The Six Tenets of Relationship Marketing approach obtaining recurring customers from a strategic standpoint while clarifying how strategies like content marketing, social media, web development fit into the big picture lead generation approach.
20. IS MY STRATEGY OPTIMIZED
TO BUILD ‘RELATIONSHIPS’?
DO I HAVE THE RIGHT
PEOPLE ON THE BUS?
Andy Halko
@andyhalko
Insivia
Insivia.com
PlanBold
Planbold.com
Get these slides at insivia.com/digitalsummit
Notes de l'éditeur
‘Her’ story
A software that learns all about you, adapts to your personality and grows.
He falls in love with it because it is perfect for him.
And many others fall in love because it is easy.
We are not yet close to that today, but I think it’s a vision that as marketers we should all watch and think forward to.
Today, people don’t build relationships with brands.
We have to be honest, People don’t give a shit about brands.
But people can love - they just love what brands love.
They can be passionate about a product
A cause
or even a culture.
But the truth of it is, that people care about other things.
They act on Need and Interest.
They need groceries to live.
They want a vacation.
They like to go running
Or they love their spouse.
These things are not our brands.
If we are honest with ourselves and our research, our brand never comes up as a piece of our consumers mind.
As people go along their lives, they have needs and wants.
Marketing is our ability to convince when the opportunity arises
That intersection between awareness and need.
Often when the person has that desire, it is our goal to be the best at pushing them to choose us.
Our other goal is to create an impression that when people reach the point of action they recognize our brand and have some emotion related to how we made them feel.
I wish my needs were linear, but they aren’t.
As my life changes, my needs and interest change. Sometimes daily, shit, sometimes hourly.
Relationship marketing is about obtaining multiple transactions.
But it is just like traditional marketing where a awareness meets a person when they have a need.
In relationship marketing though, our goal is to create awareness frequency and not disenfranchise people.
These are the elements that create and keep “relationships” and multiple transactions
On the left though are tenants that impact success for all marketing.
- Doing these allows us to sell and not doing them turns away customers.
On the right we have aspects that relate specifically to creating multiple transactions.
- Doing these builds recurring transactions while not doing them ensures we won’t sell more than once.
And I think that’s why everyone freaked out as social media grew saying ‘Marketing is Dead’
But social really just exemplified the core elements of obtaining multiple transactions.
That’s why you often hear relationship marketing tied to digital and more specifically to social media marketing.
Creating value outside our product allows us to keep a connection with our consumer even when their needs don’t match what we have.
This is the root of content marketing.
And is the foundation of social and automation tactics.
Truly Valuable
Create value that truly fits our customers. We really understand our customers pains, desires, interests.
Benevolent
If we stay focused on just what we have to offer - we are self-centered - customers will not keep a connection with us and recurring transactions become very difficult.
We have to give outside our product or service offerings.
Unique
Giving something that our customer can’t get anywhere else.
The next element that really defines recurring transactions or relationships is Frequency and diversity of place.
Frequency
which doesn’t always mean consistency. Knowing your audience to understand when to connect. But we must commit to multiple touch points.
Diversity of Place
Our audience is in many places and so should we be. This means not just social, but our owned and paid media as well as traditional marketing channels.
It all ties together.
Relevancy
Combined with value outside our product, we should always ensure our touch points are valuable and relate to the place.
Now, these are hard to control by marketing, but they are essential to recurring transactions and relationships.
So, as marketers, we need to have influence in these areas.
With social media, marketing has become an integral role in both customer feedback and customer service.
We need to start seeing ourselves as a part of that puzzle to deliver product/service improvement messages back to our leadership.
And for customer service, to make sure we react and act like our customer service departments.
Great pricing and deals also fit here - simple things like free shipping act as part of providing a great product. But again, it is part of our responsibility to understand the market and what will keep people coming back and not hurt our bottom line.
Creating value, frequency and great service help us stay connected and increase transactions
Having these foundation pieces either make it easy for us to maintain a relationship or drive us away forever - and quickly.
Authenticity + Trust
I am a strong believer in authenticity across all marketing. I feel that in today’s market, that consumers crave authenticity in every medium.
Now it’s possible to be successful in creating multiple transactions without being authentic. And there are a lot of people that call bullshit on authenticity as an ingredient for relationship marketing.
But not only do people want it, but it makes it easier. It takes a lot more work to keep a fake relationship than a real one.
People see right through bullshit and they will call you out on it fast.
Knowing our audience
This again is a given in any marketing.
The difference here is that we have to see our audience as segments. There are smaller groups that we can create where needs, wants, and interests collect.
We also have to see our audience as a living, breathing, evolving thing. What is true today, might not be true tomorrow. What happens in the world or in their lives may change everything about them.
What this means for us as marketers is that we have to become better at defining our groups correctly and more diversely while also constantly re-evaluating our data.
Aligning Values
Like authenticity, this is not a requirement, but makes the long-term approach of relationship marketing easier.
Every company has or should have values.
They define us. When I work with brands on strategy, I love using the hierarchy chart which puts values as the foundation.
Values should shape our audience, products, channels, authenticity and everything else.
When values aren’t aligned with our audience it can be easy to lose them and usually it is forever.
And today, the values of our leaders in the case of Firefox can affect our brand and relationships.
All of these elements we just talked about also impact our customer acquisitions.
Authenticity, data, values, great product, frequency, diversity, and creating value help us reach people who have never bought before. Then these same elements appeal to them bring them into our marketing ecosystem.
With acquisition as well as retention, our organizations grow.
Empower Evangelists
Following these core tenets, we can find the evangelists in our audiences.
These people will carry our flag and help grow our ecosystem from outside our organizations.
Evangelists should always be watched for and embraced as part of our strategists. If there is not a process for finding these people and fostering their position, we are missing out on huge growth opportunity.
Change Our Hiring.
I also believe that brands and agencies will begin to look beyond skill of employees and more at their core values, passions, interests to find people who align with building relationships.
I want to leave with the thought about my core tenets of relationship marketing, but group them in a way that can help how we go about implementing them in our clients or business.
I want to leave with the thought about my core tenets of relationship marketing, but group them in a way that can help how we go about implementing them in our clients or business.