Something is missing in your customer experiences but you aren’t sure what it is. All you know is that you aren't getting the results you want.

You may be seeing trends like:  

• Low social media response
• No one opening or reading your emails
• Low site traffic
• Low response to special offers
• Lower than expected conversion and sales

You suspect that you’re not connecting to your audience, but you aren’t sure why. According to best practices, you are doing all the right things. Solid email marketing strategies. Great social media posts. Sound SEO strategies. Easy user experience.

But you think you may be failing because:

• Your messaging isn’t targeted enough or is "off" somehow
• Your customer experience may be too complicated
• Your product or service isn’t relevant
• You are solving a problem that your customers don’t need or value

What if I told you that all of your reasons are correct? 

Low engagement is a symptom of problematic customer relationships. And problematic customer relationships are a symptom of a disconnect between your business and your customers. 

• You may have changed your business strategies - marketing and sales - and not realized its full impact on your customers. 
• You may think you have a targeted message, but you aren't connecting emotionally. 
• Your customers may have a different perception of your company and what it does than you think.

These sound like huge problems, but they aren't.  

Most times, the problem is that you don't know your customers as well as you may think you do. This means that you aren't engaging with them emotionally. That's important. And I'll show you why.

We sometimes forget that how we view our customers determines how we treat them. You'll see why this is also important.

This webinar provides a way for you to see your customers in a new light and develop the right strategy to find the customers who value the problem you are solving. 

You will learn what’s needed to build a better relationship with your customers to expand your business, discover how customers may see your company and product, and find customers who need what you are selling.  

This FREE 1-hour webinar will get you started on a new way to engage with your customers that leverages some of the latest in psychology and brain science. 

No gimmicks (I don’t do those). No tricks. 

All science, psychology, process, and learning to see your customers in a different way.

Clip from the Webinar: Why feelings and emotions matter when making decisions?

I became fascinated with emotions and their role in decision making when I started working in content marketing and strategy. I realized that content and social media were creating automated digital conversations. And conversations were what sales used to help build a customer relationship.  

But the biggest realization of all: companies sell to people. People are emotional beings. Sure, they care about product benefits and how a product will help them in their lives, but at the same time, they are people with feelings and emotions. They want to feel good about themselves and their decisions. I had a new mission: understanding how to engage digitally with people on a deeper level to build a relationship.

I was working in an IT hardware company at the time. To better understand our customers, I decided to talk to sales to learn more about our customers and their problems. Between their insights, a bunch of past customer data from social media, the web site, and lead gen campaigns, plus my own past experience working with them, I learned that IT professionals don’t get the credit they deserve. Marketing gets kudos for new leads. Sales, for revenue. Finance, for savings. But who says "yay" for IT keeping email up and running all year except that 1 hour on Christmas Day? Instead, they instead get criticized that.  

Further, they have high risk jobs. We forget that work is automated and a room of servers down for just one day could be a very costly productivity loss. 

IT is typically overhead, which means that costs are always a factor in any decision. As well as reducing IT jobs with increased automation. 

They are a logical group. You need to connect facts very clearly when creating your story for them. They care about the business impact of new technologies and shy away from “science fair experiments.” To them, a science fair experiment is a new technology that doesn’t have a well-defined business use case. They consider compatibility, ease of use, installation, maintenance, and of course, time and cost.  

There were two issues happening in this one company's product line:  

• The customers didn't seem to fully understand the technology that they probably should have understood, so they were embarassed.  
• The customers didn't really know what to look for when buying this new technology, so they were confused with fear and insecurity.  

The communication approach we used for the content kept these emotions in mind, addressing concerns and transforming the situation so they could feel better about buying the right techology to solve their problem.  

To solve the first problem, we created a video interview of an industry expert at a bar with a colleague, discussing the techology in a straightforward way. It was casual yet trustworthy. And in a non-confrontational way, it presented new information and dispelled some myths about the techology. This video got a tremendous number of views in the first 6 months.  

