How many leads could your small business handle before you lost your personal touch? If you want your business to grow, you need to keep finding new ways to increase that number.
Last week, we covered some important dos and don’ts of marketing automation. AllProWebTools’ marketing director, Paige, shared that one of the biggest fouls in automated marketing campaigns is replacing relationships with technology.
Technology can be an amazing tool for empowering strong customer relationships, but only if you use it to get more personal instead of less. Automation and personalization are actually strong allies, but as your marketing outreach scales up, you have to keep these guiding principles in mind to avoid losing that valuable, personal touch.
1. Give Your Branding a Consistent Voice
In writing, your “voice” is the specific way you word things that makes you sound just a little different from anyone else.
Branding voice covers your writing style for website copy, blog posts, emails, and social media posts. It also covers color choices, your logo, and other visual branding elements. Make sure you customize your website, invoicing, and email templates with the voice of your brand.
A great way for small businesses to do this is to use your own personal brand. This helps keep that one-to-one feeling that draws many people to work with small businesses. It’s a good idea to write blogs, marketing emails, and newsletters in your own voice, with your byline and picture.
Writing as yourself will make it easier for you to keep an engaging, personal, and consistent branding voice. It will also make it easier for your customers and leads to identify with you.
2. Gather Detailed Information about Prospects
It’s pretty difficult to reach out to your prospects as individuals if you don’t know anything about them.
First priority is gathering basic contact information (name, phone number, and email) with a lead box. Offer a piece of content that offers them more information about the problem you solve in exchange for their email address, and you should see an increase in new leads from your website.
Next you need to learn more about them, so you can continue to provide them with targeted content, special offers, and more. You might include a brief survey as part of your lead box, but be very careful not to make your lead box so long that people don’t want to fill it out.
Use a dashboard that offers reports on what keywords people are using to find you, and track what URLs people visited just before yours. Both of these reports can tell you about your lead’s interests, the problem they’re trying to solve, and where they are in the sales process.
Throughout the process, keep your focus on adding value to your prospect. Always remember, you have to give to get.
Visit the original post to see tips 3 and 4
5. Keep Customer Support Highly Personal
If a lot of your marketing outreach is automated, it’s extra important to have a well-informed real person offering live support.
Whether that’s you or an employee, make sure they are empowered to make decisions and address problems themselves. They also need to be aware of the business’s branding voice, and stay consistent with that.
If someone contacts you for more information, that means they’re a very warm lead, and catering to them becomes top priority. Focus on them, make yourself available, and establish yourself as a real person that they can count on.
In Summary
In all your marketing communications, focus on being genuine, social, and consistent. Whenever you’re writing, imagine the buyer persona you’ve created and write to that individual.
Whether you’re B2B or B2C, when you’re creating marketing communications, you’re P2P—People To People.
