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What are your Promotional Strategies for your business?
There are five basic types of promotion: 1) Advertising 2) Personal Selling 3) Direct Marketing 4) Publicity 5) Sales Promotion
All business these days have many choices when it comes to promoting their products or services. To create your brand promotion you need to firstly have a good understanding of what makes your product or service unique, where you stand in the competitive landscape and what truly makes you different to others - this will help you figure out how to promote your business.

Once you know your USP (unique value proposition) you can think about the best ways to reach your ideal customer/target audience.

This is when you build your ideal customer avatar - Do they spend most of their days online, or do they still appreciate print mediums? Do they listen to the radio, or do they read newspapers? Do they like the personal touch of a phone call, or do they prefer to be emailed instead? These are just the start of examining your ideal customer.

When you understand your consumer, you can effectively create a multi-staged promotion strategy. Each strategy will help you achieve a different goal. For example, personal selling helps businesses to establish close, trusting relationships with their customers, whereas advertising enables businesses to reach a wide audience with their brand.

Reach Customers With Traditional and Online Advertising

Typically, advertising has a far reach, allowing you to promote your business to a large number of people. Traditional includes TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, billboards. Online includes social media, search ads, remarketing, enewsletters. These help create a brand image for businesses to reach new and existing customers.

Cultivate Relationships With Personal Selling

While personal selling is one of the most expensive forms of promotion, it's also one of the most effective because it focuses on relationships. Personal selling involves reaching out to your consumers one on one, either in person, on the phone or over email. Remember to use personal selling to cultivate long-term relationships and establish partnerships.

Target Your Customer With Direct Marketing

This form of promotion involves highly targeting your audience with tailored messaging that is geared specifically for their needs. Unlike advertising, which is about reaching a large number of people, direct marketing focuses on reaching a select, small group. Direct marketing can be done through email, postal mail or social media messages.

Make a Good Impression With Public Relations

One of the best promotion techniques is public relations, which refers to developing a positive brand image in the media. It's a way to connect with your target audience by sharing favourable information about your business. You can conduct public relations efforts through press conferences, press releases and media interviews. You can also use sponsorships as a public relations method to establish a positive image for your business. Small businesses can sponsor local fairs or markets in addition to local kids sports teams.

Increase Revenue With Sales Promotions

A good way to improve your bottom line in the short term is with a sales promotion. This kind of marketing promotion involves discounts, coupons, contests, prizes, loyalty programs and other incentives designed to entice customers to purchase products immediately. This is a good way to inform new customers about the products and services you offer and remind existing customers about your business, all with the goal of selling units quickly.

Wanting to discuss your options on creating marketing material that will reach and entice your customers?

I would love to help so let's chat - 021 2121306, or email me

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There are five basic types of promotion: 1) Advertising 2) Personal Selling 3) Direct Marketing 4) Publicity 5) Sales Promotion All business these days have many choices when it comes to promoting their products or services.

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By

Relationship marketing is a facet of customer relationship management ( CRM) that focuses on customer loyalty and long-term customer engagement rather than shorter-term goals like customer acquisition and individual sales. The goal of relationship marketing (or customer relationship marketing) is to create strong, even emotional, customer connections to a brand that can lead to ongoing business, free word-of-mouth promotion and information from customers that can generate leads.

Relationship marketing stands in contrast to the more traditional transactional marketing approach, which focuses on increasing the number of individual sales. In the transactional model, the return on customer acquisition cost may be insufficient. A customer may be convinced to select that brand one time, but without a strong relationship marketing strategy, the customer may not come back to that brand in the future. While organizations combine elements of both relationship and transactional marketing, customer relationship marketing is starting to play a more important role for many companies.

Effective relationship marketing involves a variety of overlapping strategies and technologies that help foster a deeper, long-term relationship with current and prospective customers.

Importance of relationship marketing

Acquiring new customers can be challenging and costly. Relationship marketing helps retain customers over the long term, which results in customer loyalty rather than customers purchase once or infrequently.

Relationship marketing is important for its ability to stay in close contact with customers. By understanding how customers use a brand's products and services and observing additional unmet needs, brands can create new features and offerings to meet those needs, further strengthening the relationship.

