In honor of Valentine’s Day, the WMT Wild Web Women professed our love to marketing man crushes and in the process of expressing our emotions, had a therapeutic “a-ha” about Valentine’s Day and web marketing.

Valentine’s Day is a day focused on expressing a mutual exchange of love.  Love for partners, friends and family may be expressed the form of notes, expression, gifts, dates, squidoo confessions, affection and acknowledgment.  Regardless of the form(s) of sharing how we feel, the core of LOVE equates to feelings of connection, affection and attachment.

And guess what?  Marketing does too!

Marketing = Maximizing Relationships
Relationships = Connecting, Relating, Having Passionate Attachments

Relationships are everything….we’ll say it again – you need to get this…

Relationships are EVERYTHING!!

I cringe when I see marketing execution that has no regard for the person the marketer wants to relate to.  Examples of relationship-less marketing execution include:

• Sending email blasts for the sake of doing it (not to give customers something of value)
• Giving a canned “insert prospective customer’s name into the proposal” sales pitch that has no personal “what’s in it for the customer” message
• Engaging in some form of marketing (SEO, Social Media, Emails) without having a “how will this help me connect with my customer in a meaningful way?” focus
• Ignoring a customer that is a raving evangelist because they are not “big enough”

Marketing SUCKS when there is no meaning behind execution.  We can learn all day long what steps to take to execute web marketing, but if marketing is not executed without relationship skills, guess what?  Sucks to be your marketing!

What Valentine’s Day reminded us about web marketing is that it is really healthy (and necessary) to do ongoing self-improvement work on our relationship skills.  If you focus on the steps below, you be STEPS AHEAD WITH WEB MARKETING.

Web Marketing is an ART and a SCIENCE.  We’ll teach you both, but you MUST understand the art of relationships to be successful in marketing.  (And if this blog post helps you have better romantic relationships too, consider it a WMT bonus!)

THE SECRETS TO SUCCESSFUL MARKETING RELATIONSHIPS:

• Understanding
• Passion
• Partnership
• Effort
• Commitment
• Love

Understanding
The key to successful marketing relationships must start with understanding.  We need to understand what our customers (and prospective customers) want, need, will eventually need, how they feel, what they like, what they dislike and their communication preferences.  Understanding is the key to successful relationships.  Understanding requires LISTENING and CARING about what our customers need.  The way to get to understanding is as simple as asking for feedback (online surveys, phone calls, etc), paying attention to user behavior with tools like Google Analytics and watching for patterns.  LTWM has a client who does not reply to our emails unless they are funny.  Because we understand how this partner prefers to communicate, we are able to get through his email clutter (and get great work done) And you know what?  Because of understanding, we have a TON of productive fun working together!

Passion
You either have passion for your profession, or you don’t, it’s that simple.  Professionals that are marketing for a product, service or target market that they don’t care about (or believe in) are on a rough road to get to successful marketing.  Human intuition will naturally pick up on passion…and let me tell ya, when it’s oozing, it’s contagious.

Passion = Emotion and Enthusiasm.

If you have these ingredients for your work, then we can work it, if you don’t, then as your Marketing Therapist, I strongly advise that you go get it and come back to us when you have it. (Yes, that was a dish out of tough love)

Partnership
Successful relationships are partnerships.  There is no “I” in “T E A M”.  A relationship means playing on the same team, for the same cause, pitching and catching (sometimes you do one more than the other) and working towards the same end goal.  If you have vendors that don’t get partnership, break up with them and see vendors who do.  If you do not see your customers as partners, then you have a grande problemo. STOP EVERYTHING and figure out why.  An organization is a team and the players on the team extend outside of the people that are employees, the fuel for your team is in partnering.  Healthy partnerships will fuel your organization forever.  Look at marriages and families that are healthy/successful, they are partnerships…same goes with business.

Effort
Yep, relationships require effort.  Relationships start because of effort (somebody has to initiate the date, right??) but relationships fail when both parties stop the effort or get the sick idea that the relationship will run itself.  The biggest marketing mistake is to not take care of existing clients.  You did something right by getting them to be in a relationship with you, love stays strong with momentum and that requires effort.  HELPFUL HINT…if you have passion for your profession (see above) and are in a “pitching and catching” (aka give and take) partnership, the effort part is easy…see how this all inter-relates?

Commitment
Making meaningful marketing relationships requires commitment, a pledge to something or someone.  When you commit to investing in a relationship, you are in for the long haul.  This is a long term goal.  When you set long term goals, your execution becomes a melange of meaningful steps that all equate to the large commitment umbrella goal of making meaningful relationships vs “binge and purge” crappy marketing execution.  Commitment = Big Picture.

Love
Yep, love.  Sloppy, drippy love.  We are put on this planet to love and be loved.   Love is what fuels healthy relationships and is the critical ingredient to successful marketing.  When you love what you do, this love radiates to your customers.  When you love your customers, you are committed to making the effort to understand and serve them (you seeing the connection to all the steps?)  Love is magical, it fuels us, inspires us and attracts people to us.  If you have issues giving and receiving love, then your marketing will suffer (and we do recommend therapy to get over this)

Relationships fail when they are full of anger, arrogance, guilt and dishonestly (Enron flashback).

Relationships thrive when they are fueled with goodness:

• Understanding
• Passion
• Partnership
• Effort
• Commitment
• Love

Invest in relationships and the “what steps should I take?” to win big with marketing will follow.  And I feel pretty confident that if you take the same steps we advise you to take professionally and apply them to your personal life, you’ll reap some rocking benefits too.

THANKS FOR READING OUR BLOG – WE LOVE YOU!  Make a commitment today – sign up to get our WMT blog RSS feeds and make the effort to healthy marketing!

Web Marketing Therapy Related Links:

• Web Marketing Dose of the Day – Skipping Steps Kills Success
• Web Marketing Tip – Never Stop Learning
• Web Marketing Intervention – JUST DO IT
• Top 5 Tips to Start Your 2010 Marketing on the Right Foot