Relationship marketing differs from other forms of marketing as it recognizes the long term value of customer relationships and extends communication beyond intrusive advertising and sales promotional messages.Companies have established teams to only concentrate on building customer relationships and marketing themselves better on each occasion while pitching for more business with their existing clients.
The main objective of Relationship marketing is to develop long term relationships with important customers inorder to retain them and get more business from them. Marketers are required to prepare strategies taking all the stakeholders of the business into consideration. The whole idea is not only to develop strong relationships but also understanding the capabilities, requirements , goals of all the stakeholders (customers,partners, suppliers etc).
Nowadays companies always ensure that they create an effective marketing network of all the people involved in the business to make the company more profitable and create a win-win situation for all the constituents. We always hear the word CRM on a regular basis . What is this CRM? Why is everyone who is in the field of management or technology really emphasizing so much on it ? The answer to the above questions is that Customer relationship management (CRM) is a system used for managing interactions of a company with customers, clients, and sales prospects. It involves using technology to organize, automate, and synchronize business processes—principally sales activities. It is further used for marketing, customer service, and technical support. The main advantages of CRM in terms of developing relationship marketing strategy are as follows.
The automated CRM systems are so advanced that it carries out marketing segmentation on the basis of available customer data and throws up customised offers to each customer in the form of a email, newsletter,SMS etc.
Relationship marketing differs from other forms of marketing as it recognizes the long term value of customer relationships and extends communication beyond intrusive advertising and sales promotional messages.
Companies have established teams to only concentrate on building customer relationships and marketing themselves better on each occasion while pitching for more business with their existing clients.
New trends in Marketing and Maintaining Relationships
Today more and more relationship marketing techniques are used by the companies in the form of emails, newsletters, advertisements, search engine marketing, social media marketing, mobile ads etc to keep their existing and potential customers,suppliers informed about the various offers and news of its products. Marketers have realised that they need to measure the performance of their marketing campaigns. The marketing department of all the companies have started investing in analytics to understand their customer’s online behaviour and response to their campaigns.
Relationship managers of companies have started keeping track of the analytics reports on a monthly basis to understand the customer’s requirements and behaviour in a more detailed manner. The usage of tools like cheetah mail and phenomenon of heat maps are now in the limelight due to a paradigm shift in this stream of marketing.
Using Experts and Bloggers to establish relations
Companies are also taking help of various influencers so called experts for developing stronger relations with all the stakeholders and prospective customers. Let us take an example of a software company which has launched its new software . The company gives the software product to an expert who is technically sound and has a reputed name in the software industry for a free trial run of the software. If the expert likes the product and endorses it by praising and recommending it to others via conferences, social media networks, blogs etc., there will be many followers who would respect him and go by his view . Thus they will be inclined to buy the product. People would contact the company and place an order. This in turn will help the company in increasing its revenue and then they need a dynamic relationship marketing team to consolidate their business by maintaining strong relationships. This can also act as a blessing in disguise for the company as positive reviews from experts would encourage the existing customers to do more business with the company. This will help in nurturing better relationships and would help the company to establish itself as a good brand.
Every company has its own set of prestigious clients who contribute maximum revenue for the company. It is very rightly said that in order to obtain a new customer any organisation has to spend a lot of money in marketing themselves. As a result of which retaining the current customers and strengthening the relationship with them is given maximum importance and high priority. Companies are ensuring that their esteemed clients are given 24x7 support, assistance with relationship managers for each account/ process to keep a track of the work done, understanding their needs and to resolve all their issues.
The term Relationship marketing is evolving continuously. The mantra to success nowadays is “Client is God” . Whatever the client says is correct and be ready to do anything for them. The relationship managers have to add value to the projects/ processes constantly to showcase various initiatives, capabilities of their workforce other than the normal tasks.
Marketing strategy of relationship managers
Relationship managers try their best to highlight any achievement and explore all possible opportunities to diversify and expand their existing businesses with clients. When there is a Quarterly business review (QBR) or yearly meeting to evaluate past performance and setting up the goal for the future, managers use this opportunity to pitch for maximising their business by offering various additional services to the client . They also request them to fund for hiring domain specialists in the team for improving quality and to optimize performance. Thus a process which initially starts with 1 or 2 employees for the client becomes 8-10 employees in a year’s time. Thus they try to project themselves as a customer centric organisation and strike a right chord to increase the revenues from their current clients.
To conclude all I can say is that relationship marketing is undergoing transformation at a rapid pace . However CRM will still play a major role in maintaining relationships with customers . The companies cannot neglect digital marketing as it is growing very fast and must involve it in all their plans to retain and strengthen relationships with all stakeholders.
Leadership : Myth vs Reality
The general perception and belief is that leaders win followers, innovate, inspire people, take end to end responsibility, develop power with people , bring about a change , strive for effectiveness etc…A company with a robust leadership pipeline is expected to be successful in the long run as many organisations who face leadership vacuum stare at a major crisis.
Collaborative Marketing: Co-creating value with customers
Marketing is basically about satisfying human needs profitably and also creating value for the customers . Marketers need to create distinctive & unique offerings, build brands and focus on promotion activities along with a robust distribution strategy.
Building Brands through ORM
Online reputation management(ORM) has become a primary focus for any business in the digital world as negative feedback or reviews from customers can influence many minds not to do business with that brand. Hence Companies are ensuring that they maintain a strong brand reputation and are proactive to address the concerns raised by their customers in an effective manner.
