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If you’re running a business, whether it’s for-profit or non-profit, odds are you’ll have better success if you have loyal customers. These are the people willing to try your new products or services and who get excited enough to tell their friends about you.

If you’re wondering how to get those types of customers, focus on one word.

Relationships.

If you form good relationships with your customers, they’ll be more loyal, more forgiving when something goes wrong, and more likely to help you succeed.

Why Building Relationships Works

If you think about companies you buy from, you’re probably familiar with the idea of transactional marketing, where a business is just trying to make one sale at a time without worrying about keeping a particular customer in the long-term.

This approach has some benefits, but it won’t build brand loyalty or encourage that customer to come back to you. This is where building relationships comes into play.

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You probably know that stories are important in marketing, and so is knowing your audience. But have you considered using stories as a way of understanding your audience?

This is the idea behind customer journey mapping, but I started thinking about it even more when reading User Story Mapping by Jeff Patton.

One of the key points of the book is the importance of having people arrive at a shared understanding. Patton describes this as “when we both understand what the other person is imagining and why.” (loc 305) 

He further adds that stories help us arrive at that shared understanding, and that “what’s most important isn’t what’s written down – it’s what we remember when we read it.” (loc 365)

From this perspective, it’s easy to apply the concepts of the book to marketing, even though it was written for the stories used in agile software development.

But in marketing, the important part is also what people remember after they read the materials. Even if everything you write is accurate, if it’s not presented in a way that resonates with your readers and makes them feel understood, they won’t remember what you wrote.

And the best way to understand them is to write their stories. When you do this, you not only visualize what actions they take, but you also develop empathy for them.

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