Implementing a relationship marketing strategy

Relationship marketing is based on the tenets of customer experience management (CEM), which focuses on improving customer interactions to foster better brand loyalty. While these interactions can still occur in person or over the phone, much of relationship marketing and CEM has taken to the Web.

With the abundance of information on the Web and flourishing use of social media, most consumers expect to have easy, tailored access to details about a brand and even expect the opportunity to influence products and services via social media posts and online reviews. Today, relationship marketing involves creating easy two-way communication between customers and the business, tracking customer activities and providing tailored information to customers based on those activities.

For example, an e-commerce site might track a customer's activity by allowing them to create a user profile so that their information is conveniently saved for future visits, and so that the site can push more tailored information to them next time. Site visitors might also be able to sign in through Facebook or another social media channel, allowing them a simpler user experience and automatically connecting them to the brand's social media presence.

This is where CRM and marketing automation software can support a relationship marketing strategy by making it easier to record, track and act on customer information. Social CRM tools go further by helping to extend relationship marketing into the social media sphere, allowing companies to more easily monitor and respond to customer issues on social media channels, which in turn helps maintain a better brand image.

Benefits of relationship marketing

Benefits of relationship marketing include:

Relationship marketing creates loyal customers, which leads to repeat purchases and a higher CLV. In addition, loyal customers are likely to become brand advocates or Higher customer lifetime value (CLV). ambassadors, recommending products and services to friends, family and business associates.

Spending on marketing and advertising to acquire new customers can be expensive. Relationship marketing causes customers to do the marketing for a brand, in what's called Reduction in marketing and advertising spend. buzz marketing. Customers tell others about a brand's products and services, which can drive sales. Brands with exceptional relationship marketing programs spend little to no money on marketing or advertising.

Stronger organizational alignment around the customer. Organizations that emphasize relationship marketing have a stronger organizational alignment around an exceptional customer experience. The teams work together to create satisfied and happy customers over the long term.

Examples of relationship marketing

There are several types of activities brands can use to facilitate relationship marketing, including:

Provide exceptional customer service, as customers who are consistently impressed by a brand's customer service are more likely to remain loyal to the brand.

Thank customers through a social media post or with a surprise gift card.

Solicit customer feedback through surveys, polls and phone calls, which can create a positive impression that customer opinions are valued and help to create better products and services.

Launch a loyalty program that rewards customers for their continued patronage.

Hold customer events to connect with customers and build a community.

Create customer advocacy or brand advocacy programs to reward customers who provide word-of-mouth advertising on a brand's behalf.

Offer discounts or bonuses to long-time or repeat customers.

Continue Reading About relationship marketing

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What is Relationship Marketing? - Definition from WhatIs.com

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By Relationship marketing is a facet of customer relationship management ( CRM) that focuses on customer loyalty and long-term customer engagement rather than shorter-term goals like customer acquisition and individual sales. The goal of relationship marketing (or customer relationship marketing) is to create strong, even emotional, customer connections to a brand that can lead to ongoing business, free word-of-mouth promotion and information from customers that can generate leads.

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Marketing is more focused on digital than ever before. Modern marketers and sales professionals are in a long race of acquiring new customers and increasing brand awareness across newer geographies and scopes of business. While marketing and sales work as a team in growing the business with acquisition efforts, it is imperative to dedicate the same amount of efforts and resources in retaining the existing users.

In today's customer-first era, relationship marketing is a perceived altruism that entails mutual trust between a business and its customers. With more businesses putting the customers at the center of their marketing strategies, relationship marketing retains its prominence among various organizations that aim to foster loyalty and pursue brand ambassadors.

According to Forbes, a business is as good as the clients it serves, and no business gets too far after losing the clients it has.

Relationship marketing is a way which leverages customer trust to improve customer retention and drive hyper growth based on one-time acquisition. Having emerged at the forefront of modern-day marketing, relationship marketing is more focused on customers as opposed to traditional marketing which heavily focuses on prospects and new leads.

Initially, product marketers and growth marketers were responsible for driving relationship marketing, but now organizations have a designated person for customer marketing. They are responsible for strategizing the relationship marketing strategy which focuses on creating long-term and valuable relationships with the existing customer.

Imagine if your business stopped getting repeat customers. Or, if your customers stayed but never referred you to their friends and peers?

