One of the cardinal rules of small business is that people want to do business with people who they know, like, and trust. That desire holds the key to both delight your customers and boost your cash flow by developing and consistently implementing relationship marketing. Your customers get what they want (a solution to their problem) and you get what you want (smoother cash flow).

Relationship marketing is all about letting your customers or potential customers get to know you. It’s not about trying to make a sale. The goal with relationship marketing is to communicate to your customer or potential customer that you have a solution to his or her very particular and special problem. People want to feel as though you really understand what they are going through and you have just the right solution to help them solve that problem.

Here’s an example of how it’s done. Let’s say you’re an audiologist. Your patients all have a similar problem—some sort of difficulty with their ears. But when you dig down into their problems you find that the broad category of ear-related problems can actually be broken down into a variety of more specific problems. Your potential patients may be dealing with age-related hearing loss, hearing loss in children, swimmer’s ear, or tinnitus (ringing of the ears). Each subset of specific problems has very particular needs—a child with hearing loss has a different set of problems than a person with age-related hearing loss. If you develop marketing materials that speak to very specific problems, you’re able to catch the attention of people with that problem.

Those marketing materials become the bait that attracts the fish you want to catch directly to the hook on the end of your line. For example, if you offered a special report on your website or through your yellow pages advertisement entitled “Helping Your Child Cope with Hearing Loss”, you’ll attract parents of young patients dealing with hearing loss. A report of this nature speaks so specifically about a problem your potential patients might be dealing with that it establishes you as an expert and even more importantly as “the” expert. It isn’t that no one else has the expertise, it’s that you identified the problem, provided guidance, and suggested that you’re available to help with the problem. You’re no longer a stranger, you’re someone who understands what they’re going through.

As with any good marketing plan, building a strong relationship with your customers or potential customers takes consistent effort. You don’t establish a life long relationship based on one hand shake at a networking event. Relationship marketing involves multiple contacts. Those contacts can be any imaginable marketing effort as long as it’s something your target market responds to. In the case of our audiologist, the relationship can start with downloading or ordering a free report. The next step might be to send the potential patient a letter or brochure giving more information about the practice. The goal of this piece would be to make the patient feel more at home in your office. It can include pictures of front desk staff looking welcoming, pictures of the audiologist doing a hearing exam on a child, and directions and parking information.

Once the patient books an appointment, the next piece in the relationship building toolbox could be a newsletter full of helpful tips about caring for your hearing aid and what the staff has been up to. (It should not be one of those stark, bland, dry newsletters that no one reads—bring a sense of family or fun into it so it actually gets read!) The newsletter becomes your regular communication piece and serves to make your customer feel like they’re a part of your practice.

These are techniques that work for any type of business or organization, whether for profit or not for profit. Each marketing piece is designed for the specific target market and the specific problem you are solving. A child psychologist can address problems like bed wetting, a company producing yachts can talk about what to think about before buying a yacht. If you’re talking to day traders, you would speak the language they speak. If you’re marketing to quilters you would address their specific needs.

The cost of the marketing materials and implementation of the program would be different depending on the problem being solved and the target market. Marketing to someone looking to buy a yacht would most likely be more expensive than marketing to parents of children with hearing loss. Make the budget match the message and the market.

As you implement your relationship marketing plan, your potential customers get to know you. The fear factor is removed and they become more likely to start doing business with you. Once they buy, you can continue to build that relationship by sending them special offers, expanding services or products, catalogs, etc. If they had a good experience the first time they bought from you, they’re more likely to respond to future offers.

It’s critical to take good care of the relationships you develop with your customers. Businesses are built one happy customer at a time. Those relationships also become a source of more predictable cash flow. With a list of happy customers in hand, you can create an offer to generate more sales. Those sales become cash flow AND further cement your relationship. If your focus is always on solving a problem for your customer, your marketing efforts will bear fruit and your reward will be a healthy business and smoother cash flow.