Attracting, convincing and converting a stranger into a lead (and then into a buyer) is what is now called Relationship Marketing — the best way to guarantee constant and profitable sales over the Internet!
The tactic of selling an offer through brute force, focusing on attempts to persuade a customer solely based on the qualities of a product or service, used to work in the past, before Digital Marketing, when basically all markets had sales as the protagonist.
With the evolution from Marketing 1.0 to the current Marketing 5.0, the purchasing behavior of the public itself has changed, disfavoring the “cold” impact caused solely by promoting the qualities of an offer and becoming aligned with Customer Success — and their feelings regarding the offer!
In addition to ensuring that the customer will be successful when using a product or hiring a service, companies need to nurture a relationship with each member of the target audience until they persuade them to buy.
This persuasion is no longer just cold contact and becomes beneficial for both parties!
This text is my attempt to help your company gain the immeasurable loyalty of the largest portion of your audience, through the nurturing of lasting relationships, bringing to reality:
- The authenticity that separates your brand from similar offerings on the market;
- The confidence your business needs to build to sell more over time;
- And the authority you need to dominate your niche by appearing to your new leads in the first results of their Internet searches!
Over 16 years of extracting practical results at the head of one of the largest Digital Marketing agencies in India has made Enjoy Minder a reference in Relationship Marketing — and, based on this text, our next success story could very well be yours!
What is Relationship Marketing?
Digital Marketing involves a series of techniques and tools aimed at attracting and converting the largest possible number of people interested in what your brand has to offer , in addition to doing this:
- With the lowest possible costs;
- Analyzing the data that makes your sales predictable;
- And in the most sustainable way for your company’s growth in the short, medium and long term!
Relationship Marketing ends up being the name of a “modality” within Digital Marketing, focused on the mission of:
- To reach;
- Enchant;
- And engage with your future and current customers!
In other words, Relationship Marketing takes advantage of Digital Marketing techniques and tools (especially those that measure and analyze the behavior of your leads) to make each person who comes into contact with your business feel:
- View;
- Heard;
- And supported.
When your company does more than just talk about a product or service and starts paying attention to the results it would like the audience to have from these offers, it begins a relationship entirely focused on:
- To help the lead understand the challenge they face;
- Offering free solutions (and those sold by your brand, of course) to help you achieve what you need;
- And to ensure that such solutions will bring satisfaction and practical changes to the customer’s routine, completing what is called Customer Success!
When your company dedicates a series of content to capturing, then nurturing and converting your target audience, the emotional bonds created from this relationship ensure that, when it comes time to purchase, your audience will buy from you — and no one else!
After all, who was it that cleared up these people’s doubts? Who gave them hope that things could be resolved?
When it comes to swiping their card or deciding between alternatives other than your brand, who do you think your ideal (and engaged) customer will choose?
You!
The power of Relationship Marketing is incalculable — and the limits depend only on:
- How much you know your ideal customers;
- From its expertise in relation to the solutions it offers;
- And your dedication to expressing these solutions in a way that they can be found by the people who matter on the Internet!
Lucky for you, you’ll learn how to do all of that here!
Building Connections in the Customer Journey
Since I’m talking about creating authentic and powerful connections between your brand and your perfect audience, it’s easy to imagine that Relationship Marketing is present in absolutely every stage of awareness and bringing a lead closer to your business:
- Starting from the first contact with your brand;
- Going through all the stages of education in relation to the challenges it faces;
- And culminating in an opening of contact that goes far beyond the moment a sale is completed!
One way to ensure that Relationship Marketing will be explored to the fullest, throughout all stages of public engagement with your offers, is to repeat something we do here at Enjoy Minder — not only for ourselves at the agency, but also for all our clients:
- Create relevant materials to be found on the Internet and to be targeted to the right segments of your audience during their education process;
- Based on Content Marketing strategies that take into account your audience’s purchasing profile to create relevant materials;
- Ensure a structure for capturing information about this audience so that it is understood, measured, and that these metrics have solid results to be used in other strategies or in other stages of the customer journey;
- Ensure that these metrics are interpreted within the correct contexts for which they were collected;
- And make sure they are used for every next action within your sales strategy!
Do you have questions about how to build a relationship with your customer? The video below — and the example below — can help you build the right strategy!
Relationship Marketing Example
It all starts with content production answering two important questions:
- Who is this material for (which segment of your target audience);
- And what is the moment for these people to become aware of the problems they face, that you can help, and in relation to your own brand!
Since Relationship Marketing is based on Digital Marketing strategies to reach and collect data about the public, it all starts with knowing your audience and collecting all the necessary information to make them later purchase the offers you make available.
All this persuasion occurs gradually, indirectly, but directly influencing the sales of your products or services, because a relationship is not born overnight, and the promotion of your offers does not happen coldly.
Each action aims to gain space in customers’ lives while:
- Educates them about the problems they face or the needs they are trying to meet;
- Create a community of people with similar interests, problems and expectations around your brand and other people in your target audience;
- And it creates future sales opportunities (for new and existing customers) by consistently getting your business in front of the audience that matters most.
This is why personalized content and publications on social networks have such a big weight in Relationship Marketing, after all, it is through relevant content that your audience can be:
- Engaged;
- Encouraged;
- And connected to your company’s goals!
As your audience progresses through the buying journey, content changes from generalized (broadly targeted) material to a more personalized and intimate approach (aimed at reaching specific individuals).
This way, you make your brand the only option that matters when making a purchase!