Well, this indicates that you might have to go on a scavenger hunt to acquire new customers for your business to sustain itself in the long run.

According to a Forbes Article, a 5% increase in customer retention can increase your company's profitability by a staggering 75%. Also according to a survey, it would cost just 11% of what it would cost to acquire a new customer.

Every business wants their customers to " trust" them. Modern businesses are based on mutual relationships with their customers. According to a research, even with the best products and business practices, you will still need strong customer relationships to succeed in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

Hence, retention marketing lies at the core of relationship marketing and plays an integral role in your business's growth.

Here are 6 reasons why relationship marketing is critical to your digital business:

1. Build formidable trust:
Relationship marketing builds upon improving the customer experience and puts customer trust at the center of your marketing efforts in order to foster higher customer loyalty. To build this trust with your customers you must first start thinking like a customer and study your own viewing, browsing, and purchase habits, depending upon what industry you operate in.

Assuring the customer your support whenever they need you and by whatever medium possible helps create a sustainable trust factor.

2. Solve mutual problems:
Relationship marketing helps in solving the mutual problems of both the business and the customer. Your customers are the reason your business able to leverage monetization opportunities, hitting top-line growth. So actively listen to their concerns, what they like, and what they want to be changed, any specific pain point that has to be addressed and solved.

If more customers are insisting on one thing, perhaps it's time to pivot. These insights help in iteratively improving your product.

3. Build a better product:
Did you know that 70% of companies that are considered best in class for customer experience rely on customer feedback? Repeat customers to your business bestow more than just revenue growth.

As your customers continue to do business with your company, they become more closely acquainted with the products and services you offer. This helps your company to get knowledgeable feedback from a customer's perspective. Converting this valuable and timely feedback into actionable insights help in building a better product over a period of time.

4. Deliver a seamless customer experience:
Customers don't just want to buy a good product. In fact, they want to experience the joy of purchasing and using a good product.

Relationship marketing helps you focus on the customer, rather than on the product or service you offer. It also helps in creating an in-depth profile of customers based on their needs and by understanding what exactly they're looking for. By adopting a more customer-centric approach and focusing on customer relationships, you can align your core strategies and work across teams to meet customer needs, improve satisfaction, and deliver a seamless experience consistently.

5. Strengthens customer advocacy:
In today's day and age of unreliable paid reviews, your prospects are more likely to believe what they hear directly from the horse's mouth; i.e. your existing customers!

Let's face it - not all customers are likely to become super-fans of your business. For a customer-centric business, they become your core pillars of growth. It is not easy to build customer advocacy and relationship marketing makes it easier for you. Once a customer starts advocating for you, they'll become the most profitable source of customer acquisition. They are not just repeated buyers but gradually become the lifeblood of your business.

6.Lowers Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC):
One of the highest revenue churners is that of a customer's acquisition. When you leverage relationship marketing and build some viable trust, and engage effectively via nurturing with a multi-channel approach, you can attempt at lowering your customer acquisition costs, since you only spend once on a particular customer.
Relationship Marketing Strategies to Strengthen Your Customer Relationships
Source: Relationship Marketing System

1. Create compelling story-driven campaigns:
Modern day customers are far more informed and aware about your product and your ads. They are less willing to trust traditional advertising methods. Today, you need to rely on storytelling to focus more on getting customers emotionally invested in your product and service and less on telling customers what to do.

In fact, 92% of customers say they want brands to focus on creating story-driven advertisements.

By engaging customers through compelling narratives that align closely with your company's goals and vision, you can make sure that your customers are taking personal relationships into consideration when making purchasing decisions.

Get your customers hooked to a memorable storyline that resonates with them internally, and you increase your chances of converting them into repeat customers.

2. Formulate an effective loyalty programme:
Who doesn't love rewards? Loyalty programmes can become a key component of your customer retention strategy, to begin with. However, it isn't easy to formulate a customer loyalty programme. It varies from company to company, based on the kind of product or service you might have. But, it will amplify the customer engagement across both online and offline channels.

Also, you need to ensure that your programme actually communicates and delivers value consistently. Relationship marketing has to be built on the foundations of mutual trust.

3. Engage more effectively with your customers:
Connecting with a customer at a deeper level helps you build trust and long-term loyalty for your business. While social media and email marketing have been the important ways to engage your customers, Push Notifications, In-App Notifications, and SMS also play a very crucial role in this mobile-first world.

