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Show Notes

If you want to grow your business, there’s no getting around it–you need to cultivate strong relationships with your customers. By fostering connections between your brand and your audience through your marketing efforts, you can grow your business in a way that feels natural and sustainable. Join me in this episode as I explore relationship building and some key ways to accomplish it.

Want to Work with Jennifer and her Virtual Marketing Experts Team?

Are you a coach, consultant, or online course creator who are looking to grow your business, increase your income, and scale your impact? Connect with me at YourMarketingMatchmaker.com I look forward to hearing from you.

Jennifer:

Hey there, welcome back to Marketing Matchmaker, I hope you are having a fantastic summer. And I hope that you, like my family, have gotten to have a vacation and spend some time away from your general world and your general life and do something really fun with your time. I know oftentimes, in the summer, people want to take that vacation and extend it. I have talked to so many business owners in the past couple of weeks, that are taking weeks off for the summer.

And I think that is amazing for them.

And it could be just as amazing for you if you have consistency in your lead generation. So that while you’re off, things are still working behind the scenes. And when you come back, you are ready to hit the ground running. Today’s episode, we are going to continue talking about marketing, obviously, but I wanted to talk a little bit about relationship building, in your marketing. The you know kind of what that is why it’s important. Some things that you can do to help to build those relationships and in your marketing and in your business itself.

If you haven’t been following me, or listening to my podcast, you may not be aware of my correlation between marketing and dating. And so I’m gonna hit that real quick so that for those of you that haven’t heard it before, you can kind of get an idea of what I mean by building a relationship with your marketing.

So I really do believe that business in general is all about building relationships. It’s about building that know, like and trust so that people are ready, willing and able to buy from you. And there’s a lot that can go into your marketing. But when we look at it from a foundational level, we want to look at your marketing. From that perspective, how do we build real, strong, vibrant relationships with our audience with our leads and with our clients.

So if we look at marketing from the lens of dating, it becomes a little easier, I think, to understand what I mean by that. In life, we often start dating is in a process, we may not even know that we’re doing specific steps. And yet, most people follow the same steps when it comes to dating regardless of where they’re at in their life, and regardless of where they’re at in their dating world.

So if we look at it from that perspective, and we can take that same methodology that we use in dating and creating strong, long lasting relationships with our partners, and transport that over into our business and our marketing world, there’s this synergy that happens, there’s this real love for your business, as well as your audience’s love for your business. Because it’s created almost a bond between you and your audience.

So what do I mean by the steps to dating? So in the normal romantic world, step one would be introducing yourself to someone in marketing that’s really sitting down and determining who it is you want to introduce yourself to how you’re going to introduce yourself, and what you’re going to say to them. That is a key foundational piece to really growing an effective marketing strategy.

Step two, in the dating world is flirting, you know, those things, if you’re doing absolutely the in app messages, or if you’re in a bar, you know, just the casual flirting, chatting, nothing really has heavy, right? It’s just that interaction of getting to know you a little bit. That flirting stage when it comes to marketing is really about your content. It’s about building awareness and building a brand that can help you to really create an audience that’s ready for the next step. So in your life, that would be dating, actually saying, Okay, I want to see you again and again and actually starting a relationship with them.

In the marketing world, if we think of that, that’s where our lead generation really comes into play. Because we’re asking for the audience to take that next step into our world by giving us their email address and by consuming our content, whether that’s trainings or webinars or master classes. or emails, all of those pieces are part of that dating puzzle. It’s really where that know like, and trust builds, and builds and builds, just like in your dating life, right? The whole point of dating is to get to know each other and really understand whether you guys are a good fit.

The same can be said with your marketing and with your business.

Step four, in this cycle, in a relationship, it’s all about commitment.

Now, whether that commitment is a long term commitment with your partner, or whether it’s marriage, or whether it’s whatever commitment means to you, in the dating world, that’s generally the next logical step in that dating process. In marketing, in the business world, that commitment step is where people buy. Now, here’s the thing about that commitment step, a lot of business owners want to go from introduction to commitment, without the two steps in between, they want buyers to buy immediately. And while that happens, just like in the real world, some people date for two days or a week, and then they get married, it happens. And it’s not the norm.

Just like in a real world relationship, just like growing your business. takes time, it takes developing that relationship and really learning about who you are and who and whether or not you’re right for that person. I was talking to business owners earlier today, and we were talking about the number of touches it takes to get to a sale. And in the past, they’ve said things like it’s seven to 12 touches, and then it went from 12 to 15 touches. Quite honestly, I think that’s the current model. And I’m not sure that I believe that, especially when you’re going towards a completely cold audience, people who don’t really know who you are yet. Sometimes that can take hundreds of touches in order for them to be ready to buy. And that can be throughout all your steps of marketing, right. So some of those touches can be things like your content on social media, or your email address, or your emails that go out or podcasts or, you know, any kind of interaction that your audience gets from you.

All of those things help to really be develop a strong bond with your audience and helps move them towards the buyer stage. Understanding that makes that commitment easier. I will also say having really, really amazing content and copy will help you to shorten that cycle. Because that is how you really do create that relationship with your audience. Now, here’s the thing, a lot of people stop at step four, in the dating world, and in the marketing world. And that is the worst thing you can do. Because step five is just as important in both life and business.

