It's hard to come up with fresh materials for social media. Every weekend when I plan out my tweets for the week, I've settled on having a general theme. It helps me gather material and puts a focus on things that come up spontaneously throughout the week. As I have said before, life in general is the best producer of ideas for posts.
My social media theme this week in Nurture Marketing. What led me to this idea was actually reading another article about selling. The article talked about telling stories as a way to talk about products and services. The idea was tell people why you do what you do or why the product was created versus what you do or how a product works. The article suggested remembering things that had happened and influenced you in your business and then telling the story.
One of the things I remembered was a presentation by Jim Cecil, author of Nurture Marketing. It was at a conference in Nashville and was several years ago. But I remember very clearly what Jim talked about and it resonated with me. It helped foster many ideas I have used in our own business and have helped make it the success it is today.
The conference I attended was around a product that rested on top of Act. The concept of the product was to put in place a model for keeping track of your customers - or in other word, nurturing the relationship - from cradle to grave. Bringing in Jim to talk about his methodology was a perfect fit.
There were several ideas that came out of Jim's talk, but the one I will show here has far reaching power. Jim suggested creating two fields in Act - one called Pain and one called Passion.
Here's what he suggested. When talking to your clients, don't just talk about your product or service. Learn about them and their business. What keeps them up a night? That's the Pain part. What wakes them up early in the morning, raring to go. That's the Passion Part. I think of my sons and know that golf (and not just little kids) can get them up early in the morning before the crack of dawn. I know that HIPPA is keeping many people in the medical profession up at night. For me, gardening and cooking are passions. Wondering where the next project will come from is pain. Your trick is to figure what these are for your customers.
Knowing what is painful for a client can help you find solutions that soften the pain or even eliminate it. Knowing what is a passion for client gives you something to use as part of a warm touch. For example, for all the clients in your database that have Golf as a passion, and you are lucky to have access to tickets to local golfing events, send them out as a "here, I was thinking of you."
Save articles that relate to the pain and passion items. Once in a while, send out the article, using mail merge in Act (or add it to a SAM campaign) to everyone who had that topic as their pain or passion item. The email looks personal. It's a warm touch. It's not a sales pitch. It's a "we think enough of you to send you something that you might find interesting."
Warm touches are very effective. And Personal. And are part of nurturing the customer relationship.
I must be candid and say I don't do the pain/passion article emails as often as I used to. We all get caught up in our day to day minutia. But it only takes a few moments. And it can have long lasting results. It is actually funny because I talk about the pain/passion field to clients all the time. Guess I need to eat my own dog food. Gee, wonder how many of my clients have Dogs as their passion? Hm. Gotta go find some articles.
Happy nurturing. And think about stories you have that have inspired you. Use them in your selling efforts. Use them in your nurturing efforts.
If you would like some help setting up Pain/Passion campaigns, give us a call at (423)875-2652. Mention this blog post.
For more info on Jim Cecil and Nurture marketing visit here: http://www.nurturemarketing.com/