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Relationship Marketing: Creating an Essential & Long-lasting Bond With Your Customer
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Business Strategies

Relationship Marketing: Creating an Essential & Long-lasting Bond With Your Customer

read 4 min

Assertive connections. Long-lasting Results. Communication Strategy. In a synthetic way, this is what relationship marketing is about.

When creating, scaling up, or managing a business, there are different communication and acting strategies that one can choose. Some people adopt traditional advertising, others opt for Social Media Marketing. In fact, this list of possibilities could go on and on. 

At the end of the day, the truth is that, when building a business strategy, an entrepreneur and their team must make some choices. These choices must consider the business’ goals and values. 

In this article, we’ll explain everything about Relationship Marketing and how it can help your business to grow and to become more solid. 

Keep reading!

Everything You Need To Know About Relationship Marketing

What is it?

The basis of every relationship is made up of people. Not companies. It’s essential to understand that people are the key to each and every strong collaboration and partnership. 

Furthermore, we must understand that relationships go beyond just having connections. In other words, having a real bond with people is stronger than having them on your LinkedIn profile. 

With these in mind, we can finally dig into the definition of relationship marketing. 

Summing it up, relationship marketing is a long-term strategy that helps companies, entrepreneurs and influencers to be closer to their audience and/or customers. Therefore, decreasing churn numbers and improving sales and NPS. 

Why is it important?

Yet, most businesses are focused on transactional marketing. That means, instead of building long-term relationships, it focuses on increasing individual sales. 

In the short-term, transactional marketing is a solution for an expansion in numbers and cashiers. However, when looking at the future, the scenario is not so positive and encouraging, as this increase might not take long to stagnate. 

In relationship marketing, the relationship itself comes at first and contributes to a positive long-term strategy. 

When Should I Invest in Relationship Marketing?

Has a customer made the first purchase? Or join for the first time one of your events? Well, this is when you should start your relationship marketing strategy. 

That means if you already have customers, why not transform them into brand-loyal patrons – also known as brand fans? To do that, you’ll want to take a personalized approach and become integrated into their lives in a way that feels natural and genuine. You want them to feel special and essential for your business, after all, indeed they are.

Diving Into the Strategy Benefits 

Among the Relationship Marketing benefits, we have:

  1. Decreased marketing and advertising spend, after all, if you have brand-loyal fans, you won’t need these as much
  2. The business team can focus on exceptional customer experience. With a well-designed and executed relationship marketing strategy, the team is able to focus more emphasis on delivering a good customer experience throughout the purchase/relation process. 
  3. Higher customer lifetime value. If the customer really likes your product/company, that means that they are more likely to return and relate once again with your business. In other words, you feed the cycle of the satisfied customer, making them always come back.
  4. Brand fans indicate the services and products. In other words, a person who really likes your brand is more likely to recommend it to friends and family. That is, you enter a free and spontaneous “propaganda” cycle.

Creating a Relationship Marketing Strategy 

For a successful long-term strategy, the first step must be researching. Understanding the market, competitors, and target customers’ behavior will give you the lead to start drawing your strategy.

Each business requires a specific strategy based on its reality and goals. However, there are some ground steps that might be helpful. Let’s check them out!

1. Create an emotional connection with your customers

The goal is to create a bond so deep with the customer or community that if someone talks negatively about your company, they’ll defend the brand. Some examples are Apple, Tesla, Netflix and many others. 

And, that relationship can be B2C but also B2B. The secret is to be honest and open-hearted. According to SupperOffice, a customer who’s emotionally connected gives 52% more value than any other.

To create emotional connection your communication and approach must be:

  • Honest
  • Trustful
  • Show personality
  • Be personalized
  • Inspire confidence
  • Deliver great customer experience

Some ways to do it are creating personalized videos for partners and members of your community. Also, speaking directly to them or creating relevant content that makes them resonate.

2. Leverage Your Community

Prove to your customers what’s your differential and show exactly what they’re the benefits to be by your brand’s side. Show your values, listen to them and bring them together. Show that there’s a purpose behind what the company is doing. Generate identification!

3. Establish Your Business’ Values 

To generate identification, it is necessary that people see themselves for the purposes of your business. Therefore, in addition to being transparent, the pillars must be clearly outlined.

That is, no hiding things under the rug or being confused about your goals and values. Be direct, sincere, organized and, above all, have real goals that connect with business actions.

Also according to Forbes, when a customer really resonates with a company they’re truly loyal. As we can see on the below data:

  • 47% of customers buy from brands that support a good cause on a monthly basis,
  • 53% of customers would NOT invest in a company that does not actively support a good cause,
  • 91% of customers would switch brands if a different brand of similar price and quality supported a good cause.

The Takeaways

In short, there are different ways to deal with your consumer or community. We have the traditional form, which is somewhat impersonal. But, we also have the special and tailored-maid way in which relationship marketing can deliver to you.

Establishing strong relationships that go beyond simple connections can be the key to your business. You gain not only fans but brand advocates who will defend you if necessary and promote you to their friends.

However, as much as the entrepreneur wants immediate results, for this strategy it is important to keep in mind that patience is everything! It is not the advertising path, but a long-term plan that can bring unprecedented results to your business and your sales base.

A business doesn’t need to adopt only one strategy. An option can be mixing short & long-term actions to grow exponentially.

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Credits:
Júlia Vilaça

Head of Content & Social Media

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Author:
Júlia Vilaça

Head of Content & Social Media

read 5 min
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