As we head into mid-January, it’s not too late to establish your content marketing strategies for 2016. One of the most important global trends for content marketing in 2016 will be the continued rise of relationship marketing.
What is relationship marketing? In a nutshell, relationship marketing focuses on building relationships with customers rather than selling to them. It relies on customer loyalty and customer engagement to build life-long relationships with customers that can lead to ongoing business, free word-of-mouth and better customer data to help you generate more reliable leads.
You might well be creating valuable, usable, and relatable content, but without strong relationships with your target audience, that content is going nowhere fast. You can create all the splashy videos you want, but if you’re not connected to a community, no one is watching those videos you put so much time and energy into creating.
In order to build relationships with your audience, you need to get to know them and change your approach. Stop thinking about them as customers, and start thinking of them as your community. Know their wants, needs, interest, mobile usage, pain points, and anything else that will help you develop a strong relationship marketing plan and create content your community of customers can connect with when, how and where they need it. Thankfully, a lot of this data, such as past customer purchases, is easily accessible with customer data analytics. You can also gather a lot of information from email signups and social media monitoring.
After the initial getting-to-know-you period, it’s time to get personal with your content. Create content that speaks to them personally. We mean that literally—address customers by their first names. Develop loyalty programs that show you understand and care about their interests. Distribute content that speaks to your community’s wants and needs—consistently.
Think about your reader and how they’ll react to your content, what they’ll get out of it. If it doesn’t trigger an emotional response, they probably won’t interact with it. The more your content resonates with your target audience, the more they’ll engage with it.
And if your community responds to your content, join the conversation. Respond to comments. Follow them back. Keep the conversation going. These conversations are part of what build relationships. The stronger your relationships, the more likely people will be to read and share your social media posts, engage with your apps, open your emails, click on the links and maybe even forward the email.
Now’s the time to engage in data-driven relationship marketing to develop your community and personalize your outreach efforts. Create usable, relevant content and then distribute it using all the channels at your disposal in order to build and nurture relationships with your core audience.
Learn more about Filament and how we can help you build better relationships with your customers—current, new and future.
