Tips on Getting Your Relationship Marketing Strategy Going

Selling Relationship Marketing to Your Team Isn’t Always Easy

Marketers working in the trenches can often be skeptical when it comes to considering adopting another “new” strategy that hinges on integrated marketing tactics across the entire buyer journey. They know that it takes more than a name to actually build meaningful relationships between a brand and a customer.
They’re up close and personal with all of the moving parts of marketing and the inherent challenges of standing out from the noise of messages already in front of their target buyers. B2B marketers also face the challenge of multiple verticals, long decision cycles and constant changes to their organizations offerings and services.
With all of these challenges, marketers need more than another presentation from management about the new strategy. If a relationship marketing program is truly going to work, it needs to be:

• Evangelized by the leadership team
• Operationally efficient

So, when it comes to adopting relationship marketing as a strategy, consider the following tips on how these two areas will be handled to ensure success:

1) Get support by incorporating everyday principles into your strategy

For marketing leaders looking to start a relationship marketing program, a first step is seeking the support of your business peers by incorporating the organization’s values and principles into your strategy.
For example, we all want more qualified leads, but that’s not a governing principle that will help direct you or your team’s capabilities. If your organization considers data a key decision driver, however, you could incorporate this principle into your relationship marketing strategy and pitch it as, “We want to know how our campaigns perform at each stage of the buyer journey.”
This can yield mandates about how campaigns are created and tracked. This kind of clarity also applies to marketing’s everyday efforts and allows the team to assess if they are meeting that goal.

2) Achieve Operational Efficiency

Data sharing, unifying creative, and managing resources are all part of a marketer’s daily grind. It doesn’t take long to get sucked into workarounds that keep you going but don’t allow for scale. When creating integrated, mutli-touch marketing campaigns across different channels and for different target buyer profiles, an efficient model for campaign planning and execution is the only way it’s going to work. These three tips can help:

• Leverage what you have: Creative assets like logos, images, videos, etc. need a central repository along with a version control protocol. The good news is there are lots of vendors in this space who can help manage all of your campaign assets so that everyone on the team can quickly find and use what they need.
• Find commonalities: By using the buyer journey for each buyer, you can map messages and touchpoints across each stage and see where all the commonalities are with regards to channels and messages. Using this approach, you can then see how you may go about creating templates for often used touch points and what personalized campaign assets need to be created.
• Leverage your marketing technology: Centralizing data from otherwise desperate systems will be a huge time saver. All of the marketing technology vendors know this is a problem for their customers are serious about making it easier to plug into CRMs, web analytics, ad platforms, and social media management tools. If your data is not moving around and being aggregated, make it a priority to have these discussions with vendors, IT, and your technology resources.

There are many benefits to relationship marketing that make it a worthwhile marketing effort. Like any strategy, however, it is key to have the right support and operational model to ensure success.
If you already have management support and are in a good place operationally, what other relationship marketing strategy tips would you offer organizations that have yet to get there?