The importance of building relationships with your audience or customer is key to the success of your business. Reciprocity sets up a system of mutual benefit that helps to drive growth and engagement, and ultimately, sales.
From your customer’s perspective, reciprocity means that if you help them, they will help your business. Reciprocity is not created immediately, however. It takes time to build trust and loyalty through your brand.
Here you will find reasons why you should build reciprocity in your business, and how it can mutually benefit you and your customer.
1. What is reciprocity in business?
Reciprocity is the exchange of value in one from entity another. In this case, the value is often given by your business to your customer for free. For instance, if your business is to sell goods, you may add on free shipping as an added value to your product.
This achieves two things. From the point of view of your customer, reciprocity gives a reason for your customer to keep buying from you. From your point of view, as the business owner, it encourages loyalty to your brand.
This is how a system of mutual benefit is built. You should find ways to keep this system going so that your customers return for repeat business.
2. Why should you build reciprocity?
As a business owner, the main reason to build reciprocity is that it gives value to customers. It builds trust and strengthens the relationship between your business and your customer.
By giving value, you achieve another effect: you build authority, which gives your customer a reason to listen to you. As you grow your brand, you will hope to encourage loyalty among your customers.
What better way to do this than to position yourself as the authority in your niche? Building reciprocity also motivates your customers to take action. Whenever you are trying to sell something, you will always get some resistance from your audience. To tip the balance in your favour, give them something for free. You will encourage their decision making and thought process, pushing them towards your offer.
Finally, this system of mutual benefit also wins new customers. A customer who is new to your brand, and has never heard of your product, needs encouragement. A great way to introduce your business to them is to give them a free taste of your product and all of its benefits.
3. How can you set up a system of mutual benefit?
If you are a new business owner, you may be puzzled as to how you will nurture relationships with your potential customers. The simple answer to this problem is to build up content that you will later give away for free.
The first step is to create the content. Called a lead magnet, this is a piece of marketing material that you will give away for free in exchange for their email address, or for signing up for your newsletter. This could be a free checklist, e-book, or audio material.
Just because it’s free doesn’t mean that you should make the material low quality. The purpose of the lead magnet is to introduce your brand to your potential customer and entice them to buy from you in the future, so don’t skimp on its quality.
The lead magnet should promise them that there is further quality to be had, and give them a reason to remain interested in your business.
Don’t be afraid to give them value for free. It will ultimately lead to a greater return on investment because your audience will want to act as your brand ambassador, spreading news of your business by word of mouth and recommendations through social media.
4. How can your business benefit from offering free value to your customer?
Let’s say that you have given your audience a ton of value in the form of materials such as blog posts, videos, webinars or photos. Your content is interesting and engaging. You also gave value in the form of free trials, limited time offers, coupons or free shipping.
How can you ask for something in return? This is where your social media marketing strategy can be of good use. You can ask for feedback, comments and reviews. By keeping your audience engaged, they will think of your brand first instead of another competitor’s. They are more likely to take action and buy from you.
The more channels you use to get your message out there, the more likely your audience will see it and remember your brand.
5. Building reciprocity in your business is really just an exercise in maintaining good customer relations.
When there’s a system of mutual benefit set up, your customers are more likely to be happy with your brand, and more willing to buy from you. The more value you give, the more persuasive your messaging is. This is how you will convince your potential customer to sign up to be a loyal customer.