Great marketers care deeply about copy, obsess over visuals, and pour their hearts into content. That ultimately, no matter how much effort goes into building and refining your marketing strategy, something else will always have a bigger impact on buyers. Even the best marketing is still just a starting point when it comes to building customers’ trust. You blog three times a day, craft beautiful emails promoting your company's latest products, and share content relevant to your marketing personas on social media. People today are less patient and more skeptical, and it's never been more difficult to build trust as a marketer. While people today might be less interested in reading your emails, commenting on your social media posts, or downloading your ebooks, they are focused on your customer reviews. But if those stories don't feature your customers' voices, you're missing out on the biggest growth opportunity of 2018. The stories your marketing team needs to tell now start with the people who already trust you: your customers. So we created the flywheel, a new way of thinking about how customers interact with your business at every stage: Because your job isn't to close deals, it's to open relationships. If you aren't thinking about how you can nurture your customers into promoters, you're missing out on the biggest marketing opportunity in years, and severely limiting your opportunities for growth.
Great marketers care deeply about copy, obsess over visuals, and pour their hearts into content. It’s this dedication to detail that drives leads, grows funnels, and inspires customers to buy.
But great marketers also know a hard truth about their work.
That ultimately, no matter how much effort goes into building and refining your marketing strategy, something else will always have a bigger impact on buyers. There is one voice that speaks louder than any blog post, captures more attention than any ad, and inspires people like no expertly crafted video ever could:
The voice of your customers.
Today, people are more informed than ever before. They have seemingly limitless options at their disposal, and unprecedented clarity into how businesses treat their customers. These changes have translated to a sharp shift in power from business to customer, and resulted in dramatically higher customer expectations. Your customers are less trusting and less patient than they’ve ever been.
Potential buyers care less about what you have to say about yourself, and more than ever about what your customers have to say about you.
No amount of time, energy, and resources poured into your marketing efforts can override the negative impact of poorly executed customer service. Providing personalized and predictive customer experiences is crucial to achieving sustainable business growth in today’s customer-centric world, and marketers will play a crucial role in this shift.
Even the best marketing is still just a starting point when it comes to building customers’ trust. Your customers have never been clearer about what they expect from your brand, and it’s time to give it to them.
The Hard Truth About Marketing
To understand just how we got here, let’s take a quick trip back in time.
The year is 2008, and you’re an inbound marketer at the top of her game. You blog three times a day, craft beautiful emails promoting your company’s latest products, and share content relevant to your marketing personas on social media.
Your marketing funnel has become a well-oiled machine, attracting new visitors to your website, converting those visitors into leads with valuable content offers, and nurturing those leads with relevant emails. Your funnel is expanding and your CEO is happy. Nothing could possibly slow your momentum.
Except one thing: everybody else starts creating content too.
The whole content space gets a lot more crowded. Overwhelmed by more content than they could ever imagine, people start filtering it out in the same way they filtered ads. They rely on friends or highly personalized search and social algorithms to surface the best content for them. Great content still breaks through, but when it does it’s usually bolstered by a strong fanbase.
You start to see a similar trend in email. The more email you send, the less interested your customers seem to be in hearing from you.
Their inboxes are crowded, their attention is limited, and each new message you send is just adding to the noise. Even when you have something important to share with your prospects or customers, it always seems to get lost in the shuffle and forgotten. Your open rates are going down, and your unsubscribe rates are going up.
Your CEO starts to have questions: Why is this happening? And more importantly, what can we do to fix it?
You know there isn’t an easy fix. Your prospects and customers are overwhelmed with too many messages on a daily basis, and the way you approach email needs to change.
Meanwhile, you notice social media isn’t the growth…
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