Adopting Spotify-like marketing proven effective to connect with consumers: expert

Marketers should create tailored messages for their consumers to effectively reach prospects and existing customers.

A huge majority of Singapore businesses have been found to have difficulty in reaching their existing and new customers, prompting an expert to advise them to create tailored messages for their target consumers.

HubSpot chief customer officer Rob Giglio told Asian Business Review how audio streaming subscription app, Spotify, effectively connects to the wide spectrum of music lovers through customised messaging.

Giglio also shared the top concerns of customers about brands in this exclusive Q&A with the magazine:

What are the top customer complaints about brands?

There was a lot of information in 2021 that I was reading about: the saturation, the media and communication saturation. Broadly, people, consumers and businesses were feeling overwhelmed by the volume of messaging. Because there were new channels — channels that didn’t use to market to people were now marketing to people.

They couldn’t get free of messages. There are good tactical examples of that: At one time, we used a taxi cab… and it was just a backseat. Now it’s a multimedia advertising blitz.

At one time, when you went through airport security, it was just airport security. Now you see advertising in the trays in the bins. At one time, social media was just like your friends. And now there are ads everywhere so we overwhelmed consumers and businesses with messaging.

Since brands are having difficulty reaching potential customers in Singapore, what advice or technology could you suggest to sales teams?

It ends up being a bit of a product pitch. Part of the reason why that’s the case is if salespeople are trying to reach customers without good information about the customer. They don’t have the data available to them. They only know the name of the customer. They might know what industry they’re in, but they don’t have supplemental information and they can’t create a very relevant message for that person. That person… they’ll be unlikely to respond to a phone call, or unlikely to respond to an email because it’s too generic.

Effective salespeople have a lot of information available to them so they can create a tailored message that’s highly relevant to the person that they want to make contact with.

Give an example of a brand that creates tailored messages to connect with customers.

I’ll give credit to Spotify. Spotify sends me messaging that is about the music that I’ve been listening to and it extends my experience — both in the app as well as emails I get from them.
 
I don’t get a lot of emails, but when I do, they’re highly relevant, because they relate to what I’ve been listening to. They are definitely trying to sell me something. It’s a sales email, they’d like me to change my service, or they’d like me to renew. But it doesn’t feel like that’s the purpose; it feels like the purpose is deepening our relationship.
 
I think that’s a pretty fantastic way there. And they couldn’t do it if they weren’t using the power of the data that they have in their system. And the same thing is true with using a CRM, you must use the power of the data that’s in the system to make a relevant message.

What strategies should the sales teams focus on to solve customer problems?

I would say that being more attentive, listening, and asking more questions about the nature of customers’ problems is probably No. 1. My answer is about customer empathy. We train our salespeople to be empathetic and try to understand the customer’s problems and challenges as clearly as possible, so we can help them. That’s part one.

Part two, [using artificial intelligence], taking advantage of the data that's available from similar customers, is a really good example. 

For instance, if there’s a certain industry where there is a common workflow that customers use to grow their business, one of the things that I as a salesperson could do is bring what’s working in the industry, to my customer as a recommendation so that that customer could be more successful.

In the past, if you only focused on your own customer, one customer at a time, you missed the opportunity to bring what’s working in other places to your customer. Think of it as case studies.

AI is going to be able to help do that tremendously because it can help us understand product usage, use cases, workflows, and the impact of features.