Re-Evaluate Your Marketing Strategy

Is relationship marketing a key aspect to your marketing strategy? If not, it is time to re-evaluate your marketing strategy, and how you spend your marketing budget. Typically, businesses spend 80% of their marketing budgets on going after new customers and attempting to gain new business, yet this does not result in an 80% increase in sales and business.

Building existing customer relationships and expanding customer retention is an important strategic aspect to consider. A new and growing business, of course, needs to constantly capture new customers to grow its customer base. However, it is important not to lose sight of who your customers are, even if they have purchased from you only once.

Why Does a Customer Defect?

There are several reasons why clients may decide to leave you and go to a competitor, but the ones heard most often are:

• They felt your pricing was too high or unfair
• They had an unresolved complaint
• They took a competitors offer
• They left because they felt you didn’t care

In this list, it is the last two reasons that make up the majority of lost customers, which can be a difficult realization, but one that can be turned around. Business, by nature, is competitive; you may not always be able to meet or beat the prices of large companies who can buy in larger quantities. But preventing a customer from leaving you because they feel unimportant is wholly within the scope of your control and responsibility.

How to Retain your Customer Base

There are several ways to achieve the goal of retaining your customers and making them feel that their business is important to you. The main focus here is building that relationship, finding ways to connect with your customers. Learn about their needs and what they are looking for when they make an online purchase, how to meet these needs, and very importantly, to let your customers know that you value them.

In the seemingly endless world of internet business, it is easy for a customer to feel like a number that does not matter to a corporation. Nothing could be further from the truth, and you need to make sure you customers know that. If one customer feels ignored and switches to a competitor, not only do you lose the business, but you could potentially be harmed by unhappy word-of-mouth discussions.

Customers often feel an affinity for the “little guy” in business, the “underdog” so to speak. People routinely pay more for the same vacuum cleaner bags at a mom & pop store than at a big conglomerate hardware store for a variety of reasons. But the main reason is the relationship they build with the owners, the feeling that they matter, and that the owners are happy to see them when they walk through the door.

The same is true in internet marketing. It is a more complicated avenue, but the sentiments remain the same. People like to feel noticed, and that their business is important. If you can create relationships with your customers that make them feel this way, you are well on the road to customer retention and a solid customer base.

Be a Creative Affiliate or Be Lost in the Crowd

Truth is there are billions of blogs and websites full of affiliates. And then there are maybe millions or thousands of people with the same idea that you have. To stand out in the crowd, you must establish that yours is newer, better or different. The way to do so is simply, branding.

Is Starbucks really that much better than the coffee we all drank years ago for $1? Then why are billions of people paying 5 or 6 times the price for almost the same cup of coffee? The answer to that question is they have created a really good brand. If you look at any of the high end handbags or clothes that are not really that much different than others, it’s just that their target market has bought into the idea that they are better, and will therefore pay 100 times more than it is worth. The power of good marketing is priceless, yet so many companies are not willing to pay the price for it.

Brand your affiliate ads

Being an affiliate with a collaborative marketing effort can be a very profitable business. The part that requires the most work is attracting your target market and then getting them to click on your ad and buy something. You have a unique opportunity to create memorable and attractive ad here. You can go it alone and let your creative mind work. Or, this may be the time to work with advertising and marketing professionals. Their job all day everyday is to be creative. Their brains practice these sorts of things on a daily basis. Most of them have some amazing ideas. Do some research and then meet with some professionals in your area. A simple meeting may spark an idea you never thought of. You may find their ideas so intriguing you end up working with them to create a brand for yourself that will set you apart from the millions of others like you.

Offer help to attract customers

Being helpful is attractive. Collaboration marketing has become a great teller of success. Simply put, if you place helpful information on your blog or within your ad, you will get more attention. If it is a blog that you work with, then talk about things you know about. If you are a good cook, give out free recipes. If you pride yourself on being a bargain shopper, give some tips on how to find the best deals. Whatever it is you know about, tell others about it on your blog just as you would tell friends. Essentially what you are doing is establishing trust with your target market, and once people trust you, they are far more likely to buy what you are recommending.

It has been a truth for years that when you are selling any type of product; your customer has to first buy you. Even though the Internet has gotten a bad rap for being a way to disconnect from people, there is certainly a way to show people who you are and tell them that you care enough to help them out with something you know about, just because. Once you do that, you have begun to set yourself apart from the rest. Follow that up with a branding strategy, along with your collaborative marketing efforts, and you are on your way to becoming successful.

