It’s one of the foundation stones of successful business. Everyone knows that building great relationships with customers leads to better sales conversion rates, more repeat sales, long-term relationships, and a more lucrative future for your company.

Of course, the fact that everyone knows is also part of the problem. Your competition is out there, building relationships too, so that means you need to make sure you’re on the cutting edge, not drifting behind the pack.

The following tactics can help you develop strong customer relationships.

1. Engage Your Customers with Content that Actually Matters

There’s no disputing a solid fact. Hopefully your content already contains the facts about what you’re selling – and why it makes sense to buy it. Unfortunately, facts alone don’t convince people to spend their money.

To make your content more engaging, you should keep emotions in mind, in other words:

• Personalize your content as far as possible, make it approachable,
• Address problems that are actually important to your customers, emotionally, and intellectually, and offer workable solutions.
• Get your audience involved – don’t just ‘preach from a pedestal.’

Facts alone are useless, unless they really matter. In other words, your message needs to press the right emotional buttons. That means you need to know where those buttons are – and that brings us to the next important part of the strategy.

2. Let Them Speak, and Learn to Listen

Even the most engaging message on the internet will only get you so far. Relationships mean interaction – there are two parties involved, and both sides have a voice. It’s just as important to listen as it is to say the right things.

Just as your world keeps changing, evolving and expanding, so does your customer’s world. Their world should matter to you. Also, no two customers are identical.

Make sure you keep your finger on the pulse by taking the time to stay in touch, and find out what’s happening in your customer’s world. Here are some practical suggestions:

• Study what customers are doing on your website,
• Find out what questions individual clients are most interested in finding an answer to,
• Use website surveys and online questionnaires to give clients a place to leave feedback,
• Hunt for online forums, or create one to find out what people in your niche are talking about.

 3. Build and then Maintain Trust

Albert Einstein once expressed the importance of trust this way: “Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters.”

It’s something to keep in mind in life, and it’s a vital part of marketing your business too. Customers will lose trust in your brand if at any point they feel cheated, conned, sweet-talked or tricked. It’s important to stay above board, even with the tiniest details.

Trust can be built and maintained by focusing on customer service, the kind that makes people feel you have their best interests at heart. In addition, you need to remain transparent, and stay consistent.

By keeping these three golden rules in mind, your marketing can only benefit. If you’d like to find out more about how to implement these strategies, we’d love to help.