Editor’s Note: This is the Third Pillar of The Five Pillars of Marketing. In this article, we focus on one of the most critical strategies, Relationship Marketing. Prior articles have dealt with Positioning and Branding.

Building loyal client/customer relationships in a family-owned business can be a powerful strategy for success. Relationship Marketing should become a key phrase in your marketing vocabulary. Why? Simply stated, I believe that family-business relationship marketers win more often. They have come to realize that Relationship Marketing is a particularly effective strategy for a family business. It can deal with these three realities:

• Knowing your clients/customers—and meeting their needs—is vital to successful client acquisition and retention.
• Current competitive communications clutter, including social media, makes it tougher to build client/customer equity for any competitive business.
• Building strong client and customer relationships is the best weapon against today’s myriad competitive forces.

Relationship Marketing in a family-owned business, according to Wikipedia, can be defined as the identification, establishment, maintenance, enhancement, modification and termination of relationships with clients and customers to create value and profit for your family business by a series of relational exchanges that have both a history and a future.

Traditionally, family-owned businesses with one or more of the following characteristics benefit from the use of relationship marketing.

• You seek to establish a continuing client/customer relationship.
• You can define your client/customer’s environment fairly accurately.
• You wish to do more than sell a commodity product or service.

Relationship Marketing programs are ideal for a family business to establish continuing ties to clients/customers. Relationship Marketing will maintain contact with and seek feedback from prospective clients/customers. It will allow the family business to maintain a continuum of contact and interaction, which will generate top-of-mind awareness for you as a favored and trusted supplier.

Relationship Marketing builds from a foundation of excellent positioning. Clients and customers traditionally think about your family-owned business in relation to other competitive providers. Each client and customer establishes a hierarchy of values and wants and needs to use as a basis of comparison before a final decision is made. Think about all your competitors occupying rungs of a ladder. You want to be on the top rung.

Because your clients’ and customers’ available resources are being limited more and more, the need to develop and maintain a continuing relationship with them is heightened. Your family-owned business should be about relationships. Strong relationships provide the competitive edge, yet relatively few provider organizations do more than talk about it. You must take advantage of this natural opportunity and act to install relationship concepts in your organization.

You know that technology has moved into the marketplace. Our daily news is coming from USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, TV, news websites such as Politico and the Huffington Post, and many more.

Researchers estimate that now we are exposed to more than 5,000 commercial messages each day. How then do we remain “top of mind” to our clients and customers? Remember that technologies, blogs, direct marketing programs, service offerings and locations don’t compete – people do. People have to identify the opportunities and take advantage of them. People have to develop marketing and communications materials, how best to implement them, determine who will receive them and how to follow through. And the family-owned business that is based on relationships is a perfect vehicle to utilize relationship marketing techniques.

The road to a client or customer’s favorable decision to do business with you is full of chains and linkages. Buying processes and buying decisions are linked to one another in a great chain that ultimately connects you to the decision. To succeed in Relationship Marketing, you must work to understand the client/customer’s mind. It is not enough just to know who the competitors are. You have the opportunity to develop additional leverage as a family-owned business.

Winning over the client or customer’s mind is the central challenge. Client and customer decisions are often based on quality, image, support and leadership, not just convenience and need. As futurist Alvin Toffler has said, “Even when they appear identical, there are likely to be significant psychological differences between contending choices.” It is this battle of psychological differences that can best be won by employing the principles of relationship marketing.

Clients and customers today have access to more information than ever before, and they study it carefully. We must meet a level of higher client-customer expectations. We must find ways to break through the clutter of massive doses of information. One way is to use the family-owned business paradigm in employing Relationship Marketing strategies.

How can we encourage a positive response to the question, “Why do business with me?” The answer lies in your ability to establish a relationship with the client/customer, to tie an umbilical cord to the client/customer, which in turn ties the client/customer to you. In short, it is extending the family business environment to the client/customer. We must convert prospects into more than a client/customer. We must turn them into advocates for our cause – an extension of the family.

Relationship Marketing is essential in developing loyalty and acceptance. In a world where the client/customer has many options, relationships are the best way to establish and retain client/customer loyalty and acceptance. Collaboration becomes the key. What can we do to help the client/customer reach their objectives?

If all things get pretty close to equal in usual business terms such as service and price, clients/customers will choose on the strength of other attributes, things like family business, loyalty to a brand and a provider that has been responsive to their needs. Merely putting the most attractive brochure in front of the client/customer will do nothing other than incur the largest design and printing bill.

This makes sense when you consider that clients and customers often purchase your service or product because they have developed a relationship with you, they owned another product or service of yours, or they were referred to you by a friend or associate .

The bottom line is that one of the key components in marketing and business growth is to spend significant time and effort nurturing client and customer relationships. This is a strategy that will support your efforts to increase your sales without increasing your budget.

Finally, fold Relationship Marketing into your family-owned business’s marketing plan and communicate your commitment throughout your organization so that all of your associates know, understand and commit to Relationship Marketing. And then make it happen.