In this episode of Sequence Over Strategy, Michelle Warner reveals why relationship marketing is now more crucial than ever, as businesses that once thrived on traffic marketing are seeing their success dry up.
What if everything you thought you knew about marketing is wrong—especially when it comes to attracting the right clients? In this episode of Sequence Over Strategy, Michelle Warner reveals why relationship marketing is now more crucial than ever, as businesses that once thrived on traffic marketing are seeing their success dry up. She explains how the market has matured, shifting power from business owners to consumers, who now prefer a more personal, relationship-based approach. Warner urges entrepreneurs to embrace this change and realign their strategies to meet consumer expectations in this new era of marketing.
Check out the full episode at TheMichelleWarner.com
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Hi, I'm Michelle Warner and I'm a business designer and strategist. In the 15 years I've done this work, I've noticed the same trend everywhere. Business owners are falling into the trap of centering strategies first. And what they need to be centering is sequence. Because the reality is the steps you take in your business and the order in which you take them is more important than how well you implement any single strategy. So on this show, my goal is to fix that by helping you find and trust your own sequence of actions rather than blindly following someone else's strategy. Welcome to Sequence Over Strategy.
In every episode of this show, I answer a real question from a real entrepreneur who's struggling with a real challenge in their business. And this week, I'm going to address something that comes up frequently in conversation. And that is why relationship marketing matters now more than ever. Or more specifically, why the chasm is so big right now between it and traffic marketing. As we know, relationship marketing is great for service providers, creatives, anybody who's offering some of those higher cost products and services where you don't need a ton of leads every year.
You're looking for that model where you have just the right amount of leads and they convert at a relatively high rate instead of a more mass market model where you have tons and tons of leads and a lower conversion rate. And I still get a decent amount of pushback from service providers and creatives who have always used traffic marketing. And they want to know why they can't any longer. Because as we know, even though relationship marketing is great for those folks, a lot of times they've actually been traffic marketing. And they want to know why is this such a big deal and why is it a bad idea?
Well, first off, the reason we're even having the conversation in the first place is usually because their leads have dried up. So there's that. There's something right in front of their face that tells them that maybe this whole traffic marketing thing isn't working anymore. So they have this evidence, but they're still hesitant. And I get it, but I don't agree with that hesitation. And so when that happens, I share a little bit of tough love with them. And that's what I'm going to share with you today as well. Because here's the deal. Before, let's say, 2019, 2018, sometime in there, all those folks were right. Traffic marketing did work for just about anything that you were selling if you were operating online as a small business.
And when I say operating online, I mean if you're doing any kind of lead generation online from posting on social media to all the way, you know, being a big content creator. But, and here's the important part, and here's the sequence over strategy part, just because it worked didn't mean it was the right thing to do. Instead, it was because back then you could get away with it. And I'm going to repeat that.
If you were a service provider, a creative, somebody who was really in alignment with relationship marketing and you were using traffic marketing back in the 2010s, there's every chance it worked and it worked well for you. That does not mean, however, that your marketing strategy was aligned with your business model even though it was working. It wasn't aligned. It was just as true then that it is now that relationship marketing is more aligned with those service providers. And again, anything that you're selling when it's that higher cost, higher conversion type of model, what it does mean is that you were able to get away with it. And there's also every chance that in the last five years that has slowly begun to dwindle, that ability to get away with things slowly gone away.
So that was your first sign that conditions were probably changing and what you could get away with you no longer could. Doesn't mean that you didn't keep up on trends or you forgot how to traffic market overnight. Just means the market caught up with you. And that, the market catching up with you piece, is why relationship marketing matters now. And again, this is a sequence over strategy situation because if you were using traffic marketing, again, pre-2020, kind of in the 2010s when it was working, you were getting away with something but you fundamentally weren't doing things in the right order. You weren't asking yourself the right questions in the right order. And so now it has come to the point where it's kind of bit you for doing that. So let's break this down more exactly what's going on.
There's an economic or as I call it a business school term called market maturity and you've probably heard of that. Let's talk about what the definition of market maturity is. The definition is a stage in a product lifecycle where a product has reached its peak sales and market penetration and growth rates begin to slow. I'll repeat that.
Market maturity is a stage in a product lifecycle when a product has reached its peak sales and market penetration and growth rates begin to slow. This happens to every market and it's characterized by a growth slowdown, aka demand meets supply and things start evening out. And this is the opposite of what is happening when a market is immature. That makes sense, right? I just gave you the definition of a mature market.
And so we can imagine that something I'm going to call an immature market would have opposite characteristics. And the definition of an immature market is a market that has low competition so you can rapidly gain market share and revenue growth if you present a solution that solves customers' problems. Well, that probably sounds pretty familiar, right? Because for those of us, again, who are operating online in any kind of capacity in the 2010s, our market was pretty immature. However, about 2018, 2019, and certainly 2020 onward, the market has really shifted from an immature market to a mature one. So what does that mean in real life terms for your business?
It means you've likely gone from a time when there was rapid growth and low competition, frankly, a business owner's dream, things were easy, to a time when there's lots of competition and therefore a real slowdown in growth, which of course is not so much a business owner's dream. And we can talk all day about what that means in terms of how you respond as a business owner in many different ways. But let's stick to the topic at hand. And that topic is how this mature market versus immature market relates to why relationship marketing matters so much right now. And the reason it matters right now is because you're operating in a mature market. You're no longer operating in an immature market.
