about your business? I have some bad news for you.

The hard truth? No one cares.

Many people believe that showing up is enough. They believe that crafting a great headline or selling a great product is enough to compel other people to care about it (or you) and buy. But it’s not.
If you expect the money to come rolling in the minute you tweet out your sales pitch, you’re going to be disappointed.
No one cares about your product unless you give them a reason to care. Your sales pitch won’t work without first building an audience who cares about it and/or your brand.
Taking the time to build relationships with your customers is a necessity. It’s also better for you and your business in the long-term.

The value of your network

Relationship marketing is not new, but, with the ongoing evolution of social media and inbound marketing, the way you attract and retain customers is.
By nature, the online world parallels real life. While the same principles of offline lead generation, sales, and customer service hold true online, your message and your brand are amplified, reaching a greater number of people in less time.
You might have a reach of 200 people in real life. At any given time, you are physically near only 2-4 of them. If you complain about the service at the coffee shop downstairs from your office, only those 2-4 people hear it.
On social media, however, you might have 2000-4000 followers. When you complain about the same coffee shop, you’re amplifying that message x 1000. Plus, if any of those followers share your message, it amplifies it to their network too.
Positive or negative, people will talk about you in their network. Create an exceptional customer experience, and people will tell their friends how great you are. Disappoint them, and they won’t hesitate to complain about you.
That’s why the relationship with your network and your customers is so important.

What do relationships have to do with sales?

The most powerful thing you can do in the online space is not making a sale. It’s building meaningful, lasting relationships with your customers. The amplification of your messaging and transparency of your brand online makes it that much more important to conduct business with honesty and integrity.
Beyond the benefits to your reputation, a network of prospects who know, like and trust you are also more likely to buy from you. And if you provide them with enough value, they will likely bring in referrals and repeat business after the initial sale.
How much of a difference does this really make? Just look at the age-old practice of cold calling.
Cold calling for leads can bring in some business, but it’s a high effort/ low reward activity. In our office, we break it down like this:
30 – thirty dials on cold leads
10 – to reach ten people
3 – three of those will meet with you
1 – one of those three will result in a sale
By comparison, here are the numbers for referrals and prospects you already know:
5 – five people referred to your product or service
2 – two of those five agree to meet with you
1 – one of those two will likely result in a sale
Using these numbers, the cold calling success ratio is 30:1. Sales from people who already know and like you averages 5:1. Less effort, more reward. Which would you rather do?
Online, the same logic holds true. According to Hubspot, 71% of people are more likely to purchase when referred by social media. The relationships you have with your prospects and customers make all the difference.

How to get Started

1. Change your perspective: People don’t like advertisements telling them what they should think, but they do like to feel understood. Stop treating your prospects like someone you need to sell. Instead, look at your business from their perspective. A little empathy goes a long way.
2. Start having conversations: Instead of broadcasting your message or sharing self-serving content, try having a conversation with your customers. Listen to what they say, and respond to their comments, questions and concerns. Find opportunities to reach out and engage with your customers and they will be more inclined to engage with you.
3. Bring value: Find ways to bring a tremendous amount of value to your customers. Providing them with an exceptional value in product (and the service behind it) is one of the key ways you can forge a strong relationship.
What additional steps have you taken to foster meaningful relationships with your customers?

Content Marketing: Can We Really Trust Your Brand?

“Then you should say what you mean,” the March Hare went on.
“I do,” Alice hastily replied; “at least–at least I mean what I say–that’s the same thing, you know.”
“Not the same thing a bit!” said the Hatter. “You might just as well say that “I see what I eat” is the same thing as “I eat what I see”!”
- Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Can your brand be trusted?

Of course your first answer is to assure me that, of course, I can trust your brand.  You’ve been around for X number of years. You have The Most Amazing Social Proof Ever in the perfectly optimized position on your website.  You’ve even have declared yourself an expert in your field. 

But I want to know whether I can trust your brand at a deeper level. And here’s what I mean.

What does your brand stand for?

You might have a mission or value statement.  You might support a charity.  You might have had a company retreat and talked about authenticity, for all I know.

But if something suddenly happened to your website and I couldn’t read those carefully crafted statements, well, then what? If I couldn’t find your web page and couldn’t read the content that talks about your brand’s passion for providing fresh water in impoverished areas or I couldn’t see your links to Seth Godin’s posts on authenticity, but I could see the rest of the content on your site and your social platforms, would I really be able to tell that those things matter?

I recently read a story about a little experiment done at a corporate retreat. A brand wanted to see if who they thought they were and how they were perceived online matched up.

It was a simple experiment, and you could easily harness the exact same tool this multi-billion dollar brand used and examine the authenticity of your own content marketing.

They took a representative example of their content and put it into a word cloud tool called Wordle. Many people see it as a great graphic tool to make artistic images of text communication.  And it is.
But it also helps you dig a little more deeply into your word choices and see what you’re talking about frequently – and what you’re not talking about at all.

For this company, it was stunning. They discovered that there was a pretty serious disconnect between what they were parading as the “important stuff” and what they were communicating online.
You might think that your followers don’t care about that level of detail. But even if they can’t exactly put their finger on it, that’s one of the ways they decide if you’re truly authentic and if they want to do business with you.

If your content isn’t aligned with who you say you are as an organization (and that counts for single person brands all the way up to large multinational corporations), you’re telling a story that is disjointed, unclear, and possibly even flat-out contradictory.  The bottom line is this: over time, your brand will appear less trustworthy. And when your potential clients have a choice, they’ll choose your competitor whose message is more clearly aligned.

How to Align Your Content With Your Brand’s Story

1. Know your purpose
2. Use your purpose to formulate the core message of your brand
3. Evaluate every piece of content against your core message and purpose

Is your content supporting your brand’s story or are you missing the mark?