Published on October 21st, 2018 | by Sunit Nandi
0Are You Falling Into This Common Marketing Trap?
It’s all a numbers game.
The more leads you gather, the more prospects you find. The more prospects you get into your marketing funnel, the more sales you make. The more sales you make, the more money you make.
This is common sense. It’s also dead wrong. This is the reason why most of the marketing agencies fail to provide long-term results to their clients.
If you are interested in building a business with longevity, making marketing a pure numbers game is a losing endeavor. Customers and clients are more sophisticated than ever and have access to virtually unlimited amounts of information. If you turn sales and marketing into a numbers game, you will always be chasing your tail as customers leave to chase special offers, discounts, and cheaper prices.
Are You Building Relationships or Seeking Transactions?
The most successful marketing isn’t about getting more sales. It is about attracting the right customers. Marketing that improves profits over the long-term focuses on building relationships. A digital marketing agency must come up with strategies that can help businesses (their clients) to improve the relationship with their customers.
Focusing on relationship building over transactions doesn’t mean you need to throw away all of your data and metrics. But, it does mean you have to stop patting yourself on the back just because you captured 1,000 new email addresses. Transactional marketing focuses only on the number of people at different stages of the funnel.
Relationship marketing focuses on the quality and quantity of prospects and customers. But, when you are building relationships, you have to believe that one customer who is a perfect fit for your offering is worth much more than 100 prospects that are only a marginal fit.
At its most radical, relationship marketing is about one-on-one interactions.
It may seem less efficient, but these customers will be loyal. They will be worth much more to the company over their lifetime than transactional customers.
Increase Loyalty by Only Serving Your Ideal Customers and Clients
While many have claimed that brand and customer loyalty are gone forever, the truth is customer loyalty is alive and is a powerful profit booster.
What has changed is that loyalty cannot be bought with discounts and deals. It is impossible in this global marketplace to compete profitably on price for the long term. Someone will always be able to offer something similar to you for less.
If you want to avoid the trap of needing more and more leads to stay afloat, you need to have a relationship with your customers. The better you serve their needs, the more loyal they will be to you. The more loyal your customers are, the more profitable they will be over their lifetime, and according to the Harvard Business Journal, the less you will need to spend on marketing to them.
How do you better serve your customers? You get to know their wants and needs. You over deliver, you offer unsolicited upgrades, you solve problems quickly, and you show gratitude for their business.
You increase loyalty and develop relationships with your customers the same way you build relationships with your friends. You show up and engage with them regularly.
Successful marketing is less a numbers game and more of a relationship game. If you want to stand out in the marketplace, focus your efforts on attracting and keeping ideal customers, and let your competitors fight it out over the bargain seekers who are only interested in a transaction.
The Bottom Line
Every business and marketing company should learn to keep their customers for long by building a healthy relationship; after all, it’s all about the quality of service you offer to keep your customers with you forever. To become the best marketing company, you should learn to retain your customers by building healthy relationships with them. Play the marketing game wisely!