And so when you're operating in a mature market characterized by that slow growth, guess what? You can't get away with as much as you can get away with when you're operating in an immature market that's growing like crazy. Here's the secret.
Immature markets allow you to get away with murder. And they do that because they're growing so quickly. And when they're growing quickly, there's plenty of demand and there's usually not enough supply to fulfill that demand. So guess what? The power is with you. There's a power imbalance.
The consumer, the client, the lead, whatever we want to talk about, whatever we want to call that person, they're not very picky. They're not able to be very picky. They're out there responding to whatever marketing you're putting out because they're anxious to get their hands on anything they can get their hands on. Because it's a period of rapid growth. And side note, this is also related to the maturity level of an individual customer. And you can learn more about that in Episode 12, Customer Maturity as a Marketing Strategy, if you've not listened to that episode before because these concepts do intertwine.
But in those immature markets that are growing quickly, the business owner really has a lot of power. And the consumer, the client, the lead, whatever we're calling them, they're out there responding to whatever you're putting out because they're so anxious to get some information in a growing market. They're so anxious that they're willing to meet you wherever you're at. But when that flips from immature to mature, the power kind of flips as well. And it flips from the supply to the demand side. And the consumer becomes a lot more powerful because it's harder to get their attention given all the noise.
Everything is leveled off. So there's tons of noise. There's not necessarily a lot of differentiation. What happens then is you have to be on your toes. You need to be a little bit better meeting the consumer where they want to be met. Now guess what? What does that mean in English? It means sequence over strategy becomes more important. You have to have your I's dotted and your T's crossed when you are in a mature market because the power has flipped a little bit.
So you as the business owner, you need to do a little bit better. You need to be really focused on your fundamentals because those matter more. You can't get away with as much. And in this case, that means aligning your marketing strategy with the preferred methods that your ideal clients are going to want. And guess what? Again, for service providers, creators, anybody who is selling those higher cost products that rely on fewer leads and high conversion amongst those leads, then those people prefer relationship marketing.
Traffic marketing is something that your clients had put up with when they had no other choice. But relationship marketing is what they prefer. And so in a mature market, when they have choices, when the power lies with them a little bit more, they are going to go with the choices that align with their preferences, which means they are likely to buy from someone who is relationship marketing instead of traffic marketing. And that is why relationship marketing matters now more than ever. That is why we see people who used to traffic market continue to do that and wonder where their sales have gone. Well, where their sales have gone is to somebody who is relationship marketing because that's what a relationship consumer prefers.
So I'm going to reiterate this again. Relationship marketing has always been the correct choice. If your business model is aligned with relationship marketing, it has always been the correct sequence over strategy choice to engage in relationship marketing. However, in an immature market, which we were operating in for a very long time, that immature market is going to allow you to find success even if you are making incorrect choices with your strategies, aka in this case, even if you were traffic marketing. Mature markets, on the other hand, are not going to give you that room to find success with those incorrect choices. And so as soon as we flip to a mature market, relationship marketing became critical to understand and to implement.
And it's also when we saw traffic marketing stop working or it stopped working is dramatically less, right? It became much, much, much less effective. And that's the important point here. Of course, traffic marketing, there's not a day where we say, OK, the market's mature today. So relationship marketing is going to work great and traffic marketing won't work at all. That's never true. But it does mean that those of you who have seen declining rates using traffic marketing methods, that's why. It's because the consumer is now responding to relationship marketing. And so you need to meet them where they're at. And that is just, again, becoming even more critical as the market maturity really takes off. And so to summarize, why does relationship marketing matter now? I'm going to keep saying it to you, especially if you used to find success using traffic marketing.
It's because we shifted from an immature market to a mature one. And when that flip happens, the easiest way to think about it is that the power has shifted from you to the consumer. And that means the consumer dictates what they want instead of going out of their way to meet you wherever you are. And the consumer, at least for business models that are used by service providers, creators, again, those of us who are providing higher cost services where we don't need tons of leads a year, anyone providing those services, they prefer relationship marketing and they will buy from relationship marketers before they buy from traffic marketers. So it's that simple.
That's why it matters now. If you were having success with traffic marketing and that success is tapering off, it's because the market is maturing. And so you can choose to stay out of alignment and continue to traffic market. And I can virtually guarantee you that your success will continue to dwindle. Or you can get back in a sequence over strategy mode and get into relationship marketing and get your business into alignment because that alignment matters now.
It used to not matter. And that's why I didn't talk about relationship marketing five years ago, because it didn't matter as much. But now it matters. And so I'm going to talk about it a lot.
If you couldn't tell, and I have no idea how you wouldn't be able to, one of the main goals I have with my business is to get the word out about relationship marketing because it is so misunderstood by the market and for a lot of the reasons that we talked about today.
And so if you are somebody who is starting to wrap your arms around relationship marketing, I highly encourage you to check out my Build Your Relationship Funnel Bootcamp, and you can do that over at https://www.themichellewarner.com/relationshipbootcamp.com
I've been teaching it for two years now, and we have so many folks who have turned their businesses around by diving in with me and really getting their hands dirty to understand the nuances of relationship marketing and how to really piece together a relationship marketing funnel. So if you are somebody who is intrigued by this and is ready to get serious about building your relationship marketing funnel, please again, come check it out at https://www.themichellewarner.com/relationshipbootcamp.com and even jump on the wait list so I can let you know when the next session is open for registration.
Thank you so much, and I will see you all next time.