Let’s Get Personal!

Your marketing needs to make a critical pivot to be successful in today’s marketplace. It needs to create personal connections. The COVID pandemic forced everyone to stay at arm's length, and marketing went digital. In the past several years, the proliferation of email and digital ads has become overwhelming, causing individuals to go to greater lengths to block out unsolicited marketing efforts.

The pandemic is over, and we need to move on! Marketers need to think critically about their strategy and focus on efforts that make a personal connection—opportunities to bring sales and the prospect or client together to create direct interaction. Only that direct interaction will lead to personal relationships based on a shared knowledge of the person and what challenges they are facing.

We need to think about our calls to action in terms of what generates face time. I’m not talking about another podcast, but an opportunity for sales to speak directly to the individual. We still need digital marketing and podcasts to generate awareness and build brand equity. But as potential new clients move through the experience, how can we create a sales process that includes a personal interaction with the individual we are building a relationship with?

In the initial stages, efforts like trade shows and presentations play a huge role in generating awareness and building a perception of your capabilities and value. Trade shows expose you to an exceptionally large audience, ensuring your efforts portray the right message. If your booth experience draws in your target audience, you’re off to a great start. But it’s like going to a party for the first time—you meet a lot of people, but really don’t know much about any of them.

It's time to level up your efforts and move potential clients closer to you. Build on that new relationship and fold them into your sales and marketing efforts to nurture that personal connection. The offer of a demo or unique workshop as an extension of that initial connection creates the opportunity for sales to interact more directly with clients. Presenting these opportunities in a way that creates value for the client removes much of the risk associated with allocating their time. Assessments can be an effective way to demonstrate the potential of your capabilities to the client while allowing sales to gather more insights and strengthen their personal relationship.

Events and educational workshops are another way of making that personal connection. These must be formatted in a way that offers high-value takeaways to your prospects. Clients respond to insights and education that enhance their understanding and helps them bring ideas and improvements back to their companies. Designed for both influencers and decision-makers, these opportunities to connect are much stronger than anything you can deliver using digital means only.

Again, digital is still a critical element in influencing and building relationships. Use your social media efforts to build community or groups that coalesce around the industry and products you’re providing. You can determine success based on the interactions and exchanges that come from social media. Viewing it as a community-building opportunity is the difference between building personal relationships and being just another digital post.

When we break down the digital clutter and move toward more direct and personal sales and marketing efforts, the closer we get to differentiation. If successful, this leads to accelerated sales growth and a longer life of customer cycles created by starting and maintaining personal relationships from the start.