Do you feel a strong connection with your customers?
One of the most critical parts of creating a successful business is working to build strong and lasting relationships with your customers. Unfortunately, that’s been getting more and more difficult in this age of online businesses and digital marketing.
Personalized Marketing Used to Be Easy
Decades ago, it was much easier to forge strong customer relationships, with a more personalized experience.
“Bill” would come into your shop, looking for something. You’d have a few minutes of small talk, seeing what he’s been up to lately, talking about his kids, etc. Then, after he makes his purchase and walks away, he’s left feeling like he just had a personal moment with you. You made it a personalized shopping experience.
This positive customer experience will likely lead “Bill” to come back in the future. You didn’t just provide him with a product; you actually engaged with him on a personal level. This personal touch lets you engage customers, for higher customer satisfaction. Which leads to repeat customers.
How to Forge Personal Connections Online
So, the big question is, how can you create that kind of personalized experience and close relationship with your customers in a digital age when you may never meet them face-to-face? The answer to the problem is to include some personal branding in your marketing strategy. When you personalize your business, you make every interaction a customer has with your business feel like a personal interaction with you!
One of the most effective ways to do this is to build your business’ marketing around you and your team. By putting the spotlight on yourself, you will be giving your business a face and a voice – yours! Suddenly, your emails and social media posts don’t sound like marketing jargon and generic advertising. Instead, they sound like you!
It’s incredible how effective this personalization strategy can be in creating a personal bond between you and your customers. Through your marketing communications with your audience, they will get to know you and your team. This strategy builds relationships and wins their trust. Even if they’ve never met you or your team in person, they feel like they have.
Personal Branding: Real World Example
Take a look at Merged Media’s homepage. Right at the top, you will see real people who work at Merged every day. It’s important to us that our customers know we aren’t just a faceless marketing agency. We’ve built our brand around personalizing our business and seen the results first-hand.
Things You Can Do Today For a More Successful Personalized Marketing Strategy
Share Your Story
Personalizing your brand can require more than just sharing faces. You need to share a story too!
For most businesses, their story ends up on their About page of their website. It should tell potential customers all about your business and weave elements of your personal story into the narrative. It’s also where you want to share your values and business beliefs.
If you have a team at your business, sharing their faces and stories on your website can also be a way to show customers that they aren’t dealing with a faceless business here. Instead, they will know that real people are working behind the scenes to provide them with the services they need. In other words, you want to humanize your business by showing people that actual humans work there!
Speaking of “behind-the-scenes…”
Go Behind-the-Scenes
Do you know why people love watching outtakes of their favourite movie stars fooling around on film sets? Yes, they can be hilarious, but they also show that the stars are people, just like them.
Showing behind-the-scenes footage of your business on social media can serve the same purpose. These videos don’t need to be super funny or show special events. They could just be short videos that show your team hanging out together after work or working together on a project.
Seeing footage of your team members can help create a personal connection with your audience, making them feel like they actually know them. Not only will this help build engagement, but it can also improve one-on-one communications with customers.
Engage on Social Media
Every business should have a robust content marketing strategy that involves posting engaging and interesting content on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and all of the other popular platforms.
However, the part that many businesses miss out on is the opportunity to actively engage with their customers on these posts. If a customer reaches out with a comment on a piece of content you posted, that’s a literal invitation to speak with them one-on-one!
Personalized interactions make them feel valued and connected to you. You know that little hit of happiness you get when you see that someone has responded to one of your posts on Facebook? You can provide your customer with the exact same feeling! If they engage with you, always respond!
Learn About Your Customers Through Customer Data
This suggestion could be challenging if you have a massive customer base. Suppose you’re working with thousands of customers every day. In that case, you will likely want to get into Personalized Marketing, where you use customer data and demographics to craft messages for specific audiences.
If, however, you have a customer base of a few hundred people, learning about them and their preferences can be a winning strategy. A great example is if someone repeatedly orders a product from your storefront, remember that purchase history so you can provide them with more personalized service the next time they visit, based on the collected data.
You can even automate this strategy with online storefronts showing customized product suggestions based on customers’ prior purchases and behavioural data.
Take the Time to Personalize Your Business
Connecting with your customers is the best way to actively build strong relationships with your audience. When you send personalized messages on social media, share information about yourself on your webpage, or help your customers with personalized content, these customer interactions build brand loyalty.
By personalizing your business, you are inviting them to engage with you and your brand!
Of course, doing so can take a lot of time. Personalizing your business could require you to revamp your website’s About page, add more photos of yourself and your team, spend time creating content, and engage with customers on social media. If you don’t have the resources to do all of that, that’s precisely why Merged Media exists!
We would be delighted to get to know you and your business, allowing us to craft a brand marketing strategy to personalize your outreach to your customers. We’ll help you deliver personalized content and create personalized experiences, with effective marketing strategies. If you want to build genuine connections with your customers, please don’t hesitate to reach out! Let’s get to know each other!
