High Tech vs. High Touch Marketing? When To Use One Over The Other.

There’s no question that our new technologies have made it easier for us to keep in touch across distances and over time, but has the allure of these tools persuaded us to trade in our real relationships for something imitation and less sincere?

The key is to figure out how to integrate the high-tech with the high touch because high-tech alone is unlikely to produce a sale. Sure, somebody might buy a $29 item on-line or even a few hundred dollars for a well-known piece of software or a gadget, but when it comes to most purchases, both companies and people want to buy from people.

With a myriad of tools available and hawk eyes on marketing budgets and the rate of return on those budgets, it’s extremely necessary to integrate the high tech tools with opportunities to create high touch as well to produce the best results. But when does it make sense to use each?

Face-to-face meetings are much more critical in helping you achieve certain business objectives. In-person meetings are much better at accelerating and deepening relationships faster than if you were to communicate solely with high tech tools. Face-to-face meetings are much more useful in situations that require the following:

1.Persuasion—If you’re looking to close the sale, a larger sale with a longer sales cycle, an in-person meeting is much more likely to help you persuade someone in a certain fashion.

2.Decision-making—If you’re moving a prospect or client toward a new purchase, decision-making is much more likely to happen when you’re meeting one-on-one.

3.Frankness—If you’re looking for a decision to be made and you’re looking for complete candor, a face-to-face meeting is more likely to result in you completely understanding their position as you’ll have a full view to body language and how their tonality and movement matches to what their words say.

High tech tools also play a critical role in a company’s sales and marketing plan. While there are a number of virtual communication tools that can be used, the most common ones used for marketing include webinars, virtual events, and social networking. These tools are effective in communicating the following:

1.Delivering supporting data—Webinars are a useful delivery system for research as are blog posts which are amplified with social networking posts.

2.Maintaining Relationships—Social networking posts are useful for simply keeping in touch and keeping yourself and your company top of mind.

3.Connecting a Distant or Global Audience—When people are miles or oceans apart, introducing and connecting them via a social network LinkedIn or another virtual tool can be so valuable simply because you can make the connection almost
immediately.

Take the time to carefully evaluate what you’ll do based on your business objectives, your goals and your metrics. Then build the plan that will get you where you need to be. Other items that should be taken into consideration are the value of time and the budget for your engagement plan.
No doubt, there are significant advantages to face-to-face engagement. And the best reason for this live, real-time communication is to speed up the business relationship. Face-to-face meetings allow participants to connect on a much more personal level because of the real-time two way dialogue.

Now the benefits for virtual communication are significant as well and need to be used in building the engagement plan. The most common reasons for selecting virtual contact is time and money—it’s super efficient and can be executed 24X7, and, in most cases, the costs are insignificant in comparison to the costs to travel and host some kind of face-to-face meeting. Not only is it flexible because you can record some of these virtual offerings like webinars, but you can also archive them on your web site for future use. That way, the company also gets the benefit of offering the information and experience to other prospects at their convenience and they receive the additional search-engine visibility for their web site.

What’s most important to consider is how your high touch interaction converges with your digital tactics to facilitate and foster relationships with clients and prospects. Virtual communication is a perfect way to follow-up with your prospects after a face-to-face interaction so that you can bring the communication full circle. A fully integrated high tech and high touch system will produce the most authentic and desirable results.