144. Relationship Marketing: The Marketing Strategy Our Content-Obsessed World Forgot to Mention – with Michelle Warner
If you’re fed up with the endless marketing BS and tired of all the “must-dos” that don’t actually boost your sales, you’ve found your new home.
Welcome to The Standout Show’s New Series: “Market Less, Matter More” – designed for entrepreneurs who want sustainable profitable growth and anyone who wants to do more of what they love, with more impact, and a whole lot less marketing.
Each week we’re sharing short, 10-minute presentations with entrepreneurs who’ve discovered simpler, more impactful ways to connect with their customers.
In this first episode, co-hosts Eva Y. Chen & Brad Powell are joined by Michelle Warner, Relationship Marketing expert (who’s on a mission to design tiny companies that are built to last).
Get ready to elevate your customer engagement through the power of relationship marketing.
Takeaways:
- Michelle’s map of the marketing landscape, from the warm, referral-like awareness at the heart of relationship marketing to the wide-reaching nets cast by traffic marketing.
- Instead of creating your Ideal Client Avatar, create your Ideal Connection Avatar
- Strategies for borrowing audiences and adding value in a way that leaves a lasting impact.
Resources:
Become a Standout Brand 1-Minute at a time! Watch this new bingeable pair of 2-minute videos: Stand Out In 60 Seconds
Transcript:
Brad Powell:
Welcome to the Standout Show. I’m Brad Powell and I’m a video marketing coach, and today I’m joined by my new co-host, personal brand expert Eva Chen, and Eva and I are launching our new series that we’re calling Market Less Matter, more. So why are we doing this? Well, as you’ve probably noticed, the world of marketing is full of all kinds of what I can only call garbage. A lot of what’s being labeled as marketing is really just a bunch of BS. It’s either something that worked in the past but it doesn’t really work anymore, or it just wasn’t really helpful to begin with.
Eva Chen:
We’re on a mission to help you filter out all the market tactics that don’t fit you so that you can focus on what really matters connecting on a deeper, more meaningful level to attract your best customers, and in a way that’s uniquely and authentically you. So this show is for entrepreneurs who want to build a sustainable, profitable business, and it’s for those who want to do more of what they love, have more impact and spend a whole lot less time marketing.
Brad Powell:
And we’re changing the format. So, instead of doing interviews, this new series is going to have short to the point 10 minute presentations. So with each new episode, we want you to walk away with quick, actionable tips that you can bring straight into your business. And with that let’s start the show. Today we’re joined by relationship marketing expert Michelle Warner, and I just want to pitch her new podcast for a minute. It’s called Sequence Over Strategy and right now it’s just launched. There’s only about four episodes, and on my bike ride a couple days ago I binged all the episodes. It’s really good. I highly recommend it. Go listen. What Michelle’s talking about today is the marketing strategy. Our content obsessed world forgot to mention Relationship Marketing 101. So, michelle, welcome to the show.
Michelle Warner:
Awesome. Well, thank you for having me. As I said, I’m excited to be here and just thank you for everything that you said in the introduction, because, as you know, this is what I really believe in is that we are tend to be doing so many marketing things that don’t ultimately matter, that feel good because you can kind of check them off a list that they’re done and complete, but they probably maybe aren’t doing the job that you think that they’re doing or aren’t converting, and there’s a lot of opportunity to be doing something else. So I’m going to pull up some slides and talk about what you can be considering doing instead. So what we’re going to be talking about today is something I call Relationship Marketing 101. And I cheekily say the relationship or the marketing strategy or content obsessed world forgot to mention because, my friends, there’s a whole world of marketing that in my work as a business strategist and designer, in my work helping people fix their businesses, I see that folks are not taking advantage of and then they’re telling me, none of my marketing is working.
Michelle Warner:
I don’t know how to connect with people, I don’t know how to build these relationships you’re talking about, and it’s because they’re not doing what I call relationship marketing. So let’s get into it and I am going to show you what the heck I am talking about. So when I think about marketing, I think about it on a continuum. I’m going to show you that continuum right now. All marketing strategies in this world lay somewhere on this blue continuum that you see. The left side of that continuum is made up of what I call relationship marketing strategies. The right side is made up of what I call traffic marketing strategies. Relationship marketing strategies. The most extreme form are referrals right, and for a lot of us who are in B2B marketing or you’re doing services or you’re doing any kind of maybe higher priced offer referrals that’s the best lead you can ever get right. Everybody. I hear from so many people like, oh, my referrals, they’re my best clients, they’re my best leads, but I just am not in control of them enough. I don’t know how to find more, and so I have to be doing more marketing, and so that’s the extreme side of relationship marketing. And, as you see, relationship marketing tends to line up best when you have a business where you need a high quality of leads but low quantity aka high end, custom, high touch services, right, when you don’t need hundreds of thousands of leads or clients or even 1000 leads or clients a year because you were doing services. That is an alignment with relationship marketing. Other side traffic marketing. Nothing wrong with traffic marketing if your business aligns with it.
