How Relationship Marketing Works Within Your Go-To-Market Strategy

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Ask any marketer and they will tell you that a segmented list will have significantly higher return than a non-segmented list. The clearer you see your target audience, the more they are likely to respond favorability to your marketing campaigns.
The same holds true with go-to-market (GTM) strategies. Without enough market clarity, marketing efforts can be too general and fail to target valuable audiences. There is no segmentation of prospects, influencers, or of their ecosystems. Companies don’t gather enough data is gathered to determine where and how to grow the most important relationships, and how to build marketing programs around these profiles.
At OpenView, we simplify an otherwise complex GTM strategy into the following four building blocks:

• Conversion: What do you want your buyer to do?
• Context: What is the situation they are in?
• Content: What are you going to deliver to them?
• Contact: How are you going to engage with them?
  • Relationship marketing zeros in on how best to deliver content to your buyer in an effort to increase engagement and conversions across multiple channels throughout the entire customer journey, from awareness to loyalty.

These building blocks turn marketing from an event into a cohesive, integrated process. The goal is for marketing efforts to be an invitation to a direct relationship between the participant and the organization, rather than a singular attempt at marketing to drive a participant to a conversion.

How Relationship Marketing Works

As products become inherently similar, the unique offering of one business has to come through unique experiences offered through its marketing, rather than the product alone. The value of relationship marketing is that it facilitates this model throughout each stage of the customer journey. By taking it one stage at a time, the series of channels, messages, and pushes and pulls becomes a flow of well-orchestrated touch points that invite the participant to respond at key moments. Developing this type of program doesn’t have to take long, either.
In short, it’s not just about having access to people, it’s about adding value to an important part of their life. Even if people are technically available, it doesn’t mean they are behaviorally available. Instead of shortsighted attention strategies (batch and blast), think long-term relationship building.

How have you been succeeding and what challenges have you faced developing deeper relationships with your customers?