Relationship Marketing Tips
for
Big Business Success
By Judith Sherven, PhD and Jim Sniechowski, PhD
While there is a lot of chat and PR
about
relationship marketing and how it’s more and more important to your
business success, it is often difficult to discover what “relationship
marketing” requires you to provide for your customers.
Typical hard-sell marketing focuses more on the customer within the person —
instead of the person within the customer — so we can’t look there for
practical how-to relationship marketing answers.
Instead, we must look to what we call Soft-Sell Marketing in order to get into
the heart of marketing success. It’s in this heart-based, soul-guided method of
marketing that relationship takes center stage as the core secret to your career
enjoyment and big business success.
SOFT-SELL MARKETING
Before we provide several relationship marketing tips you can put to use
immediately, it’s important to share with you our
business success story. We
got started in marketing and sales just four years ago, coming onto the Internet
after 17 years as psychotherapists specializing in
dating and marriage counseling.
As a husband and wife psychology team, while we tried to promote our products
with the hard-sell marketing methods we saw everyone else using — it just
didn’t fit. It didn’t fit for who we are, nor did it fit for the people we were
marketing to.
We knew there had to be a better way. So when we started writing our own
heart-based sales copy, and then teaching our Soft- Topic Copywriting Secrets
course, that’s what gave us a more in-depth appreciation for the needs of the
soft-sell marketer — those people who are service providers and care-givers.
And that ultimately gave birth to what we call Soft-sell Marketing — focused on
a conscious relationship connection with your reader as the core value of
exchange — long before any money or product has even changed hands.
In case it is not clear what Soft-sell Marketing is — think about it this way...
It’s all about the difference between ROI and ROE.
ROI vs ROE
If someone buys something from you and they expect that the money they paid for
it will return to them plus a profit, that’s called an ROI —
Return on Investment — transaction.
This is the way most standard investment transactions are designed and
understood, with stocks, bonds, real estate, and business take-overs being key
examples.
But this ROI business model simply does not work if you are a service provider,
care-giver, life-enhancement expert of any kind.
Let’s say that you are a parenting counselor and a couple comes to you for
advice with their 5 year old. You make a suggestion and it works. Their child is
better. And they give you a check.
Do they expect the amount of the check to return to them plus a profit? Of
course not. That’s not the nature of the transaction.
What you’ve done is changed their life experience. And for that type of
transaction we’ve coined the term ROE — Return of Experience.
Soft-Sell marketers specialize in ROE — Return of Experience.
And it’s for you, the ROE marketer, that Soft-sell Marketing is designed for and
dedicated to.
RELATIONSHIP MARKETING DEFINED
If you
search Google for “relationship marketing,” you will discover that the
first several organic free listings are about data-based marketing. Then you’ll
discover several sites that center around strategies to produce customer and
brand loyalty. But so far what you’ve encountered amounts to hard-sell
marketing lite — all tactics and strategies — no relating person-to-person,
heart-to-heart.
That’s why Soft-Sell Marketing emphasizes the need to personally identify with your customer, to have an internal bond with the people you are speaking to in your promotional sales copy, in your radio show, your platform presentations, anything you do that promotes your special excellence, your specific genius that benefits others.
We’re talking here about relationship marketing from within the heart of
marketing — not just some clever tricked-out relationship-strategy put together
by some whiz kids on Madison Avenue.
We’re talking about the real thing, the genuine heart-felt relationship you
experience in relation to your potential customers whether they buy from you or
not.
So, what is your deepest
relationship with your ideal customer? That’s what you’re after in order to
experience big business success that’s organic to who you are and who your ideal
customers are.
RELATIONSHIP MARKETING TIPS
• Answer the question: What problem(s) have you had that your ideal customer is
currently seeking a solution for?
• What emotion(s) do you feel toward the need(s) your ideal customer brings to
their search for you and what you provide that will alleviate their problem(s)?
• How has your life improved because of the solution you’ve created that you’re
now marketing to help other people achieve the same or similar results?
• How does it make you feel to know you can provide that kind of lifestyle
improvement for your customers?
• How does it make you feel when your satisfied customers go out of their way to
thank you for the value you’ve provided for them?
• Given your answers to the questions above, what are the three most important
customer-benefits you want to make sure to include in all of your marketing
messages?
• And how can you put your emotional connection with your customer more openly
into your relationship marketing?
When you bring yourself into the heart of marketing, your customers have a
clearer idea about who you are and what you care about — is it them, or is it
just the money?
And when it’s them — your customers — then they know that they are safe with
you, they are at home in the marketing relationship that’s dedicated and
designed just for them. And then you have the basis for big business success
that values and lifts up both you and your customers.
For more information about Soft-Sell Marketing, visit
www.TheHeartofMarketing.com
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