Campaigns, which transcend the Internet barrier

Written by Rubén Martínez

Beyond emotional marketing

One common mistake we make at the beginning of coming up with a new business idea is isolating ourselves mentally and physically, imagining everything we are going to accomplish, and hiding, to avoid telling about it to anyone, suspicious that someone is going to steal our idea from us. This clashes with the very basic rule of: what we think about our business, for the most part, hasn’t got much worth. Hundreds of shops close down daily, with the entrepreneur being incapable of finding an explanation to why their product –which they adore– is not selling. In many cases, this is due to the fact that the communication with the client had been non-existent.

Making online marketing more human

If you don’t know what your customer wants or needs, you’re not going to be able to sell it to them. So, to find it out, you’ll probably have to ask them. It’s true that nowadays we have a lot of technological resources to analyse the interests, search trends and online behaviour of the different population segments. However, communicating with our clients, asking them what they want and what makes them happy, will have them give us the most valuable information you’ll possibly find, of their own accord. Think about the best communication routes you have within your reach, which will make this task easier for you; these are countless.

Making online marketing more human-centred is the route that should be followed by any company, in order to boost their campaign’s most emotional aspects, aiming to accomplish more than just customer satisfaction. The purpose of this process is to transcend analytics, going the extra mile in being capable to captivate the consumer.

In tune with Google: customer satisfaction is not enough

Over the past few years, the technological advances in artificial intelligence implemented in the Google algorithm have made it possible for it to resemble a human person more and more. This has facilitated the road to offering the most suitable product to the customer, in this case, the product that will make them live the best experience. Based on this aspect, it started to give more visibility to websites, which have been optimised to provide the best user experience in terms of navigation, devaluing factors, which up until now have been key to achieving good rankings. That’s why we should be able to overcome the digital barrier, in order to reach the people’s hearts.

If we know where to look, Google is giving us out some valuable clues which can be extrapolated to the business scenario. Why don’t you start thinking about what would you want for your customer’s experience to be like when they purchase your product? Why don’t you start to think differently, and invest some effort into radically improving your customer’s life with your product, or making it so that they cannot live without it?

The success of your campaign should transcend the Internet barrier, because the experience your customer gets with your product is part of it. From here on, the impact of your next campaigns will be more significant.

Think of a long-term content strategy

We should have a plan of what we want to achieve in a year, otherwise, it could very well lead to a failure in our strategy. We should be very clear about where we want to be in a specified amount of time, and work every day towards getting closer to it. Usually, the customer journey is long and it is composed of various stages, during which our users conduct their research to make the best decision. You should consider being there for them at every stage, in order to solve their issues and doubts, as a means for this first approach. Unconsciously, they will make the decision of returning o not, based on the experience they had during this journey, and after the acquisition of the product or service.

If you’re going to give your marketing strategy a global approach, by simply focussing on creating a website based on a series of requirements and campaign investments, to get a high conversion rate from time to time, you should hit the breaks and rethink several points: What are you planning on doing once the initial impact wears off? When it happens, you should already have a new plan lined up, which will allow you to present a new and improved product, with a new and better campaign.

Let’s assume you create a blog where each week you publish a post with exercises and a diet to lead a healthy life. These articles are high-quality, and they contribute very interesting data to their readers, who begin to subscribe to your blog to avoid missing out on anything. Thinking about the benefits of this in the long term, it would be a great idea to begin preparing a series of videos, which you’ll use not only to further delve into the information you already give in the post with some more ideas, but you can also explain the exercises you propose each week graphically, with a steady plan of making a video each week of the year. In this case, the video marketing will contribute a much higher value to these weekly updates, allowing you to increase the amount of subscribers once it becomes a stable feature. At the same time, with this the increase in followers, you can start thinking about different actions to conclude this stage. For example, you could plan a in-person tour of workshops for a set fee at a national level, visiting regions where you have more subscribers. This way, you will have built during the initial stage a huge database of subscribers to whom you began offering information and resources altruistically, and ultimately provide them the opportunity to access an exclusive premium service.

Marketing before and after the sale

In the above table, at the left-hand side we have some of the resources we can use to reach our customer and get a conversion from them. On the right, the reasons for which this customer would return to you to convert again. Why would you set up an e-commerce with inventory, stock, logistics, analytics, campaigns, pricing strategy, etc. if you’re not going to work to somehow improve the life of those who acquire your product?

Let’s see this with an example. Íñigo and Silvia create new online stores, where they offer baby care products and children’s food. After a year, both achieve similar levels of visibility in search engines, similar levels of traffic, and the same conversion rates. Íñigo is happy with the results. Silvia, however, is aware that she’s just only starting to do her job well, and she decides to show interest in her customers, and sends out evaluation surveys, offering some sort of compensation in the cases where there had been an issue with the item or its shipping. In parallel, she decides to monitor the purchases of each customer, to offer the parents products that could be useful to them once their little one has grown a bit a few months later. To do this, she asks them their baby’s birth date during sign up, or by looking at the age range the acquired product belongs to. Moreover, she thinks it would be a nice detail to send a present to each kid on their birthday, in an entirely selfless manner. But that’s not all. In addition to all this, she decides to launch an exclusive offer for customers who spent more than €5,000 in her shop over the period of 1 year, by offering them a gift coupon, which can be exchanged for a family photo session in the best photography studio in the customer’s city.

As a result, after a couple of years, not only Silvia’s e-shop is growing exponentially with more and more new customers, thanks to the great job she is doing online, but she’s getting their loyalty, getting them to buy at her shop again and again, throughout the entire period of growth of their kids. On the other hand, Íñigo continues to get a similar amount of conversions to the one he was getting a year ago, wondering where is that increase he oh-so-expected to happen.

Create expectations and surpass them

Imagine you get the Top 1 position in Google’s ranking with an important keyword within your industry, and you begin to notice an increase in sales. Mission accomplished? Not quite. You’ve only just reached a little less than half of your goal. What if you sell a product, which, even if cheaper than your competition’s, it doesn’t transcend the emotional surface of the customer? Well, that’s just that, you remain in the surface, and as we’ve said before, this customer won’t be coming back.

It is high time we changed the online marketing mentality. We should stop thinking that we can only reach our goals through tools and technique, and begin approaching our client’s more emotional side. It is there, where the true success lies for all of our marketing campaigns.