Relationship buyers are your fans. They love you, they love what you do, they want to support you, and they want other people to know about you.
This type of customer is pretty common among small businesses because the face of the owner is usually pretty closely tied to the name of the business, which means the owner’s friends become a natural network of relationship buyers.
Another example would be local haunts like bars, coffeeshops, bookshops, etc., which are the type of experience offerings that people become regulars of, i.e. they make it their “spot.”
These type of buyers—with at least one caveat1—are probably going to be your followers online. People who want to keep up with what you’re doing and show off their support via your branding or merch, or even organic UGC.
The easiest way to engage with these buyers through your media is to use your business’ social media content the same way you would use your personal social media. And frankly, it seems like this is what most small businesses default to because it feels the most natural.
But if we really took the time to sit down and think about what kind of content would actually benefit these loyal customers, I think we could be a lot more creative in the way we approach this natural followership than just posting about how adorable the office dog is or which account manager recently had a birthday.
Relationship buyers want to spend their attention on you.
Let’s respect their investment.
- There is a subset of relationship buyers that I would call “status-quo buyers.” These are people like dental patients. The patient is committed to their dentist and returns because they are satisfied with the relationship they have, but, for the most part, they’re not super interested in what’s happening at the dental office in the six months between their regular appointments.
If you really want to engage these buyers on a regular basis, you’re going to need to create content that has an outsized amount of intrinsic value for the audience. ↩︎