Michelle Warner:
The most extreme form of traffic marketing mass marketing. I always love to call it like Old Navy, or I live in Wisconsin, so I call it Kohl’s lovingly, because they are headquartered here. Anybody who is pummeling you with coupons all day in your inbox, any kind of direct marketing, all of your junk mail. That is the extreme form of traffic marketing. And that at its extreme is when we need low quality leads. High quantity because you got to pump them through a marketing funnel. And here you’re talking really low conversion, right, You’re probably talking about services that are relatively entry level or mass market. At its extreme we’re talking conversion rates, probably less than 1%, Whereas over on the relationship side we’re talking very high conversion rates. They can be upwards of 90%. So you can also look at this continuum for going left to right in terms of what is your expected conversion rate? Again, over on the left-hand side, very high conversion rates 80%, 90% is not uncommon. If you do it right, All the way over to the right, you’re going to get really low conversion rates, and all of that is normal. But it has to be in alignment with the product and service that you’re offering, and we can then extrapolate that.
Michelle Warner:
Every single marketing strategy that’s out there lies somewhere on this continuum between our two extremes, right. So if we’re talking about posting on social media, if we’re talking about writing an email newsletter, launching a podcast, all of those things lie somewhere on this continuum between relationship marketing and traffic marketing, and somewhere again in that kind of conversion play of hey, what kind of relationship am I expecting to build with someone through this strategy? If it’s a better relationship, they’re probably over on the left-hand side. And it’s a relationship strategy, it’s a little bit more transactional, they’re probably over on the left hand side. And it’s a relationship strategy, it’s a little bit more transactional, they’re probably over on the right side. Now here’s the trick of this A relationship marketing. It is a little bit of the gray areas, it’s pretty nuanced and it’s hard to teach, and so tons and tons and tons, if not like probably well over 75%, if not well over 90%, on the marketing strategies that you see talked about are traffic strategies. Here’s the deal, though Half the businesses, half our business models, are more in alignment with relationship strategies, and I would argue that every business out there, every product mix, every business model, actually also has a spot on this continuum that is most in alignment with its services, with its product mix. So, again, like, if you’re selling, you know high end, custom, high touch services, you are in alignment somewhere on this relationship side of the continuum. But guess what? A lot of the marketing strategies you’re taught are probably over on the traffic side of the continuum, because they’re easier to teach. That’s what we’re talking about.
Michelle Warner:
Social media, email marketing, it’s stuff you’re a little bit more in charge of because you can just check off your list and say, Okay, great, I posted on social media today and that’s not necessarily bad. But if that’s all that you’re doing and it’s not in alignment with your business model, I am guessing because I hear about it from people all day long, every day that you’re probably a little frustrated by the results of your efforts, and it’s not that you’re necessarily doing anything wrong. And this is Brad, thanks for bringing up the podcast, because this is something I’m really trying to teach on the podcast is that you can be the most brilliant social media person in all the world and you can be amazing at it, but if your business model is more aligned with relationship strategies, where maybe social media is not at the top of that list, it doesn’t matter how good you’re at it. You are at it because it’s not in alignment with your business model and therefore there’s going to be what we call in the business world, there’s going to be noise in there, aka inefficiency, aka it’s not going to work as well as you want it to work. And so it’s really important, before you pick any marketing strategy, to take a beat and say, hey, where is my business on this continuum? And therefore, what types of strategies should I be choosing? Should I be looking for relationship strategies or should I be looking for traffic strategies? And when you do that, then your world starts to change in terms of marketing, because now you’re choosing things that are really in alignment.
Michelle Warner:
And let me share and I just talked about why all this matters. It matters because you know you have to be in alignment and people don’t understand that and I talked to so many businesses who are in alignment with the relationship marketing side of the spectrum but don’t even know relationship marketing exists. So when they’re in that world where they’re getting all these referrals and they say, oh, I wish I could have more referrals, I better do some marketing, what do they do? They like over cracked into a bunch of traffic marketing and then wonder why it doesn’t work. And it doesn’t work because what they should be doing is finding some strategies that sit on this left-hand side with the relationship thing. And then let me show you why this actually matters and why you have so much inefficiency if you place yourself on the wrong side of the spectrum.
