High-touch marketing is all about creating relationships between your company and your customers. As with any relationship, a strong bond comes through meaningful communication.
The better your content marketing, the healthier your relationship will become. To help people embrace your brand, you have to create high-touch marketing messaging that truly speaks to them.
Low-Touch Marketing
In marketing, your company can spray advertising and email blasts all over the internet until your marketing professionals are blue in the face. That’s essentially the pattern of low-touch marketing.
The idea revolves around a numbers game and you just need to hit on a certain percentage of the numbers. There is some truth to that, but this approach also reduces the customer relationship down to anonymous, catch-all messaging.
It’s not a very personal way to approach marketing. Your potential and current customers may see your messaging, but if the messaging doesn’t resonate with them somehow, they aren’t going to give you a call.
These days, it’s too easy to ignore emails and advertising pop-ups when we are online. With so much messaging traveling around the internet, it’s a struggle for companies to get customers to engage with their advertising.
It’s not that low-touch marketing doesn’t work to some degree. It does work in some circumstances, but you’re leaving a lot up to chance if your messaging only touches certain people a lot and others a little or not at all. You are definitely not creating brand loyalty.
You may hit on some of your messaging, but you are primarily flying blind and just hoping you end up in the right direction. What you most certainly are not doing is making a real connection with the people you are trying to convert to your brand.
High-Touch Marketing
By contrast, high-touch marketing targets a handful of carefully selected customers or potential customers with each piece of messaging you create. It’s quality over quantity.
Rather than emails blasted willy-nilly out to your entire contact list or one you paid for, high-touch marketing calls for sending customized messaging to current customers about things that interest them (e.g., how to get the most out of your product or resources). Instead of posting on social media without ever looking at any of your followers’ responses, high-touch marketing calls for engaging in two-way conversations. This is the type of messaging that creates engagement, conversations and relationships.
It takes time and resources, but high-touch marketing exposes customers to your brand and establishes actual relationships that go beyond anonymous online purchases or conversations with automated voice software.
Rather than a faceless name and logo, your company becomes an entity itself, and the public-facing people who work for you become actual people to your customers. The character of your public-facing customer-service representatives and your company’s online marketing messaging becomes the personality of your company.
In essence, your company takes on a character, voice and personality that your customers can relate to and also engage with. Very often, this happens through the telling of a story.
Every brand has a story, whether they realize it or not. You have a story, your company has a story and your employees all have stories. The interconnecting subplots of those stories weave together to form your company’s story. And it’s that story that enables you to create a connection with customers.
Your competitors can copy your products and services or marketing tactics, but they can never copy your company’s story, personality and brand. The traits that combine to make your company truly unique are the same sort of things that make each of us unique as individuals.
People can pretend to be you, but they can never really be you, and the same is true for your company. It’s important to remember that when you are crafting your marketing messaging. Your uniqueness is your competitive edge, so embrace it with your messaging. And take the time to learn about your customers, just like you would in any other relationship.
Brand Loyalty Via High-Touch Marketing
If you touch someone or connect with them, or, if you are lucky, inspire them with your messaging, you are forming a connection. If the connection is strong, you may be lucky enough to create a customer for life, something that can only happen if a customer feels a real connection.
For example, companies that take care of their customers when things don’t go well, admit when they have made a mistake and do everything they can to rectify that mistake can often turn would-be lost customers into loyal customers overnight.
To the customer, your company took the time and cared enough to make things right, in the same way that a friend might go out of his or her way to make up for a mistake they made in their relationship with you.
It’s often during the difficult times that we cement our personal relationships in life, when we discover the true measure of our friends. We tend to stay friends with the people who stuck with us during the hard times and lose touch with the people who don’t.
It’s the same in business. Customers will stick with your company if you show them you care about them, in many cases even if that means the customers pay a little more for a product or service. That’s the nature of brand loyalty. And you can only get to that point if you have strong communication with your customers and show them you care.
Create Relationships with High-Touch Marketing
In a digital world where every customer is beset on all sides by messaging from any number of companies, high-touch marketing can cut through the noise and resonate with customers.
High-touch marketing requires thoughtful, targeted messaging aimed squarely at your customers. And not just any old customer, but the customers you feel a connection with and, in return, who feel a connection with your company. High-touch marketing is about quality over quantity—it’s about building real relationships.
