Relationship Marketing: Consolidating Brand Loyalty Through Overseas Social Media
According to a survey by the well-known public relations firm Edelman, 88% of consumers state that "trust" is an important factor in purchasing decisions, even second only to the value of the product.
Therefore, building trust with customers is crucial for brands. Especially for overseas brands, it is even more difficult to build trust in the face of consumers with different cultural backgrounds and preferences overseas.
At this time, we need to introduce a new marketing strategy, namely "relationship marketing" - to demonstrate the value of the brand and build trust by establishing specific relationships and maintaining relationships with customers.
01
What is relationship marketing
Unlike other marketing strategies that prioritize a one-time "promotion", relationship marketing is a strategy that aims to build strong relationships, and it is also a strategy that captures greater, broader benefits over time.
In addition to the final promotion of sales, relationship marketing can also help the promotion and development of the brand from the following aspects:
-- Higher brand loyalty
--Better word of mouth
-- Higher customer trust
--More cross-selling opportunities
--Longer customer life cycle
02
How to do relationship marketing
Relationship marketing can help brands improve comprehensively, and social media platforms that can fully reflect the brand's personality, capabilities, and values and can directly contact consumers are also an excellent channel for relationship marketing.
Overseas brands that want to conduct relationship marketing on overseas social media platforms can start from the following aspects:
1--"Role" in the positioning relationship
Before building a relationship with a consumer, it’s important to define the “role” your brand wants to play between the two.
For example, if a household consumer brand is aimed at C-end consumers, it can position its brand as a "better life sharer". Make sure your social media pages are posted around the themes of "sharing" and "good life experiences." In other words, women's clothing brands can play the role of "fashion wearers", while home appliance brands can be "convenient life skills sharers" and so on.
B2B brands can also find their own positioning in the relationship with consumers. Generally speaking, they can position their brands in the positions of "experts" and "servicers".
2--Establish value recognition
Just as friends will enhance their feelings because of the same "three views", the premise of a brand's ability to conduct relationship marketing with consumers is to have the same values as its target consumers. That is, to obtain the value recognition of consumers.
For overseas brands, especially those with many social media accounts and established social media matrix, the most important point in establishing value identity is to “maintain the consistency of value output”.
In the process of serving overseas brands, it is found that many overseas brands will hand over their social media accounts in different regions to localized teams for management due to the consideration of localized content strategies. However, distributed management of social media accounts can ensure the localization of social media accounts, but it brings challenges to the consistency of brand value.
Although they are in the same brand, if they experience different levels of brand value, they may not be able to convey a consistent brand value to the outside world, and it will not be easy to establish a trusting relationship with consumers.
-- How to better manage the globalized social media matrix?
--How to maintain content consistency across all social media homepages efficiently and quickly?
Many overseas brands have chosen Marketing Cloud – by adding their own social media homepage authorization to the monitoring system of Marketing Cloud, combined with the function of “account authority” allocation and management in the “member management” function, it provides global marketing support. Teams are assigned different administrative rights to manage large, complex and distributed team content.
Just add the accounts of different team members into the team at the headquarters, and give them different role permissions (account administrator/group administrator/common member), so that each marketing team can carry out the content marketing work of its own account At the same time, an orderly review process is carried out to ensure the consistency of brand value output.
3 - Improve customer service on social media
By positioning the role of the relationship with consumers, constantly creating content and establishing value identification with consumers, brands have been able to establish a certain relationship with consumers and conduct continuous marketing.
But there is still an important part of relationship marketing that cannot be ignored, which is the “customer service” experience throughout. And on social media, this kind of customer service is reflected in the quick and effective response to consumer interactions (comments, retweets, and private messages).
Through the "interaction" management function of Marketing Cloud, it can help you manage cross-platform comments and private messages in one stop, and add custom internal tags for important customers to further enhance the effect of social media interaction.
Epilogue
In fact, it is not difficult to build a relationship with consumers. Especially on social media platforms, consumers come with the purpose of "socializing", so they are more willing to build relationships with brands with an open and accepting attitude. One-off promotions can lead to instant sales growth, but long-term relationship marketing can build influence and increase sales for your brand over time.
If you are interested in relationship marketing on overseas social media, or are interested in the functions such as "member management" and "interaction management" of Marketing Cloud mentioned in the article, please leave your contact information, and we will arrange someone to contact you.