In this case, the further leads advance in the purchasing journey and interaction with your brand’s content, the more the messages will aim to:
- Providing highly customized information;
- A more direct incentive to purchase;
- And the cultivation of loyalty that generates new sales for the same customers.
Personalization through data collection
This entire process of reaching, approaching and delighting the public can begin without your business knowing much about the details that form your audience’s purchasing personality.
But it is inevitable that, to move forward with this strategy with truly positive results, you must collect and categorize all possible information about each person who interacts with your brand!
The data collection offered by Digital Marketing platforms is essential to sell more and better — and without appearing desperate, shooting in all directions — because it is from this information that you will be able to identify:
- Who to talk to;
- What to talk about;
- And when to speak!
And it may seem counterintuitive, but since the intention is to get the public to take an action that brings your company closer to its financial goals, you can’t put your company (or its offerings) under the spotlight.
You need to put your audience at the center and use them as a basis to decide:
- How to convey your messages and content;
- How to ensure that these communications are fruitful;
- And what role does your product or service play in transforming your customer’s life from a regular one to a life where they feel satisfied because of your help!
So Relationship Marketing is not a passive concept: it is not enough to simply publish content and hope that it finds its audience!
Content Marketing tries to predict your audience’s behavior based on this data collection (and not on guesswork) precisely to create content that answers the questions they will one day ask (in addition to the ones they already ask) to ensure that you will use the right means to:
- Make your company’s most valuable content appear before them on the Internet;
- Answer the most common questions and objections from this audience;
- And provide content that will serve as guides until purchase!
By understanding your prospects’ individual preferences, behaviors, and needs, your business can deliver personalized experiences that resonate with each person within that bigger picture — closing bigger, better, more frequent sales as a result!
Enjoy Minder’s strategies for customer relations
All the results that Enjoy Minder achieves for itself and for its partner clients have increased sales as a natural consequence of the process of interacting with clients in an intentional way!
But this only becomes possible after a company:
- It proves that it can do everything it promises for leads;
- Demonstrates genuine concern for the relationship;
- And you know that the only way to sell more and better is by genuinely satisfying the customer!
These are the qualities that can make your company a market leader, and it was these same qualities that transformed Enjoy Minder into one of the largest Digital Marketing agencies in India!
The next step is to improve your business’s Customer Experience using all the data collected about your audience up to this point — and I’ll explain what Customer Experience is (and how to use it to ensure Customer Success) below.
Improving Customer Success with Relationship Tactics
To improve Customer Success, it is important to align customer needs and expectations , offer proactive support and, of course, build trusting relationships.
To do this, you need to know your client well, what they are looking for and the challenges they need to overcome. With this information in hand, you can personalize your approach, maintaining open and frequent communication.
Establish an ongoing support channel where the customer can receive support before, during, and after the sale is completed.
Be available to answer questions, provide guidance, or even resolve issues quickly and ensure your customers get the most value from your product or service.
Because all the actions that show your audience that your business has their success in mind will help them see your brand as a “someone” (instead of a “something”) that:
- Seeks audience success;
- From the least waste of her time, money, and other resources;
- With the greatest chance of success in whatever objective that audience needs to achieve!
To master each customer acquisition and retention strategy, I highly recommend checking out Enjoy Minder’s blog.
There are dozens of free content pieces teaching you how to make your brand’s Relationship Marketing more personal (and effective), dedicating just a few minutes of reading per day!
Improving Customer Experience with Relationship Marketing
Customer Experience is how you deliver the outcome of your product or service (success) to customers at all touchpoints, from before the sale to after it.
It’s not enough to have a quality product or service, you need to think about the customer’s entire journey and how each interaction with your brand will generate positive emotions!
And although certain experiences are personal, they can be generalized to ensure that, at least technically, your sales strategies will cover all the points present in the formation of an image :
- Coherent;
- Reliable;
- And meaningful to your company’s audience!
Understanding the importance of Customer Experience is essential to remain competitive in today’s market! By delivering a memorable journey to your customers, your company will connect emotionally with them, build loyalty and, consequently, sell more.
The 2023 Limitless RD Station Awards
None of what I’m saying is just lip service: the Limitless Award recognizes agencies that achieve significant results and exceed expectations!
The Customer Success Specialist category , in particular, crowns those who have created strategies for the continued use of RD Station Marketing by customers, aiming to achieve superior and more consistent results with the tool, thus ensuring their success.
Enjoy Minder took home the trophy, in addition to being among the Top 5 Best Marketing and Sales Cases (among the more than 2 thousand agencies that are part of the ecosystem)!
Another achievement that not only completes our collection, but also represents how investing in building a solid relationship with customers is the best thing you could do for your company.
Another good thing about this is that you don’t need much to get started — and as long as you’re serious about your clients’ success, it’ll be hard not to be successful too!
Invest in a better relationship!
You have two options to sell more on the Internet today:
- Focus on your products or services and hope that your persona is interested in them;
- Or take an interest in your audience to find out which products or services can serve them like no other alternative!
The power of Relationship Marketing lies in exploring opportunities for connection (always through Content Marketing) that your competitors are not seeing — or that they prefer to ignore in favor of cold and superficial sales focused on the product, instead of the buyer!
If you decide to focus on your audience and make the most of Relationship Marketing to increase your sales while maintaining customer satisfaction, you can discover a variety of new opportunities with the multidisciplinary team here at Enjoy Minder!
Talk to our team for free and they will give you the next steps on what to do to create valuable relationships and sell much more!
