Trying to create a brand your customers will adore makes fools out of many of us. And it’s not unusual for your marketing efforts to make you feel like your middle school-self again — pining for the attention of your latest crush with silly antics, followed by repeated bouts of melodramatic dejection. But unlike middle school love, the world of marketing is high-stakes, and it can make or break your company’s climb to the top.

To make sure your company’s marketing overtures are taken seriously by an array of suitors and prospects, you have to do the seemingly impossible: treat every customer like they are your only customer. Lucky for you, Salesforce Core offers the Marketing Cloud, a comprehensive solution to creating authentic journeys for every customer. And Simplus offers services to help you effectively implement and master Marketing Cloud.

So, to get you started, here’s four tried-and-true ways to woo your customers (and possibly teach your middle school self a lesson or two):

Establish a connection

In order to get things going, you have to have a connection with the prospect you’re trying to bring into the brand loyalty fold. To do this, you have to take the customer journey seriously. This means not just gearing up the marketing department, but all departments. 64% of marketing leaders (or, love gurus) believe customer journey strategies begin with organizational shifts, like breaking down silos in your business. Your marketing has to work with sales, and sales with finance, and finance with service, and so on. If marketing is left to operate independently, it won’t be able to create an effective customer journey that’s embedded with all the other touchpoints a customer experiences.

Enter Journey Builder, a Salesforce solution meant to ensure you cover all aspects of the customer experience. You can show your customers exactly how you two are the perfect match by offering them an undeniable connection at every point: advertising campaigns, journey templates, community onboarding, and more. And best of all, Journey Builder knows how to tailor each journey according to customer lifecycle and demographics.

Related: Using Salesforce Marketing Cloud to win fans and influence customers

Communicate in their language

I’m not your middle school crush, but I am a potential customer, and here’s my situation: after a “friend” gave my contact information to a company I had no interest in, I received two calls, two voicemails, and two texts within three days from the company. Each attempt to contact me compounded my irritation until I finally replied: “Please stop contacting me.” Kudos to this company for listening and no longer sending me unwanted stuff, but wouldn’t it be better to have begun the relationship with tailored, effective content and the appropriate medium for that content? To have earned a fan, or at least some intrigue, rather than earn a hater who will spread their tale of irritation far and wide?

Marketing Cloud makes sure you’re crafting messages in the right (love) language for your customers. Some, like me, prefer to only get texts from companies I have personally signed up for, saving the unknown companies for my emails. Perhaps others like to get social media alerts from your brand, or push notifications from your company’s app. Marketing Cloud makes sure you’re catering the right content in the right way to your different customer personas. Using top-notch data analysis and easy to use interfaces, you can create journeys sure to woo even the coldest of hearts.

Make time for them

A key feature of Salesforce Marketing Cloud is the Mobile Studio. So not only is your potential business crush wooed by your mastery of communication, but they can tell you’re making time for them. Using SMS, push notifications, or group messaging (whatever your customer prefers best), Mobile Studio allows you to create messages that are custom for mobile format and still personal. Not only that, but you can also drive app engagement and expand your brand’s audience via Mobile Studio. With 85% of rising millennial consumers using mobile devices to make brand decisions, it’s imperative you make time to reach your customers where they are.

You can’t just transfer the content from your website to a mobile format and expect it to work the same magic. Just like you can’t expect your behavior in class to fly when you finally get that date with your crush. Going out, or going mobile, means adapting to a new situation, and your marketing strategy has to be prepared for that.

Be genuine

All the strategies previously covered won’t mean anything if your branding doesn’t feel genuine to your customers. On this front, your customer is a little more complicated than your middle school crush: customers can actually see through forceful, pushy advertising and quickly shut you out. Yet 59% of marketers are still failing to personalize email content. And, not so coincidentally, 52% of consumers are likely to switch brands if content isn’t personalized. Clearly, email templates that don’t include a name are just the tip of the iceberg of things customers deem red flags.

But again, Marketing Cloud is built to handle that. Using Email Studio, Social Studio, and more features in Marketing Cloud, you can avoid being part of the 59% losing customers. With Marketing Cloud, you can personalize your content and make it more interactive for each end user. Authentic one-to-one journeys for customers take effort, but the ROI for fostering these relationships is unbeatable. Just take it from Simplus’ experience with one client:

Simplus helped a pool supply company implement a more effective email campaign using Salesforce Pardot. We created customizable email templates within Pardot to better leverage the company’s marketing emails. Simplus also offered training on marketing best practices and helped with marketing campaign setup processes. This streamlined and brought greater success to the company’s onboarding efforts to potential vendors and members by championing personalized, effective content.

So your middle school days are long past and buried (we hope). But let’s not forget the important lessons from that arena of romance when it comes to effective business marketing: establish a connection, communicate in their language, make time for them, and be genuine. With Marketing Cloud, mastering all four is a breeze.

Our previous clients won over their crushes with personalized emails in Pardot. And we think you could, too. Contact Simplus today for implementation, managed, and advisory services from the leader in QTC.