To solve the second problem, we created a buyers guide based on the division's experience and insights into what customer data centers probably need now and in the future. The company won a number of awards for its products, so it was the subject matter expert and could easily give this advice. They only needed to share this expertise with their prospects. 

The buyer's guide became the top performing gated asset for driving leads for the division and got an annual update for the first few years after it was written. 

I was able to product similar results for another team and for other groups. But I wanted to continue creating emotionally engaging content for people, wanting them to feel good about themselves and their decisions and help their life have meaning. But that is hard to sell to a business. 

And that's where all of this research came from - my need to be able to get an executive to agree to incorporate feelings and emotions in marketing.

I didn't realize that I was doing this work when I first started working in user experience. I wanted to help people complete tasks, but I was enabling them to do it in a way that they were able to feel good about their decisions.

Years ago, I worked with a Bay area online digital printing company. It was my first Gearmark project. They had a site, but it was difficult to use. However, I quickly learned that their customers loved ordering print work from them. It wasn't just because they could pick up the print work down the street, but the work quality was excellent for the price.

I talked to a few customers to discover how they used the site. And they liked working with this company so much that they were willing to do all of these crazy workarounds to get the system to work as they wanted. 

The biggest insight from the calls was that they wanted the ability to get the best print price and delivery date by selecting different print turnaround times and shipping costs. They were cost conscious and time sensitive. They valued having the flexibility available to choose what they wanted for an option, even if they didn't use it.

So we created a shopping cart that allowed them to do that - choose the print turnaround time and the shipping time to see when they should expect the item and the total cost.

The improvement was a hit! There was a spike in sales that just didn't quit. By appealing to the customers' need for flexibility, we created a winner. (And the approach was copied across the industry too!) 

So what can this approach get you and your business? 

• It will help you drive leads (and subsequently, sales).
• It will improve your site experiences, potentially creating dramatic results. 
• It helped a company become even more loved than it already was.
• You stand out in your industry - in a good way. People know how you are unique and love you for it.

Here are some recent wins: 

After the webinar, I had a discussion with an IT marketing professional. By using the approach outlined in this video, we were able to quickly identify and solve the problems her company was having in her space. More to come on this topic, but we are seeing some patterns that we may be able to redirect and appeal to their target.  

With one independent financial advisor, we repositioned his company after 2 sessions. We got him a new sales script and he noticed the difference right away. I even tested the new approach with a colleague who fit his customer profile, and she got pretty excited to talk to him. So it works!

The webinar references research by Antonio Damasio, Vicktor Frankl, Srini Pillay, and more. You'll notice many references to Harvard Business Review studies. There's a lot there, but it's all useful. 

And some special gifts for watching the webinar: 

• A free 30 minute consultation with me, Mary Brodie, to discuss your situation to see how we can best apply these ideas to your business.
• An activity book to guide you through your own situation and make a change.
• An invitation to participate in our "Gearmark Forum - Customer Experience Club" through a free, two-week trial.

Enjoy the webinar! I look forward to hearing how it helped you.

Clip from the webinar: Value and worth

Harvard Business Review recently issued a video that summarized a study demonstrating the impact of connecting emotionally with your customers. It drastically improved a retailer's bottom line. Further, researchers originally published an article promoting this idea in 2015. This approach to solve what seems like a complex customer problem where customers are just "stuck," not purchasing and not taking action, works. 

Mary Brodie is an experience strategist and founder of Gearmark. She has been helping companies create memorable customer experiences, online and offline, for over 20 years. From apps to content strategy to lead gen programs, Mary has helped companies achieve results that contribute to the bottom line. But achieving great results takes a great team that works well together. Mary’s work extends into team dynamics and internal processes. She believes that the internal employee experience of a company is just as important as the customer experience it creates. Mary attended MIT, graduated from Simmons College with a BA and MA, and recently graduated from IE University in Madrid with an Executive Masters in Corporate Communication.

Mary Brodie Founder - Gearmark, Customer Experience Strategist