Enhancing your relational marketing activities can help you attract and keep the right clients.
What is relational marketing?
Relational marketing is a strategy for cultivating more meaningful interactions with your customers to ensure long-term satisfaction and brand loyalty.
Relational marketing activities can help you:
- amplify brand awareness
- strengthen brand commitment, and
- generate quality referrals.
It’s a long-term strategy focused on the customer, not on a single transaction.
—Josh Bean
Relational marketing integrates your brand promise with the products or services you provide to meet the simple and complex needs of your customers.
When done well, customers will inherently understand how your endeavor makes a difference for them on a personal level and how it makes a difference for humanity at large, increasing the likelihood that they will share it with their friends and family.
Why does relational marketing work?
Relational marketing taps into human psychology in a more pleasing and affirming way than traditional advertising and promotional tactics. As a result, customers feel more respected and included in the vision and mission of your endeavor.
The goal of relational marketing is to develop an emotional connection with your customers.
—Michael Keenan
Relational Marketing Benefits
Enhancing your relational marketing activities can save you money, time, and energy over traditional marketing methods. Here’s why:
- it costs twenty-five times less to keep a customer than to win a new one
- committed customers spend 23% more than your occasional ones
- people are 90% more likely to buy from a brand recommended by a friend
- word-of-mouth promos are five times more effective than paid impressions
Levels of Relational Marketing Engagement
As customers become more committed to your brand, they move through measurable checkpoints on a planned journey that is meaningful to both them and you.
- exploratory, e.g. social media → email marketing
- basic, e.g. email marketing → event attendance
- collaborated, e.g. social media + email + events → referrals
- interconnected, e.g. social media, email, events, referrals → ambassadors
How the levels are designed depends upon your endeavor and your industry, but the stages are naturally defined by the human desire for bonding and sharing.
Be open to testing different types of media to discover what works best for deepening customer satisfaction and commitment to your brand.
Relational Marketing Activities
What would it look like to bring your relational marketing to life?
- create compelling content that tells a story
- engage with your customers where they are
- personalize customer interactions based on shared values and needs
- incorporate technology for efficiency and effectiveness
- choose to focus on customer-centered metrics
- collect customer feedback and take action on it
- support referral-making behavior
- incentivize brand ambassadors
Think about offering specific products and services that fit appropriately into the overall design of your customer journey, as well as those that support your ability to be profitable in a responsible and sustainable way.
If you find that you’re offering some products or services that no longer fit the intentional journey you may envision now, consider pruning them back to invest more money, more time, and more energy into a streamlined core set.
Key Takeaways
Get started in these small-to-large ways:
- one-to-one interactions
- customer-driven content
- organized referral programs
- structured influencer programs
Consider implementing the first two items in your communications each day, week, and month; then plan it out on a calendar for maximum accountability. At the same time, begin reflecting on the last two items until the ideas start flowing, helping you shape the concepts to your brand over time. Record any random ideas on sticky notes, then move detailed notes into a dedicated notebook, or simply use your smartphone to keep it all organized.
A final thought on relational marketing:
Even when you’re marketing to your entire audience, you’re still simply speaking to one person.
—Ann Handley
>> Learn the marketing basics that will turn heads for all the right reasons.