The Importance Of Building Strong Customer Relationships
Relationships build loyalty. Loyalty helps you survive tough times.
Here in the studio, we’ve always known that marketing and branding is all about building relationships. It’s about listening, understanding, and connecting. It’s about delivering the experience your market is looking for – and comes to expect – every time they meet you. And if that doesn’t sound like a relationship, what does?
What we’ve noticed is that local businesses who have done the work of building strong customer relationships are being rewarded with customer loyalty right now. As one of our yoga studio clients says, “There is a lot of free, online yoga content at the moment, produced by some very big names. Our students aren’t coming to our online classes because they have no choice, they’re coming because they choose to support us.”
During the pandemic, the work of relationship-building hasn’t stopped. If anything, it has intensified. Once the initial shock wore off, relationship-centred businesses got going: they got on the phone, they got online, and they figured out new and innovative ways to serve their people and stay connected. Many of our clients tell us they have never worked so hard for so little income – but the relationships they’ve built, and are continuing to build, are an important part of their survival plan.
Start building intentional, authentic customer relationships now
If you’ve been too busy over the past couple of years to focus on intentional, authentic relationship-building with your clients, now is the time to start. Who are your people? (We’ll talk about creating buyer personas in an upcoming newsletter.) What are their needs and wants, issues and problems? What can you offer – and what do you bring to the table that no one else does?
Like many of you we used the first phase of the pandemic to catch up on things we’d been meaning to do.
One of those projects was documenting our website design process so that our clients would know what to expect at each stage, and what was required from them to keep the project running smoothly.
Many of the small and medium-size businesses we work with are recognizing that in the new economy they need a new set of tools to sell their products and services, and build relationships with their customers. In this moment, the face-to-face relationships and foot traffic they used to rely on to build business are on hold.
“Over the next couple of months we’ll talk about some of the tools you can use to build business at a distance – and websites are one. If you’re thinking about building or refreshing a website, and want an overview of what’s involved, please give us a call.
At Indalma Creative, we’re all about good design, strong brands, compelling stories and solid strategy.
Got a problem you think we can solve? Get in touch – we’d love to talk!
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StudioTalk is our free, bi-monthly newsletter full of practical design, branding, and customer relationship-building ideas to help you grow your business.
