What 3 marketing steps are designed to build customer relationships?
Building customer relationships. Growing audience. Growing customer relationships. Building audience. That’s the marketing mantra for many companies. If you’re not building relationships with your current customers, you are always on the lookout for new ones. And if you’re always on the lookout for new customers, you are missing out on opportunities to keep your customers coming back to you.
Let’s break down the final stage of the 3-Stage Marketing Strategy. Here we’ll discuss ongoing content and sales so that you know what to focus on in your marketing in order to build relationships and grow audiences. Or, is it the other way around?
Stage 3 of the 3-Stage Marketing Strategy: Build Relationships with Ongoing Content
[Read about Steps 1-3: Marketing Foundation]
[Read about Steps 4-6: Audience-Building on Autopilot ]
Step 7: Social Media
Step 8: Nurture Emails
Step 9: Proposals / Sales Process
Step 7: Social Media
Create a social media strategy.
Twenty years ago, if you wanted to get a feel for a company, you’d evaluate their lobby. You’d make an appointment, head to their office, and the first impressions would begin. If the magazines were up-to-date while you waited, you made a mental note of it. If the place seemed clean and fresh, you’d make a mental note of that.
Many businesses that Downstage Media works with don’t have a physical office, but their customers and potential customers are still making those mental notes.
It’s just that nowadays, those mental notes are based on your social media presence.
Think about it. When you meet someone at a networking event, for example, they are going to look you up on your website, most likely, (which we covered in Stage 2, Step 4) and they are going to look you up on social media.
So it’s vital to have a social media presence so that your audience knows that you can understand their problems and you know how to solve them.
But social media can easily eat up all of your time and energy. It doesn’t have to, though. In my book, Simple Social Media, I go into a strategy that helps you have a presence without feeling like you’re constantly editing Reels (unless you want to, I mean, you do you!)
Here are a few time-saving social media tips:
Only focus on two social media platforms at a time - not owned by the same company - at most. You don’t need to be everywhere.
Liking, commenting on, and sharing posts from other people will help you build stronger relationships with prospects and peers than purely publishing your own content alone.
Create, vary, automate. Come up with an idea for a post, say it a few different ways, then schedule that content out in batches. I recommend ten posts at a time. But five is a good start.
For more social media strategy, join in at the next Simple Social Media webinar.
Step 8: Nurture Emails
Create a series of nurture emails to continue building relationships with your customers.
I like to think of emails in 3 different ways:
Annie Schiffmann is an Intuit Mailchimp Partner.
Blasts: (one-offs that go out to all or a segment of your audience)
Sales sequences: a short series of pre-written emails triggered by one event designed to start a sales conversation
Nurturing sequences: ongoing emails designed to be entertaining or informative
Most small businesses create blasts. They have something coming up and they send an email about it. Or, they send out an email once a month with a roundup of what’s going on. Those are great. I recommend sending out at least two of them each month.
In Step 6, we talked about the importance of sales sequences. Having these automations set up for each of your lead generators helps your email tool become a sales team for you while you’re doing other stuff.
Nurture emails, though, are all about staying on your customer’s mind. Sometimes they download a freebie and they’re not ready to buy yet. They change their mind. Their circumstances change. Life happens. That’s cool.
So you want to regularly be sending them out helpful, thoughtful emails that show that you have been in their shoes and you know how to solve their problems.
This way, when they are ready to buy, you are at the top of their mind because you’ve shown up at the top of their inboxes for years.
These nurture email sequences can be pre-written and put into an automation, or they can be written on the fly. I have a client who has over 52 already written. Whereas another client I’ve worked with writes and sends them out religiously.
If you work better by having a set schedule, then work writing a newsletter into your weekly routine.
If you work better in fits and starts, then create a series of emails in batches and then automate them.
Downstage Media can help Mailchimp customers with setting up a nurturing sequence. Schedule an Intro Call.
Step 9: Proposals / Sales Process
Create effective proposals that close deals.
Up until this point, we’ve worked on getting prospects in the door. Now, though, it comes time to turn those prospects into customers.
“Marketing is what leads people to the cash register. Sales is what makes it ring.”
This is where the sales process becomes vital.
I like to say:
Marketing is what leads people to the cash register. Sales is what makes it ring.
An important part of sales is a proposal that is designed to get your prospect to understand what your offer is, how you’re going to deliver it, and what to expect. In Business Made Simple, there is a great course called Proposals Made Simple that walks you through just how to craft one for your offerings.
Another important part of the sales process is how you deliver that proposal. For your business to succeed you have to be good at selling it. And sales is a skill. When I realized how important sales was to the growth of Downstage Media, it reminded me of all of the thousands of auditions that I went on when I was performing (quick aside: I was a professional actress for 15 years). Spoiler alert: if I had been better at it, I would have made a lot more money.
You want to understand just what your prospect needs, ask questions to find out more, then have clear ways to overcome any objections and build a bridge between the problem they have and what you offer.
I’m going to be 100% transparent and let you know that I’m by no means an expert. I am learning more every day about sales. So here are my favorite resources:
Proposals: Proposals Made Simple in Business Made Simple Get a free trial
Sales Process: Customer is the Hero in Business Made Simple Get a free trial
Sales Training for B2B Experts: Do It! MBA Book a 15-min demo
Stage 3 is all about Relationships
In Stage 3, you grow the relationships with your customers - or potential customers. This is where you start conversations that you’re going to keep going. Those conversations can happen on social media, in email inboxes, and in sales calls. But those conversations are happening.
Imagine how great it would feel to see that someone you don’t know has booked a time on your calendar to meet with you and then when you see one another face to face she says, “I’ve been following you online for awhile now! And I need your help now!”
That is a sign that your marketing is working.
All of the work that you put in from setting up the foundation in Stage 1, to putting systems in place in Stage 2, to nurturing those relationships in Stage 3 are coming together to help you grow your business.
To see where your business, product, or brand stacks up in terms of the 3-Stage Marketing Strategy, take the StoryBrand Marketing Assessment.
