Building relationships online is a whole new ballgame for many of us. Before social media, we would build relationships through personal communication through phone calls, networking, having coffee together, meetings and more.
Relationships are needed to build the “know, like, and trust” factor required for most sales. It also is needed for continued loyalty to your company. Well, the bottom line is that relationships are the backbone of most businesses’ success. Strong relationships are a key driver for sales.
What people are looking for are trusted experts who can help them solve their problems.
Today your content is critical to your success. We depend on the internet for information and relationships whether personal or business. What you write (your content) is an extremely important part of your business.
Below are a few tips on writing content:
Focus on the Customer
Think for a second about how you build relationships in the offline world. Hopefully, you don’t do it by talking about yourself or focusing on your own needs. The way you do it is by making an authentic connection, and you can only do this if you focus on the other person. Often times you bond over a common interest.
The same goes for the online world. The best way to build a relationship is to focus on the customer. Offer what they need, what they are interested in, and they’ll follow you loyally. In order to do this, you have to know your audience (ideal Client) well, and this means conducting research and gaining an understanding of their challenges, problems, and questions. If you can help them deal with these issues, you’re on your way to a strong relationship.
Create the Best Content Possible
To build strong relationships, you need to offer high-quality content. What does this mean? It means creating content that offers real value to the people who read it. This value is not only about your business but also about connecting with them. This can be done through encouragement, laughter, appreciation, and issues about their stage in life as well as business.
If you create your content with your audience’s best interests at heart and try to do something different that no one else is doing, you’ll have quality content. Don’t take shortcuts and always emphasize quality over quantity.
Be Yourself
The internet can be impersonal at times. If you give your content marketing the personal touch, you’ll be more likely to build strong relationships. Be yourself, be transparent, and be authentic. Use actual pictures of yourself for profile images. Tell stories and add personal anecdotes in your content wherever it’s appropriate. Connect authentically with your audience through social media. This does not mean you need to share with them your entire life. It does mean, however, that you are authentic about what you do share. Be yourself. Trying to pretend to be something that you are not will never turn out well.
Monitoring Your Relationship Building
It’s easy to see whether traffic is coming to your site, or if a product or service is selling. But how do you measure relationship building? As with any online marketing efforts, you need to choose a few key metrics to watch that will tell you whether your efforts are paying off or not.
Some of the things you can measure to evaluate include:
- Email open rates and click-through rates. If you have a good relationship with your email subscriber list, they’ll open and take action on your emails.
- Time spent on site. Measure the amount of time visitors spend on your site. This shows whether it’s holding their interest and whether they’re reading.
- Social media engagement. If people are sharing and commenting on your posts, this shows that they’re actively engaged with your brand.
A big mistake is to promote all of the time or too much of the time. As with many things in life, the rule is 80/20. 20% is the amount of time you should spend on promoting/selling. 80% is building your relationship with your audience.
Tip: The more you know about your ideal client the easier it is to grow an engaged audience and the less you need to share any personal things that you don’t want to share. It allows you to connect on comfortable common interests.
