Why Building Strong Client Relationships is Important for Business

Today’s business environment is competitive. There are dozens of companies aiming for the attention of the same audience you’re after. Naturally, businesses look to cast wider nets to improve their odds of winning new business but overlook the true value of focusing on clients already in their circle.

Client-based business is all about building strong client relationships and delivering more than what is expected; and when done right, your clients will become ambassadors that help you build a community of trust and loyalty. 

However, building and maintaining client relationships requires time, effort, and persistence. In this post, we’ll discuss strategies for building strong client relationships, cover why it’s essential, and the benefits it can bring to your organization.

Strong Client Relationships Build Loyalty

Lasting client relationships are built on trust, there is loyalty in trust, and there are benefits to loyalty.

One study confirmed it is 5-25x more expensive to acquire a new customer than keep an existing customer. Another states the probability of successfully selling to an existing customer is 60-70% versus 5-20% to a new customer. 

Not having to do the dance of gathering new leads, qualifying them, and winning their trust frees up bandwidth for you and your team to tackle other duties, all while still maintaining revenue.

When done correctly, building strong and deep relationships will rile up business for you as a positive side effect through referrals and general conversation. There is more trust in the conversations between your clients and their friends & family than a piece of marketing to new prospects. In fact, 49% of U.S. consumers say friends and family are their top sources of brand awareness. (Apptentive) Communities share services, product offerings, and awareness of events in order to validate and be validated. If your client relationships are strong, your clients will do the talking for you.

Getting Emotional

Investing into your client relationships and fostering emotional connections not only helps create loyal fans who refer their friends & family, but they will also be an excellent source of feedback. This emotional connection between your clients and your business will be a brilliant resource to better understand your ideal clients, their needs, and how to fine tune your product or services.

Additionally, clients with an emotional relationship with a brand have a 306% higher liftetime value and will recommend your company at a rate of 71% versus the average rate of 45%. (Motista)

Getting emotional pays off.

Build Your Community and Connection

Building a community around your business is a fast-pass to maintaining and building client relationships. How does one go about building a community to galvanize their relationships? Offering sincerity and provide value that is solely theirs. This can come in various forms, here are a couple:

Blog

Blogs can become peoples’ favorite places to learn things and entertain themselves. They have gained reputations as resources to educate, showcase authenticity, build brands, and be effective tools in creating community, especially when paired with a unique writing style and personality.

A blog is an excellent platform to provide valuable information about and surrounding your business and business philosophy. You can build your community and client relationships by sharing your experiences, expertise, anecdotes, and increase audience connection by sprinkling in personal stories. Your readers will appreciate the sincerity and increase client confidence in your business knowing there is an actual person behind it all.

Social Media

Use popular social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter to be an extension of your reach. Not only is social media a fantastic place to share your blog posts, news, and stay top of mind, it also works amazingly well to display personal bits of you, your family, and even behind the scenes of your business.

When done correctly, social platforms can also increase your reach and audience. For example, if your business hosts a giveaway of their products or services, your audience will repost your post as an entry to win your product or service, allowing your business to be shared to their followers. This can be a very powerful way to create and nurture your community as you are taking care of your audience and being exposed to their sphere of influence as well. This is magnified if they have a large following on social media.

Email Marketing/ Customer Service

While not typically thought of as two in the same, they can be executed as if they are in the same vein and all under the mission of building strong client relationships and staying connected. 

An email list is an excellent way to send newsletters, share exclusive content, reward them for their loyalty, and grant them early access to product and service releases. Emails lists are also great places to ask for feedback. It is not uncommon for companies to send out surveys to their clients in emails to get a pulse on the client’s opinions and expectations of the company. 

Building an email list of clients and subscribers also serves as an additional avenue for reach. Some social media platforms may adjust the way their reach algorithms work once or twice a year, or prioritize a specific type of content versus others. Building your own email list provides a safety net as you’ll always have a way to communicate with your audience without having to compete with algorithms.

The Magic is in the Connection

Future-proof businesses are built with strong client relationships and community in the heart of their foundation. They don’t rely on product or services to do the talking for them, those are seen as the cost of entry – the bare minimum. When there is a community built around a business or product, your audience not only connects with your business, but they connect with each other as well. In theory, they all were dealing with the same problem until you and your business came around and solved it – you being at the hub of it all.

Keeping your audience close to you and each other grants you insight to know how they feel, think, and what keeps them motivated – this creates an aura, magic if you will, around your business. Strong client relationships build connection, connection builds community – and if your community is well taken care of, your community will take care of you.