Today Bill Lowell and I discuss Relationship Marketing. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard somebody say, “Marketing doesn’t work for us. Our business is all relationship driven.”
And I think to myself, “How unfortunate, this otherwise intelligent person has no idea about the potential of using marketing approaches to drive more referrals and maintain longer, more profitable relationships…” Then I realize my mic is hot. But my point still stands.
What is marketing but your relationship with the customer? Good marketing strategy starts, nurtures and strengthens relationships – at a tiny fraction of the “cost per touch” of throwing a bunch of sales people at the problem.
How many conversations can a salesperson have over the course of a month? 20? 50? 100? How much does that salesperson cost? Six figures? Easy.
Let’s say a successful salesperson’s total cost of ownership is around $180k 180K/50 conversations = $3,600 per conversation.
Marketing tactics like email, social media, video, websites, PR, community relations et. al can have those conversations with tens of thousands in an instant. Ask a 20-something Instagram influencer. (BTW I also was attractive and skinny when I was in my early 20’s. All you Instafluencers should keep that in mind.
I’ll let you do the math on that. Here are the ways marketing can impact relationship driven businesses
1. Brand Awareness: Marketing helps to create brand awareness and visibility for relationship-driven businesses, which can attract new relationships and keep you top of mind among colleagues.
2. Building Trust: Marketing campaigns that emphasize the business’s values and commitment to customers can help build trust and credibility with existing and potential customers.
3. Customer Engagement: Marketing can also provide opportunities for businesses to engage with their customers through personalized and targeted communication, which can strengthen the relationship and foster loyalty.
4. Competitive Advantage: Chances are your competitors are not doing a great job of maintaining relationships. Focusing the marketing effort on expanding the organization’s capacity in terms of the number of relationships it can maintain and support – greatly increasing it.
5. Measuring Success: “relationship-driven” is usually ill-defined. Using marketing approaches you can measure how well you are expanding your relationships while giving you data for continuous improvement of relationship KPI’s In the podcast we get into practical applications of marketing processes that can drive relationships and referrals.