Michelle Warner:
I already said that relationship marketing inherently has higher conversion because of how it’s designed. You’re looking for less leads. You’re looking for higher quality leads, ie better fit leads. Traffic side, you’re looking for more bodies, more leads to put through something that’s designed to be low conversion. So what does that actually mean? If you think about it, what that means is that the flow of the two funnels is opposite. You’re actually creating a different type of movement in each of them. So if you’re moving against that flow, you’re going to screw yourself up. Let me show you what that means.
Michelle Warner:
I break marketing into three stages Awareness people need to know you exist. Engagement they kind of need to understand what you’re talking about. However, they met you in awareness, like you’re meeting me right now by talking about relationship versus traffic. So in engagement, you kind of need to understand more what that means for you. Maybe you need to hang out with me and plot where your marketing is right now in that continuum and really bring it home for you. And then sales they need to buy something from you.
Michelle Warner:
So in any type of marketing, whether you’re on that relationship side or that traffic side, you have to work really hard at one of these stages to create some momentum. And by working hard I don’t mean hustle, I just mean like you have to have impact at one of these stages to create some momentum. And by working hard I don’t mean hustle, I just mean like you have to have impact at one of these stages. But the stage that you have to have that impact is the opposite in relationship and traffic marketing. And this is where we get screwed up, when we are working on the wrong side of the continuum, because then you start having impact at the wrong place and that just makes it harder to get your marketing through.
Michelle Warner:
Let me show you what I mean In relationship sale. A relationship sale we want to engineer leads that look like those referral leads. Well, what do referral leads look like? Referral leads look like a snowball running downhill. You work really hard at the awareness stage because people become aware of you when somebody sings your praises and that has a ton of impact. And so what happens is that the sale is basically made during that awareness stage and then it’s a snowball running downhill during the rest of the marketing cycle. You’re just talking logistics. Is this a cultural fit? Is this a schedule fit? Is it a budget fit? Right, but you don’t have to convince them anymore. They met you at that awareness stage, they’re in. So you are trying to create the momentum of a snowball running downhill.
Michelle Warner:
And if you don’t get that referral moment, then your job is to figure out what are marketing strategies that I can deploy during awareness that will have that same impact, that will have people. You know that where I can work hard and have people really invested very early on with with being, you know, all in on the sale very, very early, that’s how you create that high conversion stuff. Traffic is the opposite Traffic because you need so many bodies, because it’s just designed to be that really high quantity. You can’t work very hard at awareness because you need so many people in that funnel in order to make the conversion numbers work. So you have to go a little bit lower as common denominator during awareness, Whereas awareness and relationship you are trying to have massive impact for the absolutely correct people and everybody else who cares right, Because they’re not your people.
Michelle Warner:
Traffic’s the opposite.
Michelle Warner:
You need as many people to come in. This is more mass market. You need all the people to come in. So you can’t be as specific and therefore you can’t have as much impact, because it’s going to be, by definition, more generic. So when you do that, you haven’t had this huge impact on people. You haven’t built any loyalty yet. They don’t know who you are. They’ve just kind of run across you and probably signed up for something that’s relatively generic. So now your job gets harder. Now you got to climb a mountain. I actually call it pushing a boulder uphill. Right, Instead of creating that snowball running downhill, we are trying to push a boulder uphill to get people over the edge, and now your sale becomes the place where you have to work really hard.
Michelle Warner:
And that’s where we see, you know you’re getting bludgeoned by coupons and email that has been working really hard at the sales stage in a traffic funnel to get you over the edge. And that’s where, maybe, if you’re an online business, we start seeing. You know the ticking time bombs of buy now, buy now. This is going to expire. That’s people working hard at that sales stage in the traffic funnel. And then you can imagine, when you cross these streams, if you will, if you’re trying to sell a high cost product through a traffic funnel and now you’re pushing really hard at the sale, that feels really icky and really, really gross, and that’s where things start to get really inefficient and not work well. And it’s because you’re creating these opposite momentums and that’s why it’s so hard just to go all the way back to this as I wrap up.
Michelle Warner:
So it’s so important to understand from the jump where does your business model, where does your product mix lie on this continuum?
