I’ve been in marketing for nearly 30 years. And in all that time, the single most useful framework I’ve found for understanding how people move from ‘complete stranger’ to ‘paying client’ isn’t from a marketing textbook. It’s from dating.
And after a long period of singledom, I’ve been doing some more dating over the past couple of years – which has definitely served as a refresher in these lessons!
Here goes…
One of the things I teach the people I work with is the concept of know, like and trust. It’s not new. Marketers have been talking about it for decades. The theory is simple: people won’t buy from you until they feel that they know you, like you and trust you. They need enough interactions with you, over enough time, to reach a point where handing over their money feels safe.
In the early days of online marketing, the rule of thumb was five to seven meaningful interactions before someone would buy. These days, with all of us more marketing-savvy, more cynical and more overwhelmed with content than ever before, that number is closer to twenty or thirty. For higher-value services, it can be even more.
Which means that if you want a healthy pipeline of clients, you are essentially in the business of building relationships at scale. You are, whether you like it or not, dating. A lot.
In marketing as in dating, there are ways to do this well. And ways to do it very, very badly.
Here are five lessons that apply equally in both worlds.
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1. On ‘lovebombing’
Ahhh…the intensity of the love-bomber. Day and night he* showers you with contact, compliments and communication. It can be intoxicating at first but – as I was recently reminded – it also tends to end badly.
The marketing equivalent is the business owner who, having just discovered email marketing or content creation, proceeds to publish three posts a day across multiple platforms, send daily emails AND a monthly newsletter, all at the same time, all from a standing start. The logic seems sound: more contact means faster know, like and trust. Right?
Not quite.
What actually happens is that people feel bombarded. And overwhelmed people do one of two things: they switch off, or they unsubscribe. Neither leads to a purchase.
There is a difference between presence and pressure. Your audience should feel like they’re hearing from someone they’re gradually getting to know. Not being pursued by someone who really, really needs them to buy something.
Turn up consistently, with intention. Make each interaction count. That is not the same as turning up everywhere, all the time.
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2. On inconsistency
Sadly most of us have experienced this scenario. You meet someone interesting. You exchange numbers. They text the next day. And the day after. Thoughtful messages. They aren’t love-bombing you but they establish a respectful pace and engage in real conversation. You start to look forward to hearing from them.
Then. Nothing. Three weeks of silence. Then a message as if nothing happened.
Confusing, right? Unsettling. It undermines your trust in that person. And trust, once wobbled, takes time to rebuild.
Your audience experiences exactly this when you go quiet. When the newsletter that used to arrive every Tuesday stops showing up. When the social content that was regular and warm suddenly disappears for a month and then reappears with a sales push.
They don’t know what happened. They just know the pattern changed. And when the pattern changes, something shifts in the relationship. Not dramatically. Not consciously, most of the time. But it shifts.
Consistency builds trust not because it’s impressive but because it’s reliable. And reliable is, in the long run, far more attractive than brilliant-but-erratic.
Set a content rhythm you can actually maintain. Smaller and steadier beats bigger and unsustainable every single time.
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3. On asymmetry
A few years ago, I was getting ready for a date and chatting with my wonderful friend Scotty Mark (he’s “Scotty” to distinguish him from Canadian Mark, Evil Mark and Cute Mark).
I had tried on six different outfits. Redone my make-up twice and was seriously considering cancelling the whole thing. Scotty Mark asked me why I was so nervous:
“What if he doesn’t like me?” I replied.
“And therein lies your problem Sara. You’re worried about whether he will like you and trust me HE is thinking about whether he will like you. Who is worrying about YOU and whether you will like him?”
It was like a lightbulb moment for me. It wasn’t all about whether he liked me. My likes, preferences and needs were also part of the equation!
Now I am absolutely not making a point about men. I am making a point about asymmetric attention, because it maps perfectly onto one of the most common mistakes I see in marketing.
