The future of marketing is all about the relationship

Most bloggers and diligent webmasters are fanatic about keeping track of their statistics and doing their best so make sure this month’s hits exceed last month’s. While driving traffic to your website is the primary goal for marketing, I think one must also not forget that the whole marketing process does not end there.

We started from the corporate style catalogue sites and sites with standard sized and coloured fonts, and in the past few years, we’ve moved on to the one super long page sales letter full of graphics, bold and red headers, pop up boxes, and even video streaming, but as more people find how full of hype and marketing talk these sales letters are, I think as far as marketing online is concerned, there is a clear direction we are heading to.

Transactional marketing is dead, we are moving to Relationship marketing.

The next few years will see the boom in relationship selling - the sales letters will still make an impact, but not so much as the trust and relationship between the buyer and seller.

Think about it, if you had to buy a lawn mower, for example, would you go shopping around in the departmental stores (or online stores) to hunt high and low, facing “salesmen” (or sales letters, who are full of sales talk anyway!) who try to push products to you, or would you rather have a friend you trust recommend you a good one? To be frank, I’ve never seen a real lawn mower in my life because most of us stay in apartment flats in Singapore and we don’t have lawns to mow… but I’d go for my friend’s recommendations.

Chris Anderson talked about the filters in the long tail book. The fact that there are more and more consumer generated products means that there is more and more crap in the long tail, and we need better filters to make sure we get the stuff we want.

A trustworthy friend is the best filter you can find. In fact, the better the friend knows your preferences, the better recommendations you get.

Friends. Trust. Relationships. Conversations.

Blogs and social media tools are the way to go - these tools help to convert your “transactions” into “relationships” by inviting participation, reviews, comments, and ratings. If you are thinking of starting a business or service online, look towards this direction and you will be halfway there.