Check out this great interview with Mari Smith, author of The New Relationship Marketing and Facebook Marketing: An Hour a Day.

In the interview, Mari discusses why relationships are important to businesses (regardless of size or type) and why businesses need to improve their listening skills. She explains that it doesn’t matter if you are a B2B or a B2C business, you should always think of your company as a P2P (people to people).

Relationship marketing involves using multiple medias to communicate with your customer:
– social media
– Blogs
– Email marketing
– Offline marketing

Lessons all companies should learn about relationship marketing:

– Personalize and humanize your brand. Don’t be afraid to humanize your brand even if you are a big or medium size company. Focus on using the first person “I/Me” not “Us”, and using people’s names when replying to customers through social media.
– You do not need to be a big business to do relationship marketing. It is just as important for small businesses to focus on relationship marketing.
– When using Facebook focus on posting great content and having an engagement strategy in place beforehand. Be consistent and don’t get discouraged, it will take a while to for users to become engaged.

Check out the full interview below.

Have you focused on using social media to build relationships with your customers? Have you found other ways to create new relationships or maintain current customer relationships?