Relational Marketing strategies to implement in B2B companies
Relational Marketing comprises a series of strategies with the aim of disseminating the brand and creating authority in the market, but above all it involves actions related to lead prospecting and customer loyalty. In other words, the ultimate objective of Relational Marketing is to win over and build customer loyalty until they become brand prescribers.
What Relational Marketing is for
Knowing how to listen to your customers, understanding their concerns and adapting to their needs by offering personalised B2B marketing solutions are the basic principles of Relational Marketing. The immense volume of information available on the Internet and the large amount of stimuli to which a user is exposed throughout the day are factors that cause serious problems for brands or companies in their relationships with their B2B customers and potential buyers.
For all these reasons, Relational Marketing seeks to recover the personalised contact between the customer and the company in order to establish long-lasting relationships based on trust, as well as to generate new sales opportunities in the case of new contact leads, for whom Relational Marketing will accompany them throughout their purchasing process.
Benefits of implementing Relational Marketing
Having clarified what Relational Marketing is and what are the objectives pursued by this relational marketing strategy, we are going to present the 3 main benefits that it can provide to B2B companies to keep their customers satisfied:
1. Increase LTV
The LTV (Lifetime Value) metric helps to understand the importance of retaining the customer for as long as possible in order to stimulate a volume of recurring purchases that will pay for the cost of acquiring new customers.
Through Relational Marketing it is possible to increase the lifetime value of the customer, so more loyal customers leads to higher turnover.
2. Reduce marketing and advertising spend
The CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) metric indicates the cost of acquiring a new customer for the company. Although investment in offline and online advertising - creating ad campaigns in Google Ads, for example - is unlikely to be reduced to zero, the truth is that carrying out a Relational Marketing strategy can help the company to reduce its marketing and advertising expenses.
A customer who is satisfied with the shopping experience and fully loyal can become a brand advocate, which means that their opinion is valued by potential customers in their decision making, so it is common to have an organic boost in sales.
3. Improve customer communication
Organisations that focus on Relational Marketing have a stronger alignment around providing an exceptional customer shopping experience. In this case, all members of the internal marketing team must work together to attract satisfied and happy customers over the long term.
In other words, all B2B marketing strategies carried out within the company should have the same focus: to build customer loyalty and attract the attention of the target audience. This should apply not only to traditional marketing actions or actions related to the product or service offered by the company, but also to all other digital marketing actions: content marketing, social media, email marketing, etc.
5 Relational Marketing Strategies to increase sales
We have already seen that in order for a company to achieve commercial growth, it is necessary to develop a lasting relationship with customers. In this respect, Relational Marketing is where marketing, relationships and customer service come together to strengthen the company-customer bond.
Leveraging data
Increasingly easy access to information and a large volume of data has given rise to what is known as data marketing, the purpose of which is to design marketing strategies based on the data collected.
Knowing your audience and buyer persona
Thanks to data we can also discover market trends and the concerns of our target audience. Collecting and organising data also allows us to create different segments of potential customers in order to design unique marketing strategies for each group.
In addition, it helps us to build our ideal customer profile or buyer persona and design personalised B2B marketing strategies to specifically attack the target.
Harnessing the power of Email Marketing
Sending commercial emails seemed to be a thing of the past. Nothing could be further from the truth: sending mass newsletters and also sending personalised messages to the inbox is still a popular strategy that delivers more than satisfactory results in most cases.
Automate marketing with CRM systems
Feeding new leads and keeping your contact database up to date through a CRM (Customer Relationship Manager) system is essential to organise your Relational Marketing strategy.
In addition, the tools that comprise today's CRM systems help to understand what attracts the attention of each customer, allowing companies to monitor and offer personalised solutions according to each customer's concerns.
Running loyalty programmes
Rewards or loyalty programmes are a common tool in B2C companies. In the industrial B2B environment, however, it is somewhat less common to have a public or official loyalty programme.
However, in the course of certain negotiations, it is more common to offer a series of benefits to make the customer choose one option or the other. The key to all of this resides in knowing how to personalise the offer according to the particular needs of each customer and thereby gaining their trust in order to achieve a certain volume of recurring sales.