Having a data-driven strategy for each of these engagement channels helps you better engage and drive meaningful conversations with your customers in real time.

Mind you, all of this is facilitated by first gaining a comprehensive understanding of your customers through a unified view of their demographic, geographic, and behavioral data.

4. Don't turn your back on email marketing:
While being a traditional channel of engagement, email continues to remain important in today's multi-channel, cross-device environment.

It is one of the channels that give you a chance to reach your customers and retain their attention to the maximum, knowing how highly distracting other channels can be.

And, by automating your email marketing efforts you don't have to manually send emails to your customer list and waste most of your productive time.

5. Drive Regular Customer Meet-Ups:
Meet-ups foster customer intimacy and if you happen to be in the SaaS business, then customer meet-ups are crucial to understanding what a client thinks about your product or service. This gives you yet another touchpoint - this time, physical - to build on your relationship marketing strategy.

Most meet-ups are held outside the office and revolve around networking, product seminars, webinars, and round table discussions on industry-related concerns and solutions-centric themes.

These meet-ups are also a creative way to understand what expectations your customer holds from your product or service. This is also a great way to discuss the possible roadmap of your product, in order to give your customers something to look forward to.

6. Create Customer Success and Growth Stories:
Customer success stories and case studies can be used across both the marketing and sales funnels.

These help you accomplish the following:
* They help you build credibility
* Become a concrete source of how your product or service can help their business
* They help open up upsell and cross-sell opportunities in the long run
Relationship Marketing = Customer Retention
Relationship marketing strongly relies on marketing automation and CRM. "Engagement" and "Trust" are the keywords here.

You need to constantly engage with your customers across multiple channels. And, as businesses focus on increasing their customer retention rates, deeper customer insights will help you delight your customers through personalized and differentiated experiences.
And yeah this blog was originally published on Smartech Blog.
At Smartech, we are focused on helping digital businesses create sustainable relationship marketing strategies in order to help them retain their customers for life.

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Relationship Marketing: The key to Retaining Customers for Life

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Marketing is more focused on digital than ever before. Modern marketers and sales professionals are in a long race of acquiring new customers and increasing brand awareness across newer geographies and scopes of business. While marketing and sales work as a team in growing the business with acquisition efforts, it is imperative to dedicate the same amount of efforts and resources in retaining the existing users.

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We know a lot about marketing, its different aspects and strategies. But why do we actually do marketing? What is the purpose of all marketing efforts taken? At first thought, the answer is simple: sell more. However, marketing is much more than that. We have to consider a spectrum of seven functions of marketing to find an answer for the question of the purpose of marketing. These functions define all the aspects that are part of the practice of marketing. In this article, we will take a closer look at the seven functions of marketing.

Seven Functions of Marketing

Distribution

Distribution is the process of deciding how to get goods in customers' hands. Although you would not directly relate it to marketing, it is an essential function of marketing: without distribution, the value does not end where you intend it to be. Physically moving and storing goods is part of distribution planning. The main methods of transportation are by truck, rail, ship, or air. Some large retail chains store products in central warehouses for later distribution. Distribution also involves the systems that track products so that they can be located at any time.

Financing

Financing is getting the money that is necessary to pay for setting up and running a business. Why is it one of the seven functions of marketing? Indeed, there is a close relationship between marketing and finance. None can stand without the other: Without marketing, the company does not deliver value to customers and does not sell its products. As a consequence, there are no profits and no need for finance.
Business owners often obtain bank loans to start a new business. Some also form corporations and may sell shares (or stock) of the business. Financing also involves decisions such as whether to offer credit to customers. Most retailers offer customers payment options such as MasterCard or Visa, while other stores offer their own credit services.

Marketing Information Management

Sound business and marketing decisions rely on rich information about customers, trends, and competing products. Gathering this information, storing it, and analyzing it are part of marketing information management. Collecting information is done on a continual basis and through special marketing research studies. This is what marketers do to find out about customers, their habits and attitudes, where they live, and what trends there are in the marketplace. Companies conduct research so they can be successful at marketing and selling their products.

