My guest today is Jessika Phillips, a social media strategist known for her dedication to relationship marketing. Jessika’s personal mission is to inspire people to love more, give more and be more through using authentic relationships every day.
She founded NOW Marketing Group in 2010 with only a laptop and a vision. The company is now a Forbes recognized Agency Partner and a certified inbound partner with Hubspot. NOW Marketing Group works with more than 100 clients across the United States and beyond, choosing to serve – not sell.
Jessika teaches comprehensive relationship marketing, presents in a weekly videocast “Magnet Marketers” and hosts one of the largest social media midwest conferences, Social Media Week Lima. Named as one of the top global rising stars in social media to watch, Jessika is one who leads genuinely, passionately, and by example in all she does.
If you want to learn how to nurture relationships for your business and really get people hyped about you and your products or services, this is the blog for you!
HOW TO BUILD A RELATIONSHIP MARKETING PLAN
Brandon Birkmeyer: It’s easy to say, “I had a customer. I’d like them to talk about me.” However, I’d say you have the ability to find people that you’re not working with yet and even some of them are saying, “You should meet Jessica.”
That has to be fostered. What’s your approach to doing that?
Jessika Phillips: My approach is the same thing I tell our clients to do. Out care the competition. Seriously, truly care. It has to start from the inside out.
CARE is an acronym. I’m a nerd for them. Care stands for Capturing attention, Articulating your message, Real relationships, and Exceptional experiences.
KNOW WHO YOU ARE
Starting from the inside out, it’s first understanding who we are as a brand. Not focusing on the product or service that we’re selling, but focusing truly on what are we here to do? Why do we want to do it?
I love Simon Sinek’s Start With Why, but I almost say take it a step further. What is your manifesto? We work with clients on creating a manifesto, but that manifest really adds this personality, the style to who you are, and gives you ideas of where you’re going, and how you’re going to show up to capture that attention in a way that’s working like a magnet.
I talk about this a lot when I’ve done speaking engagements the past year. One of our clients, I love their story and transformation. I love all of them, but one of the most recent ones was a water bottle company. You would think they could sell to anyone.
They offer a water bottle. Many brands do that. We get caught up in that–that anyone can use our product and service. We focus on the thing instead of the sense of belonging.
FIND OUT WHO YOU ARE MARKETING TO
If you stop focusing on the buying and just focus on the belonging, (who are we here to capture the attention of and what is our message and our manifesto,) that’s going to create that personality.
What we did with this water bottle company is focus on the fact that they’re not just there to sell water bottles. A thousand options are there for you to buy water bottles, so it’s not going to build and attract that brand loyalty or purchasing unless you have the lowest price. We don’t want to compete in that game.
Instead, we’ve worked with this brand and said, “Okay, who are you? What are you here to do to capture the attention?” They said, “We’re here to help others create these exceptional experiences in their life. That’s what we’re really here to do as a brand and what we get excited about. It is who we are as the individuals that are running this company. ”
It was a husband and wife duo, and that’s what they were passionate about. The husband is the one that’s doing these marathons and these mountain climbing things. His wife, his partner is one that loves working with and supporting other women.
We took their passions together, who they are their core, starting from the inside out, and said what they’re really there truly to do. We created this tone, style, and this flare for the brand itself. It started capturing the attention of those people that are going to stick with them, articulating the message.
MAKE SURE PEOPLE KNOW WHAT YOU DO
The second part of CARE is all about refining how you’re communicating with your customers. You’re spot on getting people that already know you. What is going to help them get to that next point, to want to refer you on or even talk about you?
The first step is making it crystal clear they know what it is that you do. I can’t even tell you how many people I’ve spoken with that are very well known for who they are, but nobody could tell you what they do for their business.
That doesn’t help anyone. You have to be clear, of course, on the messaging and your style, but also what it is that you do, whatever that thing is. Again, it’s not what you do, it’s how we do it that’s really going to make it stick in people’s minds. However, we still have to be clear on our message and include others in that conversation.
CREATE MARKETING AROUND YOUR RELATIONSHIPS
When I say others, I’m talking about your current customers, your team members, your community and your followers. If we can have a conversation with them in a meaningful way, asking their questions, their feedback, creating that sense of belonging, we can turn our followers into our truest fans.
We’ll have them sharing our content and engaging with it, not just liking that page. We can turn our clients into our biggest advocates. Using the example of the water bottle company, instead of just releasing new styles and designs, we asked their community, what did they want to see? What were they into?
We started personalizing water bottles. We started hearing that they liked a kids’ cartoon show that they wanted for their kids’ water bottles for gifts. Awesome. We create it, they see it and they get thanked for it. They’re showing up to the next conversation that’s happening online.
They’re invested now. Turning your community into collaborators means that you’re not just showing up and sharing your own content, but thinking along the lines of whoever else believes what we believe and supports that community.
CONNECT WITH YOUR COMMUNITY
We can also connect with it to add more value to our clients, our community. It could be something as simple as this, where I’m showing up for an interview. I love it. I’m passionate about relationship marketing. I want to show up here and collaborate with you and talk about it.
Then what am I going to do after this releases? I’m sharing it to my community because it may be beneficial to them. Even your other podcasts, sharing ones that would be valuable to our community because it’s helping them reach a goal faster or solve a pain point faster.
The other thing is turning your team members into evangelists. This is the one that I think is the second most overlooked, the first being we focus so much on getting new business that we forget about the people that have already given us their business and are really the ones drawing in the business for us.
RELATIONSHIP MARKETING INCLUDES YOUR TEAM MEMBERS
We also then forget about the people that are working with our customers, which is our team members. We should focus on turning our team members into evangelists. The only way to do that is to have that true culture, to let them in on it, even hiring based upon it, of who they are and what they’re there to do.
Then encouraging them, giving them permission to make some decisions, get involved, but not make it feel forced that they have to share social posts, lists things out, tag us, and all that, but give them a reason to want to talk about it.
Treat them well. They’re the ones that are working with our customers at the end of the day and the ones that are providing that experience that our customers are going to be grading us on. It truly does start from the inside out. All marketing does.
WHERE TO LEARN MORE
This is a portion of my conversation with Jessika. To listen to the whole thing, just click on the podcast player at the top of this story.
CONNECT WITH JESSIKA
Personal website: jessikaphillips.com
NOW Marketing Group: nowmarketinggroup.com
MORE ADVICE AND INTERVIEWS
If you’d like more content about how to build your personal brand, check out my free Content Marketing Starter Guide.
And here are some more of my most popular thought leader interviews!
- What Business to Start with John Lee Dumas
- Personal Branding Masterclass with Chris Ducker
- Built to Serve with Evan Carmichael
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Talk soon!