Drive Channel Growth by Humanizing Digital Sales and Marketing
… applying an understanding of your customers and where they are in their buyer’s journey.
- Convert data into humanized insights. Data is just data until you transform it using your understanding of human behavior, needs, wants and goals. Your database may show that a customer in New York City has added new Los Angeles, Miami, and Chicago addresses to their business account. While this may be static information in a database, a savvy salesperson understands that this expansion means this customer may need additional IT services including remote access, virtual servers and desktops, and enhanced security measures.
- Don’t spam. No one likes spam. And sending too much relevant content is just as bad as sending irrelevant content infrequently. If your marketing materials are generic with little relevance to your services, they’re not working in your favor. The counterexample is a marketing automation system that’s set to follow up with hot leads at an inhuman rate. Most people would stagger follow up emails by a few days, and that’s what your marketing automation system should do, too. The duration between emails should be longer the colder the leads are that are being nurtured. Emailing too frequently will lose you deals and also runs the risk of having your domain flagged for spam and blacklisted.
- Write for humans, not bots. Writing website content for Google bots so your company will rank on the first page of their search results will turn off human readers. And, you’re not going to fool Google’s almighty algorithms, either. While keyword research is an essential component of successful website development, how keywords are incorporated into your site content must sound natural to your visitors and address their actual business needs. Writing for humans is what Google encourages you to do for SEO purposes anyway.
- Segment your database. Don’t send the same message to everyone. What’s important to one industry isn’t important to another. Likewise, what’s important to one LOB decision maker isn’t important to another. Segment your database into groups and understand what’s important to each group.
- Speak the language of your target customers. Know what’s important to your customers and speak their language. If health care IT security and compliance is important to your target customer, use marketing messages that contain terms of importance to these professionals. For example, like HIPAA or ransomware, and address the challenges they face every day. And try not to spell it HIPPA while you’re at it. Customers need to feel you understand their specific requirements. And those include industry-specific requirements and regulations, before they will trust you with their business processes.
- Align sales, marketing and customer care. While marketing would normally distribute the bulk of messaging to prospects and customers using automated email campaigns, sales and customer care (success) teams also create individual communications. Maintain alignment between marketing, sales and customer care to ensure consistent messaging and distribution. Sending too many emails from different departments with overlapping or inconsistent messages is a turnoff. It will cause recipients to unsubscribe from all future communication. Humanizing individual communications by referencing past conversations that were had with them or their team, or referring to their unique circumstance and to them as a person (their family or hobbies, etc.), will go a long way to bridging the digital/human gap.
- Show your face. Even in the best of times, it’s not possible to get face-to-face time with every lead you’d like your sales team to meet. Webinars are a great tactic to get your team’s faces in front of many prospects and acquire leads at the same time. In your marketing automation system, make sure to include a headshot of the presenter in the follow up email for humanization and continuity.
- Provide digital self-service with a human off-ramp. Digital self-service tools such as online ordering, automated provisioning and a knowledge base let customers make their purchases, enable services and answer questions during the buying process. Although customers expect a seamless and straightforward experience, your digital experience may not always be able to deliver exactly what they need. Make sure each customer has an easy out — a human off-ramp, if you will. This is an electronic exit used to transition to a human quickly and easily for live, one-on-one interaction. Put your contact information prominently in all marketing materials. And, have strong call-to-actions on your website. Even add a Live Chat widget to connect to your sales team.
Strive for Balance
Consider how you’re utilizing digital marketing to grow awareness for your services and to increase sales. Have you discussed the importance of balancing the need for scale and humanization with your sales and marketing teams? Maybe you haven’t yet implemented a formal digital automation strategy. As a result, are unable to scale your sales and marketing efforts as quickly as you otherwise could.
It’s important for all MSPs to stay competitive by scaling using digital automation. But don’t lose sight of what being human means in an age where we are growing less privy to the nuances of each other’s communications. This is especially true during the pandemic. There are fewer opportunities for human interaction and we’re prone to lean on digital communications. Being mindful of the need for balance is the key. Why? Because being off the mark in either direction means you risk alienating prospects who would otherwise become good leads and, ultimately, paying customers.
Devin Rose is VP of digital marketing at eBridge Marketing Solutions. Prior to joining eBridge in 2014, he worked with The Oppenheimer Group and Ritchie Bros. Auctioneers. He has a bachelor’s degree from Royal Roads University in Victoria, British Columbia. He also has a marketing management diploma from the British Columbia Institute of Technology. Follow him on LinkedIn or @MrDevinRose or @eBridgeteam on Twitter.
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