Developing a long-term relationship with your clients is key to any successful business in the 21st century. More and more, people are looking for brands that share their beleifs and core values, and support the same causes they do. In order to engage and connect with your target audience, you need to design a customer relationship strategy for it.
“Relationship marketing”, as it’s often called, has been found to be successful at building trust and commitment with external stakeholders to create those loyal customer relationships. It helps decision makers and marketers take accurate decisions to enhance customer loyalty, specially in a fiercily competitive environment.
This is where Impact on Relationship (IOR) comes into play. It is a metric that measures the accumulated value a person gives to a brand due to the effort put into growing the customer-brand relationship. While the Return of Investment (ROI) is a matter of money, the IOR is a matter of value, which can be measured through recommendations, word-of-mouth, participation, engagement or loyalty.
Another important concept to consider is “relationship quality”, which refers to a customer’s perception on the extent to which the relationship fulfills the expectations, predictions, goals, and desires that the customer has regarding the overall relationship with the brand. Every client expects something from your brand, so you need to figure out what that is in order to nourish the relationship.
A high-quality relationship with your clients means that the customer is able to rely on your integrity and develop confidence in your future performance due to past satisfactory experiencies. This is where you build solid ground to grow high-quality, strong relationships.
Although this may seem a little abstract or complicated at first, truth is digital marketing allows us to keep track of this kind of metrics more easily. Here are a few tips to start measuring your IOR for your brand:
1. Take a step back and review or build your buyer personas so you know you’re understanding your audience right. This will help you think like your customers would and therefore understand what they’re looking for when interacting with your brand in any way.
A high-quality relationship with your clients means that the customer can rely on your integrity and develop confidence in your future performance due to past satisfactory experiences. This is where you build a solid ground to grow high-quality, strong relationships.nd. Every client expects something from your brand, so you need to figure out what that is to nourish the relationship.
3. Check your social media analytics: Are people engaging with your content? How likely are they to share a post? Do they generate content proactively or just interact with the content you create? Can you identify loyal customers or promoters?
Strong client relationships lead to repeat business, account growth, increased referrals, and greater revenue and margin for your business. Yet often, when you look at relationships from the buyer’s perspective, they are not as strong as they could and should be. Start by determining how strong your client relationships are and then create a strategy to strengthen and grow them over time.
