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Court your customers, and they commit
Three online marketing strategies borrowed from the stages of courtship: pursue, engage, and seal the yes.
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01 The problem
You are competing with your customer's own friends
Customers in what Pittard calls the online multiverse do their own research, independent of the brand, from sources you do not control. Then they share what they found with a community that helps them confirm the choice and influence other people.
So your message is one voice among many, and the loudest voices in that space are usually not other companies. They are the people your customer already trusts.
You are competing for attention against your own customers and against your own friends.Jay Baer
Each click is a verdict, each swipe a decision. A mistake, or simply an unimpressive moment, becomes a public post within seconds. That is not an argument for shouting louder. It is an argument for being worth finding.
02 The model
Online marketing is a courtship in three stages
Courtship is a set of stages that build a relationship without either person losing their identity. Pittard maps those stages onto marketing: Pursuit gets customer interest, Engagement holds it, Commitment seals it.
Each stage carries two things. A marketing move, which is the action you take, and a marketing love language, which is how you communicate while you take it. The moves are Display Transparency, Multiple Availability and Perpetual Usefulness. The love languages are Perception, Persuasion and Personalization.
The model is a guide, not a fixed set of rules. You thought out your products and you know your business, so you have the right to adapt it.
Take the last three marketing tasks your team completed and label each one pursuit, engagement or commitment. If all three land in the same stage, you have just found the gap.
03 Love language one · pursuit
Show only what you have, before anyone asks for it
The first move is Display Transparency. Jay Baer's standard is forthright answers to nearly every question a customer could conceivably ask, given before they think to ask it. Answering an enquiry with "let me get back to you on that" costs you the prospect.
It requires readiness in two areas: knowing yourself, which means your brand, values, vision, products and service offerings, and knowing your customer. Businesses that practise radical transparency put decisions and sometimes even financials in public view.
Our goal at Clearly Payments is to be the "friendliest payment processor on Earth." Friendship is built on trust. In order to create trust, you need transparency.Clearly Payments company blog
The love language beside it is Perception. Marketing engineering has a method for this called perceptual mapping, which plots how customers see your brand next to how they see your competitors. What it exposes is the gap between where you think you sit and where they actually place you.
Write down the five questions you least want a customer to ask. Publish an honest answer to all five, in public, where a stranger can read them without contacting you.
04 Love language two · engagement
Be available everywhere, and say it differently in each place
Multiple Availability means being present wherever your customer turns: advertising, email, search, blogs, links, social media, and ratings on credible review sites. The rule that stops it becoming noise is simple. Vary the channel, concentrate the content type.
GoPro is the book's example. Facebook to promote the brand and connect with existing customers, Instagram to show what the cameras can do and share user posts, Twitter for product announcements and replies, YouTube for tips and tutorials. One brand, four jobs, no drowning in content.
Presence alone does not make anyone decide. That is Persuasion. Web psychologist Nathalie Nahai describes three functions of the brain you can appeal to online: the primal brain, which responds to attractive people, food and contrast; the emotional brain, which is drawn to stories; and the rational brain, which is swayed by a justification for the decision.
Write your next post in Joe Vitale's three steps: make a promise, provide a testimonial, make an offer. Coursera fits all three into one tweet and a single photograph, so length is not the excuse.
05 Love language three · commitment
Be useful enough to be cherished, not merely tolerated
The third move is Perpetual Usefulness. Do not simply inform, provide highly specific solutions, because usefulness is what keeps you relevant when your customer's circumstances change.
Focus your energy on creating marketing that people actually cherish, not marketing that people simply tolerate.Jay Baer
Personalization drives that usefulness deeper. It means customising products, services, content and communication to a single customer or a small group, and its aim is to make people feel recognised and valued. There are two ways to gather what you need: explicitly, by letting customers rate and configure things, and implicitly, through software that adapts to how it is used. Amazon does both, and lets the customer decide which implicit data gets used.
Offline, Starbucks made the same point in 2012 with name tags on staff and customers' names written on cups. Familiarity first, then the bond.
Ask your next ten customers one question about what they were actually trying to get done. Send each of them one specific thing that helps with it. Not a newsletter, one specific thing.
06 The long game
Commitment does not end the courtship
Online marketing is a cycle of pursuing attention, engaging through experience and sealing commitment, and it keeps running after a customer has already said yes. Slacking off on the earlier work is how you lose them.
Keep improving and keep making small adjustments to your promotions and services. What you should not keep changing is your tonal identity, the way you sound to consumers. Following every trend leaves you with a brand you no longer recognise, and neither do they.
Lasting relevance is not built by being trendy. It is built by being consistent, useful, and timely.Gian Pittard
Customers give trust and loyalty when they see their own values in yours. Make your brand feel like home to them.
07 The whole book
Three love languages, one committed customer
Each language belongs to a stage, and each stage carries the one before it. Pursue with honesty, engage with presence, commit with usefulness.
Perception
Answer the hard questions before they are asked, and find out where customers actually place you rather than where you think you sit.
Persuasion
Vary the channel and concentrate the content type. Reach attention, then emotion, then the reason that justifies the decision.
Personalization
Be specifically useful, not generally present. Use what customers tell you and what they show you to make each of them feel recognised.
Treat prospective customers as if they are already dear to you, and mean it. That sincerity is the part of the model no competitor can copy.
Adapted from Three Highly Effective Business Strategies According To My Research
Gian Pittard · © 2022 DVFZ Training Consultancy Services · 33 cited sources in the source edition