Improving Customer Relationships Through Marketing

Improving Customer Relationships Through Marketing

Strong customer relationships are the backbone of every business. After all, customers are what keep a company propelling forward, instead of spiraling downward. As a business, you need to be nurturing those customer relationships in order to retain the business that keeps you running. 

As such, your marketing strategy should keep customer relationships top of mind, and you should be devoting communications to ensuring the customer feels positively about your brand. While any run of the mill marketing strategy can help keep customer relationships steady, an even stronger marketing strategy utilizes certain techniques in order to consistently improve customer relationships over an extended period of time. This helps your brand increase its customer base, boost individual customer lifetime value, and improve your brand perception drastically. 

5 Marketing Tactics to Help Your Business Develop Stronger Customer Relationships 

What are those techniques, you ask? Look no further! Our team at ROC Media Inc has outlined a tried and true list of marketing tactics that can help your business develop stronger customer relationships:

1. Listen to your customers & respond to their needs

The golden rule of customer service is: The customer is always right. In order for a business to follow this golden rule, we first need to know what the customer is right about! We gain this kind of information by listening to what people are saying about our brand. Our recommended tactic is Social Listening. This involves using social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit, to discover what people are saying about your company in real time. There’s something about the comfort of being behind a screen that brings out a customer’s true thoughts and feelings. 

As such, social listening is one of the strongest strategies a company can use to understand exactly how customers perceive their brand. Keep in mind that once this information is collected, changes must be executed in a timely manner in order to maximize the effectiveness of social listening. 

2. Give your brand a personality

Associating a brand with a particular personality is what brings a company to life. It shows customers that there are real people, just like them, working behind the scenes to provide a product or a service. Being “relatable” is a key strategy for developing personality that is used by a variety of powerhouse brands, and it rarely seems to fail. There are many ways to be “relatable” with your marketing. Take for example, Wendy’s on Twitter. Their content utilizes relevant slang that is used by their target demographic, pokes fun at current social happenings, and utilizes viral trends by relating them to their product lines in some way or another. Wendy’s is one of the best examples of using a “relatable” marketing tactic to actually drive sales. 

The key to making sure this tactic is effective for your business is understanding what is relatable to your audience. Once you understand this and implement it in your marketing, you’ll attract new customers, who will develop a sense of trust with your brand. 

3. Build trust through personalization

It is a well known fact that customers are inherently more likely to trust a company that adapts its offerings to their unique needs. Customization is one of the newest trends in business development, and for good reason. Take for example, the Canadian hair care startup, Function of Beauty. This company’s success skyrocketed, as after only 2 years of being in business, the brand came to be valued at $110M. Customization makes consumers feel special, and it adds a level of trust to your brand’s perception. And, it doesn’t have to come solely from a personalized product. You can tack customization on to a variety of marketing tactics, a popular one being email campaigns! New technology is also allowing brands and influencers to have a business phone number, which allows you to personally text your customers and inform them of new launches, events, or other happenings. 

By understanding which mode of personalization works best for you, and implementing it, your company can gain substantial competitive advantage by earning the trust of your customers! This will launch your customer relationships and help people feel understood and valued when they purchase your products.

4. Turn customers into advocates via influencer campaigns

Influencer marketing has developed into a primary marketing strategy that has been able to generate excellent results for a variety of companies. One of the key reasons for the success of this strategy is the ability a company has to turn a customer into an advocate by engaging with them meaningfully. Inviting influencers to help promote your content helps build trust with your customer base, by showcasing how real people use your products. But the only way it works to strengthen customer relationships and create a lasting bond with consumers,  is if the interaction with said influencers are meaningful. By showing appreciation for influencers and treating them with care, as opposed to tokenizing them, you can actually turn an influencer into an advocate, who will speak well of your brand, even if they aren’t being paid to do so. This helps build a genuine brand perception based around trust and quality, which will help drastically improve your customer relationships.

5. Give your customers the VIP Experience

A major aspect of customer relationship management is making sure the consumer feels valued. A marketing strategy that never fails to show customer appreciation is GIFTING! Gifts can come in a variety of different forms, whether it’s a free product, a free service, a care package, a ticket to an exclusive event, or even a reward program. Offering your customers something to make them feel special will differentiate you from your competitors, providing extra value that customers may not get otherwise. This will not only help attract new customers, but it will show your existing audience just how important they are to you, thus strengthening that relationship of trust and reciprocity that results in extended customer loyalty and lifetime value.