Relationship marketing, as I have mentioned in the first part (be sure to read that part to know some classic fundamentals about relationship marketing), is the process of developing a relationship that is not motivated by sales opportunity and is aimed at helping your customers and potential customers by treating them as humans rather than funnel-able leads.
Businesses that practice relationship marketing saw a 450% increase in qualified prospects.
Blogging is also an art of helping people with your ability to solve their problems or educate them about a topic. As a beginner blogger, you can use relationship marketing strategies to get initial boost to your readers in terms of traffic and subscribers.
RM is not only a topic that only big brands should focus on but also one that small businesses, online marketers, and bloggers should try their hands on.
Through practicing relationship marketing concepts, you get more connected with your readers and customers, aim at providing them value (it can be anywhere, on social media or in the physical world or through your weekly newsletter).
By doing this…
… we can not only win their hearts but also their deals.
The additional benefit of focusing on relationship marketing is that the word of mouth of your prospects. It can win you more readers and clients that would otherwise be beyond your reach.
Let’s see how!
Quick Table of Contents
- Use content marketing as relationship marketing strategy
- Informational content
- Use email marketing
- Social media strategy
- Customer service
- Loyalty rewards
- Help people asking for it
- Things to avoid in relationship marketing
- Successful relationship marketing examples & case studies
Top 7 Relationship Marketing Strategies To Win Customers & Make Sales (in 2019)
1) Content marketing: An underrated relationship marketing strategy
Your customers or readers are your boss and not the other way round. The biggest mistake we as bloggers do is to underestimate the power of a single reader.
We might think a single reader is not that important but the reality is a single reader has the ability to break or build a business empire.
“There is only one boss; the customer. And he can fire everybody in the company, from the chairman down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.” – Sam Walton Click To Tweet
Start building relationships with your every single existing customer. If you have only two of them, consider them as an opportunity to get to other 20. Provide them with what they need.
You can also figure out some common problems of your customers (or conduct a survey to find it out) and provide free support on the issue.
2) Use content to inform them and show your dedication.
Almost every company that blogs shows content that promotes its products.
But there are a few like IBM who use content marketing as a tool to build trust and credibility in the minds of their readers. IBM has around a 100 blogs each writing top notch content that is well researched and data-backed blog posts that form the basis of other smaller blogs’ content ideas.
Epic content might be something that you can use till the end of time to attract more potential clients. White papers and researched blog posts are to stay for long and should not be considered as a marketing expense.
a) Write for your readers, not for you
Writing content that can help the readers does not mean keyword stuffing.
If you really want to produce content that aims at serving the base audience of your niche, you have to take care of searcher intent which in a way is writing content according to the demand of your audience.
You optimize your content on behalf of how the reader wants it and not the other way round.