Collaboration Marketing for Your Business

Developing a strategic marketing plan is important to raise awareness for your business. If consumers don’t know about your fabulous product, it is very difficult for them to buy it! The art of successful marketing is largely about letting the public know how to find you.

For online business, there are a variety of creative ways to do this: direct email, banner ads, pop-up ads all of which are successful and strategic tools. A rather new idea in Internet marketing is called collaboration marketing, an understanding of which will help develop a complete marketing strategy.

What is collaboration marketing?

In essence, collaboration marketing focuses on directly attracting customers to your site, rather than intercepting them with traditional advertising methods. In traditional advertising, customers are somewhat randomly drawn to your business. For instance, if they happen to see an enticing advertisement, and happen to click on it, they may find their way to your website and business. This is proven and effective marketing tool, but to find an edge in business, it is important to cultivate new and creative ways to raise awareness for your business.

How does collaboration marketing work?

Collaboration marketing attracts customers by becoming more and more helpful to them, in a sense a sort of personalized service. This type of marketing targets customers both in terms of evaluating potential new products and services that may be of interest to them, and working with them to get more value from products and services they have already purchased.

This may sound like a lot of work, but these goals can be obtained through straightforward processes that will target a large group of customers at one time. Personalized service need not be personal service. Collaboration marketing challenges the idea of a one to one personalized service with the refreshing view of many to one to one types of marketing.

Push vs. Pull

Collaboration marketing works by mobilizing a broad range of relevant third party marketers to add value to the customer relationship. These marketers make resources and relationships available to the customer that will enhance the products the customer has already purchased, thus creating a need and loyalty to the company of previous purchases. This is a pull approach where the marketer becomes useful to the customer so the customer then seeks out the marketer, rather than other types of marketing that seek to push a customer towards their product by invading email and blasting out ads.

Certainly, traditional modes of marketing are effective. Many types of marketing have been successfully implemented for decades. But the art of successful marketing and strategic marketing is about finding an edge and developing a strategy that will get you noticed and attract customers to the products and services that you offer. Collaboration Marketing should not be the only type of marketing you implement for a successful strategy, but is another piece to add to your repertoire to give you the business edge that will get you noticed and helps make your business a success.

Advantages of Affiliate Marketing

One of the fastest and most successful ways to expand awareness of your company’s business is through the practice of affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is a strategy born of the World Wide Web, an effective method for gaining large-scale awareness of a company and its products and services, without investing the capital which is required of a typical marketing scheme.

Affiliate Marketing: Great for Small to Large Corporations

An affiliate marketing network can vary in size and scope and can be tailored to service the needs of just about any business. While affiliate marketing is typically used in small to medium sized, mainly Internet driven businesses, they may be an integral part of any sized business.

Affiliate marketing is a practice in web-based marketing where one site is used to drive traffic to another site. This raises product awareness by listing a single business on a myriad of sites, increasing market awareness of the targeted business. It takes the sole weight of marketing for a company off the shoulders of that company, and spreads the marketing responsibility to a number of agents.

Affiliate marketing works on an incentive program, so there are no up-front marketing costs for the company. Affiliates generally get a percentage or a specific monetary compensation for each customer they refer to a company’s website.

Types of Affiliate Marketing Techniques

Affiliates use marketing techniques that are specific to the Internet medium, but that are based on traditional marketing strategies. Direct email marketing is one such technique where names of customers and clients for a similar product to the one they are marketing are obtained, and these prospective clients are sent an email. Originally this was a somewhat unorthodox method, and viewed to be invasive, but it is based on the direct mail – marketing tool, which is very successful in the traditional business arena. Direct email marketing is more accepted than at its inception, and is a very successful method to help grow awareness for your business.

Display advertising is another Internet marketing tool, largely employed by affiliate marketing teams. It is essentially what its name describes: displays of advertising in various locations on the Internet. Display advertising can take a variety of formats – banner ads to side bars being the most widely popular, and all meant to drive business to a particular website, or even a series of websites.

Display ads usually come up on search engine sites, and will correspond to the key work search that was entered. They will advertise a product similar to the one that was entered on the search engine, either in the form of side banner ads, or a position in the list of search results. Display ads are also sometimes sold to occupy space on a company’s website. Thus, you can place ads on another company’s website, or decide to run ads on your own website as a way to generate revenue.

Affiliate marketing is a hugely successful third party marketing strategy, and can be beneficial to almost any business. It shifts the burden of marketing your company’s products and services to another source and alleviates this stress from the business owner. This third party marketer will be dedicated and reliable in the success of marketing your business, because of the individual profit they stand to make as an affiliate.