Traditional Relationship Marketing is now being compared to a Brand Marketing Strategy. Which strategy achieves the best results in new clients and more product sales?
What many business owners are saying today is: “my marketing still works, but it does not work as well as it did before.”
Are you someone who thinks or feels this way?
Do you notice the attention span of people is generally becoming less and less?
Are you noticing a shorter cycle that clients spend time purchasing from you?
Are you noticing clients coming back less frequently? Are you noticing clients spending less money per transaction?
All these factors decrease our profits.
Do you know much about your brand? The value of your brand? What it’s worth?
Paul Dwyer explains that as a business consultant they rarely discuss a brand marketing strategy with their clients because they consider there to be far more ways to strategically create uplift, enquiry and client conversion than “building that brand marketing strategy”.
Most of our time we discuss referrals, joint ventures, strategic alliances, attrition and other strategies which are forms of relationship marketing. These strategies are proven methods that can be implemented in to a business with little cost and if done correctly can reap huge rewards for the business owner.
So when comparing the two strategies, one should first consider marketing the product and service through relationship marketing before heading in to a brand marketing strategy. There is a place for the latter, however, it comes once your product and service have cemented their position in the market place.
However, if we take some elements of branding and apply it to relationship marketing, this may be just the answer to catching your prospects attention and converting them into clients.
Paul Dwyer explained it like this……. when people see an ad on TV, does it make us purchase immediately?
However, everybody knows that if “someone they trust” recommends a product, the time until somebody buys reduces dramatically. It can be sometimes immediate. We trust people we know for recommending a product or service far more than a flashy sales person on TV or on the internet.
Whether you think building a brand or relationship marketing is the best, both have their advantages and disadvantages. By combining the best elements of both, we can create a hybrid form of marketing that captures more peoples’ attention; and keep them longer.
What hardly anyone can ever value, articulate or share for business owners, is your brand as an asset on your balance sheet. Hardly any business values the relationship marketing value they have on their balance sheet either. It takes a combination of accounting and marketing expertise to achieve this outcome and forms a major part of the goodwill of your business.