Clients or relationships?
Most people think of marketing as the pre-funnel opportunity creation specialists. All initiatives lead to the sales funnel. It makes a lot of sense given that businesses need sales to survive.
Or does it?
Certainly this model of marketing worked well in the industrial era when the name of the game was to automate where possible. Seeing consumers as homogeneous, give or take a few socio-economic variables, helped in the formulation of big marketing initiatives.
But we are no longer in the industrial era. And clients, whether they are business or consumer in nature have choices and power. Thus the marketing game has changed into one that needs to be highly personalised.
The goal now is not to create an opportunity but to secure the relationship. The understanding is that sales will follow in due course. And assuming the relationship is good, ie trust and relevance are in place, the sales will keep coming and coming.
So whilst the creation of broad brush value adding marketing assets (eg. white papers, social media and events) are important, the measurement and improvement of the organisation’s relationship capital needs to be the number one priority.
Would you prefer to enter the next recession with 1,000 relationship-free transactional clients or with 100 influential individuals who personally care about your economic survival?