Step five is all about keeping the romance alive. Just like in every relationship where you have to continue to engage with your partner and grow that relationship. In your business. And in your marketing, you want to have that same idea. You want to continue just because someone has bought from from you before, that doesn’t stop your marketing efforts. Because they then become your hopefully lifetime buyers, which means you get to continue to nurture them, you get to continue to move them along your value ladder and offer them your next step in having a relationship with you.

Or, and you get to create this relationship with this audience so that they’re able to bring in their friends and become that unicorn who refers everyone that you know to you. Keeping the romance alive is a key part of that whole dating your ideal client model, and really should be included in every marketing strategy. It’s not just how do we get them to buy it’s what happens after they buy.

Relationship building is really about establishing nurturing and fostering connections. With all of those people who could be prospects and leads and customers, or even referral partners, power partners, people who can advocate for you. And it does involve taking the time to understand your audience’s needs, interests, preferences, and really tailoring your marketing strategy to meet them.

That’s what that introductions phase is really for. It’s not necessarily about selling and promoting your products or services. It’s about building trust and credit about credibility and loyalty with your audience. The primary goal of relationship building, when it comes to marketing, and when it comes to your business is creating a long lasting relationship between you and your audience.

Again, why I always push that keeping the romance alive, issue. This, if you focus on this, if you focus your marketing on really helping to create a solid foundation of your business, if that is building relationships, I promised you that it will help you to scale your business in ways you can’t imagine.

The thing is, is in today’s digital age, we are bombarded with other people, there are so many options, that when you have a good relationship with your audience, it can really help you to stand out from everyone else. It helps you to differentiate yourself from your competitors, and really creates loyal following, which is what we all want when it comes to our business, right. We all want those engaged audience members who are ready to buy from you and who are also ready to refer people to you like never before.

Building a strong connection with your audience can increase your customer retention rates, it can reduce the number of clients that leave again, why keeping the romance is so important. It can generate repeat business, why that’s why having a value ladder is incredibly important so that you’re able to keep them on a journey that will continue to grow your business. Realistically, it allows your audience to recommend you to everyone that they know, which then allows you to create more buyers and more followers and more audience members, which just repeats that cycle.

So a couple of things that I want you to make sure that you’re doing when you are working on a relationship building marketing strategy number one, develop your ideal client persona, or ideal clients, buyers persona or whatever you want to call it. Really understanding your audience’s demographics, their psychographics, their pain points, their goals, how they choose to learn and consume content. All of those pieces can help you to create messaging that is tailored to your ideal clients. It also allows you to tell your your marketing strategy to meet the needs of your ideal client.

And my friends, the the more specific we can get when it comes to really creating that ideal clients persona, the better we can get with our messaging. Because I will say if you are business is for everyone, and anyone, no one is going to hear you. You really do want to get very specific about who it is you want to work with.

The other thing is really to personalize your marketing efforts. When we can drill deeper into who it is that we’re wanting to work with, the better we’re able to make that marketing messaging really personal and help them connect with their audience. help you connect with your audience in a way that helps your audience connect with you. Ideally, we all want to have one continuous marketing message throughout all of our marketing and I also know that sometimes we have different buyer personas depending on In what it is we’re selling.

Now, I will say, you really do want to focus on one thing that you sell. That doesn’t mean that you couldn’t have two different levels of it and two different buyers for those levels. You want to make sure, however, that your marketing message attracts the people that you want to work with more than anyone else, because that is how you’re going to really grow and scale your business. Really allowing yourself to create relationships in your business is going to help you scale your business in the long run.

Relationship Building is not just a one time effort, marketing in general is not just a one time effort throwing up a post on, you know, social media, once in a while is not going to create a successful business. It’s an ongoing process that requires you to keep refining it, it requires you to really be consistent with it. And it really does create this synergy between you and your audience.

Here’s the reality: if you are really, really drilled into who it is you want to attract how it is you want to work with them, what their pain points are, what what problem you solve with them, you’re really able to set yourself up in a business that is scalable, it’s a business that’s you’re able to then take to the next level. Relationship marketing is the key to really creating long term audience members, long term leads, long term clients and long term referral partners. So when you start thinking about your marketing, avoid feeling overwhelmed by it and start thinking of it from that data in your ideal client perspective.

How can I create a relationship with my audience that’s going to help me to grow my business? When you do that, when you look at it from that perspective, you’re better able to create a customer journey that hits the points that your customers need in order to buy.

So if you’re ready to grow your business, increase your revenue and scale your impact. And you’re looking for a strategy to do that. Head over to yourmarketingmatchmaker.com. I would love to have you on one of our strategy episodes, where we can really dive into how you can take relationship marketing and apply it to your business.

Outro: Thank you for listening to the marketing matchmaker podcast.
If you enjoyed this episode, I would love to hear your feedback. Please head over to Apple iTunes and leave a review so we can hear from you. And if you are a coach, consultant or online course creator who are looking to grow your business, increase your income and scale your impact. And that put me at your marketing matchmaker.com I look forward to hearing from you.