Have you ever enjoyed learning so much that you inhale the information in big gulps, and think your head will explode? That’s how I felt when I attended Alexandria Brown’s Online Success Blueprint Workshop in Los Angeles November 8 -11.

I’ve felt for some time that traditional marketing communications and design firms were missing some critical understanding when it came to marketing and selling online — our years of offline training didn’t prepare us for the invisible online customer and the new ways in which he’d search and buy. So I felt it was my duty to learn what successful online marketers knew that I didn’t. Ali’s 3-day workshop was a great learning experience — power-packed with information, presented in an easy to absorb manner. And I learned some major differences between successful online and offline marketing approaches.

Relationships always matter.

But by far the biggest thing I came away with is the major similarity between online and offline marketing — and that’s the importance of relationships. Offline and online, marketing is built on relationships. There are different ways of building relationships with people no one in your company will probably ever meet in person, but the bottom line is that people buy products and services from people and companies they like and trust, and ignore those they don’t.

Whether you’re marketing online or off, it’s important to remember that people still like to buy from people. Even when purchasing from large product-driven companies, customers want to know that there are real people behind the company, and they gravitate to organizations that have values, things that they stand for, and go out of their way to connect. Starbucks fans don’t only like the coffee, they love the fact that Starbucks is generous with health care for their employees. Nordstrom’s customers have long been smitten by the extraordinary personal attention given to customers. And Amazon’s customers feel close to their invisible book source, which routinely finds new ways to personalize and offer the help and products that they crave. That’s why it’s important for you to establish real relationships with your customers, too, and to continually work on building them.

Here are three simple secrets for building those important client relationships.

1. The “who” is more important than the “what.”
This is one of Alexandria Brown’s mantra’s, which she attributes to Dan Kennedy, of direct marketing fame. Ali maintains that in order to influence, it’s important to make sure you’re talking to the right people, and in front of the correct audience. You can have the best product or service in the world, but if you’re building relationships with the wrong target market, you won’t make sales. Find your ideal customer first, then you can start building the relationship.

2. You have to be top of mind with your customers — all the time.
Building relationships is a long-term proposition — it doesn’t happen overnight. Many organizations take steps to build customer relationships with tactics and programs that they find difficult to sustain, and then abandon them. Regular phone check-ins with customers sound like a great idea in January, but dwindle off as the year progresses. Direct mail programs are suspended because of lack of response. And online programs like e-newsletters and blogs are discontinued for lack of time. This is difficult, I know, but listen to this: one online study found that the most stated reason for purchasing a certain product or service was that it was the product or service needed at the time. This means we have to be there, in front of the customer or prospect, all the time — or they’ll choose someone else who is.

3. You have to make it easy for your customers to work with you.
Here’s an interesting way to look at making things easy for your customers, relayed by Bill Glazer, Dan Kennedy’s partner (he spoke at Ali’s workshop). He says that the old story of “give a man a fish and you’ll feed him for a day, teach him to fish and you’ll feed him for life” isn’t true when it comes to customers. Customers, he says, don’t want to learn how to fish — they don’t want to think that your product or service will add work for them in any way. Busy customers, he says, “just want the damn fish.” They don’t want any extra work. You have to tell them exactly what you’ll do for them, how it will help them, and exactly what they need to do (hopefully not much) in order to get them to act. Make it easy. Just give them the damn fish.

[tags]building relationships, customer relationships, online marketing, offline marketing, ideal customer, target audience, top of mind, Alexandria Brown, Bill Glazer[/tags]

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