Relationships will build your business, if you don’t have enough trusted relationships with your vendors, buyers, clients, guests they will stop supporting you.
If you don’t have a way to develop relationships this will be one BIG factor in your business. 90% of your business will come from recommendations from people in your community. When you help people in your community, they will learn to like and trust you.
According to Wikipedia
“As a practice, Relationship Marketing differs from other forms of marketing in that it recognizes the long term value of customer relationships and extends communication beyond intrusive advertising and sales promotional messages. With the growth of the internet and mobile platforms, Relationship Marketing has continued to evolve and move forward as technology opens more collaborative and social communication channels. This includes tools for managing relationships with customers that goes beyond simple demographic and customer service data. Relationship Marketing extends to include Inbound Marketing efforts, (a combination of search optimization and Strategic Content), PR, Social Media and Application Development.”
Fortunately, if you are a small business owner, you’ll have a better chance of doing this better than bigger companies. Most bigger companies are still shouting at their customers, just creating noise so much so, that most of us are in an information overload. We’ve become inefficient.
What do you do when you are in this state?
I’ve pulled back and not bother to listen anymore by unsubscribing from a few e-mail blasts that I have gotten. Getting a repeated message “BUY my stuff NOW” 3 or 4 times a day. Hey guys, that’s the old way. Drop it! To me this is still going on in the year 2022. You should of course put your offers out there, be of service to people first.
What you really want to do is to start nurturing genuine relationships.
I’ve been busy organizing myself so I can keep better in touch of the people I already have. I’ve had this dilemma for a while now, is having lots of connections on Linkedin really worth it? Or is it just better to have genuine relationships with people?
My Linkedin experiment:
I started by accepting invites from everyone. I got so many I felt that I almost couldn’t keep up. Most of the invites I accepted didn’t even bother, to ask how they could help me. I always, respond sending a personal welcome from me and asking who I can introduce them to. Well, my experiment proved that large numbers aren’t really worth it.
One or two people out of the 20 invites that I accepted there was some dialogue between us. I also stated that if you have no interest in conversing with me, please don’t invite me. The point to all this is be selective in the relationships you want to have. Who you want to have in your network? Who are worthy of your time?
What tools can you use right now to help you?
▪ A good CRM upload your contacts and keeping in touch with them –
▪ Engaging people in a conversation on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin,
▪ Writing posts on my blog getting comments and responding – answering someones question or poll is more important than just posting your questions.
▪ Collecting stories from people and sharing them. ▪ Asking questions.
▪ Jumping and answering someone else’s questions on Quora & Alignable.
▪ Sending out personal messages via video. Like welcome messages, Happy Holidays etc
▪ Being nice to people, kindness does go a long way and it’s powerful
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