Brand Marketing Strategy Or Relationship Marketing?
Paul Dwyer, business consultant in Brisbane, provides an insight in to using a Brand Marketing Strategy or Relationship Marketing to build your business.
Paul Dwyer shares that over the years, we have worked with, shared time and listened to some of brightest business minds alive. We have had “inside access” to the ideas that have worked successfully in the past to make huge profits.
Traditional Relationship Marketing is now being compared to a Brand Marketing Strategy. Which strategy achieves the best results in new clients and more product sales?
What many business owners are saying today is: “my marketing still works, but it does not work as well as it did before.”
Are you someone who thinks or feels this way?
Do you notice the attention span of people is generally becoming less and less?
Are you noticing a shorter cycle that clients spend time purchasing from you?
Are you noticing clients coming back less frequently? Are you noticing clients spending less money per transaction?
All these factors decrease our profits.
Do you know much about your brand? The value of your brand? What it’s worth?
Paul Dwyer explains that as a business consultant they rarely discuss a brand marketing strategy with their clients because they consider there to be far more ways to strategically create uplift, enquiry and client conversion than “building that brand marketing strategy”.
Most of our time we discuss referrals, joint ventures, strategic alliances, attrition and other strategies which are forms of relationship marketing. These strategies are proven methods that can be implemented in to a business with little cost and if done correctly can reap huge rewards for the business owner.
So when comparing the two strategies, one should first consider marketing the product and service through relationship marketing before heading in to a brand marketing strategy. There is a place for the latter, however, it comes once your product and service have cemented their position in the market place.
However, if we take some elements of branding and apply it to relationship marketing, this may be just the answer to catching your prospects attention and converting them into clients.
Paul Dwyer explained it like this……. when people see an ad on TV, does it make us purchase immediately?
Branding experts will tell us it takes 7 – 10 contact points to get a person interested enough to move into a buying cycle.
However, everybody knows that if “someone they trust” recommends a product, the time until somebody buys reduces dramatically. It can be sometimes immediate. We trust people we know for recommending a product or service far more than a flashy sales person on TV or on the internet.
Whether you think building a brand or relationship marketing is the best, both have their advantages and disadvantages. By combining the best elements of both, we can create a hybrid form of marketing that captures more peoples’ attention; and keep them longer.
What hardly anyone can ever value, articulate or share for business owners, is your brand as an asset on your balance sheet. Hardly any business values the relationship marketing value they have on their balance sheet either. It takes a combination of accounting and marketing expertise to achieve this outcome and forms a major part of the goodwill of your business.
If a business can’t value, articulate or demonstrate this goodwill component in each transaction, how can they hope to acquire a premium price for their goods or services?
How can they ask for a premium price upon selling their business? Most businesses undervalue their asset in this area; but it does not have to be that way.
If business owners can create marketing material for their relationship marketing using the best qualities of brand and relationship marketing; we can create clients who buy quicker, purchase more often, buy larger quantities and buy more frequently. Is this what you want?
What are some of the ways people build a brand?
· Logo
· Sponsorship
· TV advertising
· Brochures
· Business cards
What are some ways people conduct relationship marketing?
· Work on referral
· Create a database
· Have regular personal contact
· Have loyalty, rewards or frequent buyer programs
· Grow through testimonials
What if one particular demographic was consistently exposed to your brochures?
Wouldn’t this be building a brand? However, this rate of return is often quite low.
How about if a third party we knew recommended our product and was able to pass on a brochure of ours? This is combining relationship marketing with building your brand marketing strategy. It sounds quite simple, but has anyone shared this idea before? Are you applying this in your day to day marketing currently? What are the results?
Can you see any risk or costs associated to this form of marketing? How does this compare to what you are currently doing?
Paul Dwyer concludes that if you were to choose either a Brand Marketing Strategy or Relationship Marketing, we would strongly recommend Relationship Marketing first. As your business, your product and your services grows with your third party relationships, there will be a time to move in to a Brand Marketing Strategy. The most powerful strategy in todays economic climate is to combine both strategies as we outlined earlier in this article.
We would really like to “share some time with you” to flesh out and discuss these business ideas with you and apply them to your business. Most ideas will build upon what you are currently doing. We believe, if you are in business, you already know what to do. Reflect and re-focus upon the important factors to deliver maximum return for the effort you already deliver.
Paul Dwyer likes to share ideas that influence how people trust you and how people value you. These are the two key factors in determining every factor related to your sales and your marketing.
Paul Dwyer conducts regular workshops where these types of topics are openly discussed and shared with the participants. Check our Events Section to see when Paul Dwyer will be holding a workshop in your area.