On one side, you have businesses that create content entirely for themselves: what they want to say, what they’re excited about, what feels important from the inside. Their audience barely features and as a result their content feels irrelevant to their audience.
On the other side, you have businesses that have become so fixated on what their ideal client needs to hear that they’ve lost their own voice entirely. They contort themselves to fit a perceived expectation, and they end up sounding like nobody in particular.
Good marketing, like good dating, requires attention to both sides of the equation. What does my audience need AND what do I want to say? Both matter. Both have to be in the room.
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4. On skipping the ‘middle bit’
One of the most common frustrations I hear from people building their businesses is this: ‘I’ve explained what I do. Why aren’t people buying?’
And when I dig in, what I usually find is that they’ve jumped. From introduction straight to sales. Hello, here is my offer, please purchase.
In dating terms, this is the equivalent of proposing on the first date. It can work. Occasionally. But mostly it just makes people back away…with a look of mild panic on their face.
The middle bit, the getting to know you bit, is not optional – especially for service based businesses when what you’re selling is a) you and b) costs more than a few £s! It’s where trust is built. It’s where your potential client moves from ‘that sounds interesting’ to ‘I think this person gets me’ to ‘I actually believe she can help.’ That progression takes time and it takes repetition.
You cannot shortcut it with urgency tactics or scarcity messaging or a particularly clever sales email. You can make the middle bit richer and more meaningful, which speeds things up. You can turn up more often, go deeper, be more genuinely useful. That helps. What you cannot do is pretend the middle bit doesn’t exist.
Every single piece of content you create, every email, every post, every conversation, is a step along that path. Some steps are bigger than others. But you have to take them.
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5. On the honeymoon phase
The joy of the honeymoon phase. It’s all fun and smiles. We are patient when we are normally quite forthright. We are flexible when we actually have firm opinions. We smooth away the rough edges, avoid conflict, say ‘Yes’ when we mean ‘Not really’. Everyone is trying to be agreeable, to be pleasant, to be liked.
And it works, for a while. Then six months in, we cannot maintain it any more. The real version shows up. And our partner looks at us and says: you’ve changed. Cue disappointment, resentment, rows and broken hearts.
But the truth is we haven’t changed. We’ve just revealed ourselves.
[Aside: this is one reason why, in my 50s, I have finally learnt the joy of slow dating. People reveal themselves over time. Take it slow and you get to see whether the ‘best behaviour’ of the first few months is a true reflection of who they are or just smoke and mirrors.]
The same pattern happens in business. Someone launches with a particular promise, a particular tone, a particular set of boundaries, or more commonly, no boundaries at all. They say yes to everything. They are available constantly. They never push back. They undercharge and overdeliver because they are trying to win people over and it feels like the wrong moment to set conditions.
Then at some point, reality intervenes. They set a boundary. They raise their prices. They say no to something. And the clients who signed up for the honeymoon version feel, understandably, that something has shifted.
The answer is not to be less warm or less generous. It is to be real from the beginning. Set your actual terms. Charge your actual prices. Be clear about how you work and what you won’t do. Let people see the real version of you in the first interaction, not the ninth.
The right clients, the ones you actually want, will not be put off by the real you. They will be reassured by it. Because what everyone is actually looking for, in business and in life, is someone they can count on to mean what they say.
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The good news in all of this?
You do not need a massive audience, a viral post or a marketing budget you haven’t got. You need genuine, consistent, human connection with the people who are right for you.
Know, like and trust. Same as it ever was.
*I say ‘He’ because I am a cis-gendered, heterosexual woman dating men. I fully accept that lovebombing is not an exclusively male activity!
Ooh! Lovely insights Sara!
I love the metaphor of dating, too.
Great points Sara. Do feel that going quiet on socials, doing this myself right now due to a sight issue (getting sorted). So keeping my health in prime position. Socials will fire up again but only when I am ready. Trying to keep the guilt of people thinking i was love bombing them out of my mindset. xx