All business is ultimately about personal relationships, but some relationships are more important than others. For example, if a majority of your customers are referrals, or you rely on a relatively small number of high-value sales per year, you target a few important, high-level decision-makers. Not everyone who likes your business on Facebook or follows your business on Twitter is one of these people.
So how do you target these critical decision-makers with your marketing strategy? Use a 1-to-1 marketing model, in which you don’t just broadcast a message to all of your followers and hope some of them come to you. Instead, you focus on followers with whom you’re most likely to build lasting business relationships.
Digital Marketing with a Laser Focus
Once you know who the decision-makers are among your customers, it becomes possible to tailor your social media messaging specifically to them—and you can do it with a laser-focus. Different methods work for different customers, and the techniques to use with each method will vary. But here are three methods we’ve found to be successful:
- LinkedIn has emerged as a top social media marketing platform because it’s so powerful for business-to-business connections. It’s excellent for starting and building personal relationships with potential customers.
- Direct messaging on Twitter allows you to tailor messages to the people who are most likely to respond to them.
- E-mail can be a one-to-one platform, too—not the kind of broadcast e-mails that often get deleted unread, but specific messages sent to specific people to accomplish a specific purpose at a specific time.
It’s important to keep in mind that a 1-to-1 marketing model doesn’t necessarily scale in volume like other marketing models can. Revenue growth comes from super-serving your best customers—you get bigger contracts as time goes by and your relationship with those customers grows stronger. That improves your bottom line, which keeps managers, owners, and/or stockholders smiling.
If your marketing strategy isn’t giving you the results you want—if a strategy of tweeting and posting on Facebook and hoping customers call isn’t helping build your business, or it isn’t bringing in the right kind of clients—it may be time to investigate a 1-to-1 marketing model. Digital marketing can be efficient and effective—not only effective in terms of building customer relationships but cost-effective too. If you’d like to find out how to use Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and e-mail to build personal, real-world relationships with your customers, get a hold of us. We’d love to help.