Michelle Warner:
And then, therefore, how can you start picking strategies that are going to create those whichever version of the movement that we just looked at? Are you trying to create the movement in a relationship funnel, Trying to create the movement that we just looked at? Are you trying to create the movement in a relationship funnel, Trying to create the movement in a traffic funnel? And for most of you I’m guessing this might be a little bit of an aha moment, that you need to move over to the relationship side a bit. And that’s where we get into looking at the importance of building relationships and why that is so important, Because you flip that mindset from getting a ton of numbers in and instead you start zeroing in on who exactly do I need to know and why, and focus there. So with that, I know we have a ton of else to cover. So I’m going to stop here. I know we can have questions at the end, but, Brad, I’m going to throw it back to you so that we can get into a conversation and keep the show moving.
Brad Powell:
All right. Well, that was awesome. I just I want to say that you reminded me of something in your snowball analogy. You know, there’s a film called Mosquito Coast and in one of the sort of peak scenes this guy who’s in the middle of the Amazon jungle has created a way to make ice and he wants to bring ice to this tribe in the middle of nowhere that has never seen ice before and he’s like this is going to change their life. And so he takes this giant, giant box of ice and he goes through tons and tons of trouble of hiking and lifting. And he takes this giant, giant box of ice and he goes through tons and does a trouble of hiking and lifting and whatever through this jungle. It’s super arduous. Finally gets there, he unwraps it and of course the ice is melted. And I was going. That is so much like what you’re talking about yeah 100.
Michelle Warner:
I’ve heard of that film. I’m gonna going to need to check it out now. Yeah, 100%. You’re working against yourself.
Brad Powell:
Eva, do you have something you want to share as a takeaway?
Eva Chen:
No, I love this and I think most people will be so convinced, like what the hell was I doing all this time and really want to focus on relationship building. So are there some like tips or something that you can offer, especially to somebody starting out like, say, they don’t have any referrals? I know, when I started out, you know you’re starting a new business so you might not know a whole lot of people. Do you have any thoughts or suggestions or tips for that?
Michelle Warner:
Yeah, two things. I’m really passionate about teaching people how to kind of build what I call these ideal networks to support this. And two things. Number one make sure that you’re not trying to operate above where you’re at. So, again, in a relationship funnel we’re talking about very low quantity of leads that are needed and high quality. So it is totally okay and acceptable to meet one or two people at a time.
Michelle Warner:
I think a lot of times we get a little paranoid and think you know, oh gosh, if I’m building a relationship or if I’m supposed to be speaking, I need to be speaking to hundreds of people, and some of the best quality stuff happens just to one or two folks. And having said that, when you are starting out, you obviously have your ideal client avatar. You also have something called an ideal connection avatar and those are the people who can introduce you to your ideal clients. So in a relationship funnel, you actually don’t want to be trying to meet your leads by yourself, because you want to build a relationship and we want to engineer something that looks like a referral. What happens in a referral? You are introduced to somebody, so you want to be looking and I say look at who owns your audience in an uncompetitive way, but a very a way that you could collaborate.
Michelle Warner:
So who can you go build relationships with? What are profiles of people who are already talking to your audience, where they can bring you in and have you talk to them? That’s one of my favorite awareness strategies is to go borrow an audience, get in front of that audience and add some value to them and spend some time with them, right, because we want to have impact. So don’t run in and hand them a 10-point checklist. Spend an hour with them, talk to them. Frankly, do what I’m doing right here, right, I’m borrowing your beautiful audience and saying, hi, I have a thing that I think might be of value to you.
Brad Powell:
All right. Well, I think we’ll start to wrap this up. I want to just thank you both for coming on today. This was really cool. This is the first iteration of this particular forum. It’s going to happen on the fourth Wednesday of the month and, michelle, if people want to reach out to you and follow up and connect with you further besides your podcast or in addition to your podcast, what’s the best way for them to do that?
Michelle Warner:
Yeah, they can always reach out. My website is themichellewarnercom and there’s plenty of places to connect with me there. I host a free monthly event where I answer a bunch of questions, probably similar-ish to this, so you can register there. It’s called the Tiny and Strong Roundtable and you’ll see that right on my homepage at themichellewarnercom.
Brad Powell:
Well, we’ll make sure that links to you are going to be in the show notes when the podcast of this recording comes out. Thank you all for coming on today. This has been brilliant and for all the folks joining live. Thank you all for being here and stay tuned for more of this coming on the fourth Wednesday next month, and with that I’m going to say goodbye. So long.
