5 Reasons Why Relationship Marketing is Good for Your Organization

I’ve been focusing a lot on how to plan, build and deploy relationship marketing campaigns as part of an integrated marketing strategy. As you can see, the idea is to start simple and build over time, always mindful of your target buyer’s behavior throughout their buyer journey. By doing so, prospects are more likely to become loyal customers, and customers are more likely to become repeat customers who stay loyal to your brand.

Brand affinity aside, what other benefits come along with relationship marketing?

1. Direct engagement from customer and influencers

This is the purest form of engagement and, if done right, will boost your brands reputation across customers and influencers. A natural output of direct engagement is that you’ll learn more about your customer, thus enabling you to better target.

2. Prioritized Channel Messaging

By aligning your messaging and channels across each stage of the buyer journey, you have a lot more insight into which channels really help to move the needle — thus helping you to prioritize budgeting and focus on optimizing.

3. Lower Cost

Research shows that keeping existing customers costs less than attracting new customers, and that the cost for acquisition on a per-customer basis may be 5 to 10 times that of customer retention. Research also says there is a 5 to 20 percent chance of converting a prospect to first-time customer status, and a 20 to 40 percent chance of reacquiring a lost customer. So, it pays to focus on building upon those hard earned relationships.

4. Streamlining Operations

As I covered in my last blog post, integrated marketing improves operational efficiencies since it requires coordinating content marketing with inbound and outbound marketing efforts. The method I’ve outlined for building relationship marketing programs aligns and leverages your content, channels, data, and marketing technology to work together.

5. Improved Reporting

By looking at your marketing efforts through the lens of the buyer journey, you can aggregate campaign reports to show how each stage of the funnel is performing. Even if your campaigns are focused on engagement and not transaction, the goal is to move a prospect to the next stage of their journey. That means you can still track conversions, report on these outcomes, and learn what works and what needs tweaking.
Depending on your organization, there may be a lot more relationship marketing benefits that apply to your company. Call deflection in customer support, for example, can help lower expensive support calls and drive higher satisfaction levels. Or influencer-based relationship marketing programs can really boost PR and marketing communications.
What specific relationship marketing benefits would you most like to gain?