As a marketer you may be familiar with the saying “Marketing is like seduction” and I can’t agree more.
Sadly, nowadays, I think most marketeers have forgotten about seduction and try to ask for marriage way too early.
If marketing is about seduction, I would argue that advertising is about persuasion.
Look at my amazing Google Ad, please click on it and buy now.
As digital managers / directors, we have sales targets, traffic and profitability objectives. With the increase of competition in most industries and the decrease of buying power, most brands struggle to hit their sales objectives.
So, what do we all do? We spend insane media budgets; we try to persuade our prospects with exciting creatives and offerings. GAFAMs make money and the digital space is every day filled with more advertising fighting for people’s attention. What a vicious circle.
Well, don’t you think before asking for wedding, you must first seduce and create bonds? Then engagement and wedding will become evidence for both of us.
Here are a few thoughts to step away from our traditional sales funnel: Acquire, engage, convert and retain and reconsider our digital marketing approach.
Start to give without asking for anything else in return.
Again, successful relationships start with caring about the other. Caring for his/her well-being, feeling important in his/her eyes, giving without asking for anything in return.
Transposing in today’s digital world means you may first create added-value content that resonate to your target audience. You’ve spent hours defining your personas, their needs, their journey, what they are looking for. Now use it!
Ask your content strategist and your copywriter to create content your audience really need, not only SEO-friendly content. Write guides, advice, opinions, lists, comparisons, in-depth analysis… your audience will enjoy this content with great interest and they will thank you for that.
They will follow your social medias, they will register to your newsletter, waiting for the next piece of valuable content that will answer their true needs.
At this stage, the temptation to push for products here and there is high.
Just don’t.
Be selfless.
Be altruistic.
Just keep on building bonds, trust and engagement.
By the way, you will collect an enormous amount of data; valuable insights about what your target audience care about, what they really need, what are their expectations and beliefs. That’s an asset.
Aim at becoming the one stop place for your target audience.
You’re a DIY retailer? Aim at becoming the best place where people can learn how to do renovation work (See the Leroy Merlin learning center)
You’re a beauty brand? Aim at becoming the best place where I can learn how to apply make-up (See the Make up for ever academy)
When Nike teach me how to run, they just teach me how to run:
- They provide 5K, 10K, Marathon training plan I can download,
- They help me to get started with a coach on video,
- They explain to me what speed run, long runs and recovery runs are and why it’s important to include them in my training plan,
- They build a dedicated mobile app to accompany me along my runs.
They don’t try to sell products at this stage. They just build a relationship.
Segment your CRM accordingly.
Your CRM can tell you how many prospects and customers you have but can it really tell you how good you are engaging with your target audience?
Can you really track how good you are in bringing your prospects from a state A to a state B? State A being “I’ve just discovered your brand”; state B being “My gosh, I love your brand, it resonates with the concern XYZ I have in my life, and I know your brand can help me to solve it”
Some SaaS CRMs do, other don’t.
Even enterprise-level CRM solution so not always allow you to track this natively if you haven’t integrated it from the start.
Segment your audience along this lifecycle and track the evolution every day or week:
- Unknown prospects. I just have their email address, opt-in and the email collection source (ie. Landing page ABC)
- Engaged prospects. I know these prospects often open my newsletters; they’ve downloaded this guide and they’re using my mobile app at least every week.
- Engaged prospects on a given product category or a given need. I know these prospects essentially care about this need (ie. Makeup for black skin).
You will then be able to address each segment with specific marketing strategies and content.
Track your monthly segments’ growth as well as collection sources.
You have your 4 to 5 segments configured into your CRM ? Now track how good ou are at growing them.
Fill in the pipe.
Each months’, you’ll loose and acquire new prospects.
See how your audience grow.
For each segment, look at the collection sources.
For example, you may collect prospect’s email from
- A newsletter subscription pop in on your website
- Visitors who abandonned their cart after creating their account
- A Facebook lead collection campaign
- Content your visitors download from your silo landing pages
Test, learn and accelerate where you see traction
Build email sequences and automations.
At this stage, marketing and email automation should be your highest priority.
Build email sequences and automations that bring your prospects into a dedicated funnel.
From a technical standpoint, most CRM and email marketing platforms allow you to build automated sequences:
- Salesforce Marketing Cloud
- Brevo (ex. Sendinblu)
- Hubspot
- Mailchimp
- Klavyo
- ConvertKit
- ActiveCampaign
- …
From a business standpoint, it’s a demanding project in itself:
- List and prioritize the high potential segments you want to address first,
- Understand your personas, pains, expectations and journey,
- Build an email automation with X steps and content that actually meet their expectations,
- Run ongoing test & learn, track data and adjust to improve performances.
Wrap up
As a digital leader, care about your segments’ size and growth more than overall conversion rates.
The more you seduce and build relationship, the more you’ll get engaged and married in a near future.
The good recipe for steady and solid growth.