The revolution from transactional to relational advertising

One of the main current problems of marketing is to create relations through the use of advertising instead of just sending out promotional campaigns as marketing used to do.

Sales has the advantaged position to create relations with their leads, prospects and customers as they have one-to-one communications and even have face-to-face meetings. They do have two way interaction or a conversation.
They even can bring advice or even bring free consultancy in order to build further the relationship.

Marketing will only:
- Communicate using one-to-many channels
- Push the marketing message through the communication channels to the audience.
Hopefully the target audience is listening.
Building a relation using these communication channels is hard to do.

Transactional vs relational advertising

Previously most advertising was and still is transactional by addressing to the transactional customers who are people that are ready to buy and probably looking at the best price or price/value on the market.
Transactional customers will easily switch if a better deal offered.

On the other hand relational customers mainly care if you meet their needs and your relational advertisement brings valuable content to them. The relational advertising needs to have affinity to the potential buyer to build the relation.
The content of the advertisement needs to start a conversation that should turn into a “Conversational Currency” as Jay Deragon describes it.

Create relations for relational customers

Esthetically superb looking advertisements or amazing technology effects in ads will not create relations: they might just impress but not create value.

What is needed is content that affects or influences the target audience.
The content needs to be relational that has context to the target audience.
Those in the audience that relates to this content will propagate your information and even add content to it.

Relational customers will listen and switch to you only:
- If you communicate the right thing and keep on saying it.
- If they can identify with the situation or person in the advertising.

The change from transactional advertising to relational advertising that creates a relation through the content is a disruptive revolution.

Is your marketing still brewing transactional advertisements? Or are they already into relational ads?