Ainhoa Rodriguez-Muguruza
Live From #INBOUND2021
Marketing is driven by emotions and customers are proud to guide their decisions through their feelings! Marketing is not about calling the attention of a prospect anymore; it is about establishing relationships that are special enough for them to consider them memorable. With higher standards than ever, customers are basing their decisions on more than features and function, they are looking for experiences.
Nina Butler, Director of Event Experience at Alyce, delighted us with a session on how to use personal experience to delight and ignite your advocates. Nina described herself as a person passionate for making personal connections, ensuring that each interaction is a memorable one. For her, marketing strategies should focus on fostering real connections and building emotional resonance with your customers in every interaction that you have with them.
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Marketing Interactions through the Last Decades
Nina explained very clearly the shift that customer experience has felt in the last decades. As automation and technology has taken over some of our processes, customer experience has started to feel a little bit like a mass assembly line! Processes are more efficient and dynamic, but they are also less meaningful. Nina uses the term “touch” to speak about the interactions in which customers do not get anything particularly valuable from the experience.
Touches are generic and impersonal messages that have very little quality when it comes to adding value to the customer. Nina believes that it is due to the number of touches that customers receive on a daily basis that have caused opt out rates to be 10 times higher than ever before. And remember, a contact that opt outs is a contact you will not be able to get in touch with again! What is exactly happening for customers to cut communication lines like that?
Nina foresees that companies will be burning through their prospects if they do not pay special attention to this shift in human behaviour. If your company is comfortable with keeping communicating in the same way they have done in the last four years, it is very likely that your messages will not feel genuine. In-message personalisation like the one offered by HubSpot can help your messages resonate better with your audience but… it might not be enough!
Personalisation tokens will not start a relationship with your customers for you, it will not cultivate a sentiment of trust with your prospects. According to Adobe, 66% of buyers said that interacting with a non-personalised experience would put them off from keeping in touch with a company. Customers want to have actual relationships with the people that they are buying from, to feel more than a mere member within your database.
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4 Ways to Use Personal Experience in Your Business
Personal customer experience, by definition, is the approach to scalable growth that prioritises personal bonds through one-to-one moments with your audience. It is about transforming those general touches into truly remarkable and memorable moments. Opposed to touches, moments are perfectly tailored interactions that are emotionally charged and, as a result, allow you to build rapport, earn trust, and drive customer loyalty.
#1 Turn an Industry Event into an Interest Event
Find something in your event that different parts of your CRM will be interested about and underline it when promoting your event. You should not be looking at a one-size-fits-all solution, but you should not overcomplicate your message either. If you do not have that information, it might be beneficial to run a quick survey among your database so they can tell you exactly what they look for.
For virtual events, partnering with another company that most of your database is interested in can be enough to ignite their interest; when it comes to physical events, highlighting the city where you will be developing the event will encourage a particular region to get involved. It is that easy! It is the teams that focus on the quality for their audience that win on the experience.
#2 Identify Gifting Moments
Inboxes have come to be a very messy place, particularly when it comes to email marketing. It is important that, if we want to connect with our customers at a deeper level, we make sure that our interactions go beyond self-promotion and generic touches. A very helpful way of doing so is by making them a gift! Now, I know this sounds quite different to the traditional approaches but bear with me.
A gift can be a way to motivate or reward a customer for taking a desired action or, more accurately, to acknowledge their presence on your database and give them a delightful surprise for simply being there! Identify critical moments throughout the customer journey and consider whether a gift could accelerate their decision. Use solutions that allow this process to be automatised and quick!
#3 Build Personalised Landing Pages
Just as Nina pointed out, people’s inboxes have never been more crowded, and LinkedIn InMail has never been more flooded with message requests… It is up to us to create something that has real value. A place to invest your efforts is your landing pages. Landing pages can build rather quickly, with a generic approach that will make customers forget about your page as soon as they close the tab!
Landing pages give you a fantastic opportunity to introduce what makes your business different, so you start building a relationship with that customer. Not all landing pages are for conversion, they can serve for purposes as simple as getting your prospects to know you. Including a quick video intro about yourself, your company, and your mission can be enough to start building that connection.
#4 Create Videos that Connect with your Audience
While videos are a fantastic resource to include in your landing pages, they are actually quite great at optimising the feeling of familiarity customers will find in almost anything! In order to make video that will truly resonate with your audience, you need to understand what exactly catches the eye of your customers!
Incorporating video can increase in 86% the conversion rates of landing pages. In fact, 1 in every 2 marketers consider video the content with best ROI! However, avoid the mistake of including videos without purpose in your strategy. Customers want, above all, that the content that reaches them is relevant. Use your insights on your customer’s lifecycle and create content that reflects your efforts.
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How Can Personal Experiences Be Applied to Marketing for the Construction Industry?
While Nina’s talk might have come as a surprise for some viewers, the shift in customer experience that she described is clearly perceptible in the construction industry, where our industry specialised. In construction, businesses find themselves marketing to different buyer personas and not all specifiers look for the same solutions.
It is essential to gain deep understanding of the core challenges your specifiers might be facing when designing your marketing plan. The more time and research you devote to developing your specifier personas, the more accurate your marketing efforts will be. Conducting a thorough user insight research can tell you a lot about what construction professionals are looking for when interacting with your brand.
From our own marketing experience, for example, we have learnt that due to their remarkable attention-to-detail, architects are thought to be hard to impress and, if possible, even harder to convince. For architects, your product is only as attractive as the available data about it. When it comes to specifiers, they are exclusively trained to advise their team on the product that best fit their project. They focus on function and how your product stands out from the crowd. Rather than details, contractors care about efficiency and seek a product to be practical over anything else. And, last but not least, designers tend to prioritise data regarding materials and energetic efficiency.
About Insynth
At Insynth we deliver a predictable flow of leads, customers, and specifications for building product brands through our inbound marketing approach, proven to reach a technically demanding audience.
We use the latest marketing techniques such as construction inbound marketing, to equip building product companies to grow sustainability in this era of digital transformation.
As the only HubSpot certified agency to major in construction marketing. We have a proven formula of bringing a variety of functionalities together including CRM Implementation, Web Design, Sales Automation, SEO, and Email Marketing to achieve your ultimate aim: Growing your business and gaining new specifiers and customers.