Pricing

Pricing is one of the seven functions of marketing that you also find in the marketing mix. Pricing decisions dictate how much to charge for goods and services in order to make a profit. Pricing decisions can be based on costs, competitors' prices, and value delivered to customers. To determine a price, marketers nowadays for most products need to determine how much customers are willing to pay.

Product Management

Product management is obtaining, developing, and improving a product or a product mix in response to market opportunities. An important part of it is New Product Development. Why is it related to marketing? Well, first of all, a product is the core means of delivering value to customers. In addition, marketing research guides product management towards what the consumer needs and wants.

Promotion

Promotion is the effort to inform, persuade, or remind potential customers about a business's products or services. As such, it plays a key role in communicating value to customers, which makes it part of the seven functions of marketing. Online ads, television and radio commercials are forms of promotion. This type of promotion is called advertising. Promotion is also used to improve a company's public image. In this case, it is referred to as PR (Public Relations). A company can show that it is socially responsible by recycling materials or cleaning up the environment. Promotion concepts and strategies are used to achieve success in the marketplace.

Selling

Selling provides a key link between creation of value and delivery of value to the customer. It reflects the change of ownership of value and provides customers with the goods and services they want. This includes selling in the retail market to you, the customer, and selling in the business-to-business market to wholesalers, retailers, or manufacturers.

Selling techniques and activities include determining client needs and wants and responding through planned, personalized communication. The selling process influences purchasing decisions and enhances future business opportunities.

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Seven Functions of Marketing - What is the actual Purpose of Marketing?

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We know a lot about marketing, its different aspects and strategies. But why do we actually do marketing? What is the purpose of all marketing efforts taken? At first thought, the answer is simple: sell more. However, marketing is much more than that.

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Business owners everywhere recognize that if they want to make money, they have to sell their products or services. But what you might not know is that there are actually seven functions of marketing that span everything from distribution to pricing.

Tip

The seven functions of marketing are distribution, market research, setting prices, finance, product management, promotional channels and matching products to consumers.

Distribution is about deciding how you'll get the goods or services you want to sell to the people who want to buy them. Having an idea for a product is great, but if you aren't able to get that product to the customers you aren't going to make money. Distribution can be as easy as setting up shop in the part of a city where your target customers are - but in an increasingly interconnected world, distribution more often than not now means that you'll need to take your products or services to the customers.

It takes money to make money. As a business owner, an important function of marketing a product is finding the money through investments, loans, or your personal capital to finance the creation and advertising of your goods or services.

Market research is about gathering information concerning your target customers. Who are the people you want to sell to? Why should they buy from you as opposed to a rival business? Answering these questions requires that you do some on-the-ground observation of the market trends and competing products.

Setting the correct price for your product or service can be a challenge. If you price it too high, you might lose customers - but if you price it too low you might be robbing yourself of profits. The "right" price normally comes through trial and error and doing some market research.

Once you've determined the target market and set the price of your product or service, the goal becomes to effectively manage the product or service. This involves listening to customers, responding to their wants and needs, and keeping your products and services fresh and up to date.

Most business owners are familiar with the idea of promotion. Advertising your products and services is essential to attracting new customers and keeping existing customers coming back. As the marketplace changes, you'll want to respond appropriately by tailoring your promotion messages to social media, by sticking with more conventional outlets, or by using a mix of the old and new.

While we tend to think of selling and marketing as being closely linked, selling is last on the list of the seven functions of marketing. This is because selling can happen only after you've determined the wants and needs of your customer base and are able to respond with the right products at the right price point and time frame.

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Seven Functions of Marketing. Business owners everywhere recognize that if they want to make money, they have to sell their products or services. But what you might not know is that there are actually seven functions of marketing that span everything from distribution to pricing.

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The 7 functions of marketing: A field guide (Infographic) | Brafton

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- created analytics for people to learn what they're more interested in: themselves
- every product design decision incentivized people to share with friends
- all those people want to go read about themselves too
- organic loop continues

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How Spotify Wrapped 2020 Marketing Campaign Boosted Mobile App Downloads And Engagement

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Spotify Wrapped induces competition amongst its users organically. Spotify’s mobile app downloads increased by 21% in the first week of December. Learn

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How Spotify Wrapped 2020 Marketing Campaign Boosted Mobile App Downloads And Engagement