Grow Your Business with a Relationship Marketing Strategy

Author: Kaitlyn Partington Category: B2B, B2C, Marketing Date: September 27, 2019

Relationship marketing is enhancing the connection you have with your existing customers in order to gain loyalty and lower your expenses over time for repeat business. A relationship marketing strategy is a long-term approach in order to build brand loyalty, develop stronger connections with your customers and encourage repeat business over time. Your goals for your relationship marketing strategy won’t be immediate sales or transactions. Instead, your goals will align with the long-term growth and connection you have with your customers in order to gain their trust and advocacy.

Understanding the Benefits of Relationship Marketing

As a marketer, you may be wondering what the importance of relationship marketing is to your marketing strategy. To put it simply – relationships are the cornerstone of your sales! As you gain trust in your relationships with your customers and prospects, the more likely they are to buy your services or products. In other words, without a relationship marketing strategy – you will go nowhere fast while spinning your wheels.

Relationship marketing is one campaign you will integrate into your overall marketing strategy, and which will have its own campaign goals. One of these goals might be to increase the number of brand ambassadors over a specific period of time. Brand ambassadors are extremely loyal customers who will go out of their way to share, promote and market your brand because they connect with and believe in your brand – oftentimes for free!

Transactional Marketing vs Relationship Marketing

Relationship marketing will differ from transactional marketing in its campaign goals, messaging strategy and target audience. Where you may drive new customers to purchase your product or service in transactional marketing, you will be focusing your relationship marketing on your existing customers or partners and increase brand loyalty through the different types of relationship marketing initiatives.

Various Types of Relationship Marketing Examples

There are different types of relationship marketing tactics that you can apply to your marketing strategy. Let’s look at it from four different points of view:

• Referral Marketing

This is the most basic of relationship marketing by rewarding others to purchase and be loyal customers of your brand. For every time your customer refers you to a prospective customer, they receive an incentive of some sort. The incentive could include a discount on a future purchase, exposure, gifts or money, or something else that might motivate your customers to continue to promote your brand.

• Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is an extremely popular type of relationship marketing strategy example because of social media marketing. The viral effect of social media, and the ability to reach a massive number of individuals though a single post, makes influencer marketing an important piece of your relationship marketing strategy.

• Partnership Marketing

Here at Paradigm, we stress the importance of leveraging strategic partnerships to drive awareness of your brand. The clichés, “two heads are better than one” or “teamwork makes the dream work” are not just sayings – they are true! By leveraging your existing relationships with other partner businesses, you now have an even greater reach. Building those relationships with the strategic partners is essential to creating this synergy with your brands. Take advantage of your existing relationships and collaborate ideas on how you can each promote one another.

• Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a combination of influencer, partnership and referral marketing. It’s creating business relationships and providing motivations for this other partner business to promote your product or service by paying them a monetary incentive – of a commission. You quite often see affiliate marketing in the retail world – especially with Amazon links. One example of a relationship marketing

Is a Relationship Marketing Strategy Worth Your Time?

The bottom line is that if you can increase your brand loyalty, you will eventually spend fewer dollars on your overall marketing in order to capture a sale or conversion. In turn, this will increase your bottom line, allowing your business to grow over time.

Still not sure how you can leverage your existing customers and partners into a relationship marketing strategy? Call our strategy team at Paradigm Marketing and Design to set up a consultation today.