When it comes to selling, everything starts with engaging your audience. This is as true for door-to-door salesmen as it is for retail associates, car salesmen, and realtors. You need to engage your audience first before you can get them to hear your pitch. Fortunately, this is easier today than ever before. But it’s still easy to make mistakes. MarketingProfs recently had a great article that outlined the steps involved in better engaging your audience. Keep reading for a summary of these steps.
Only Ask for Information You’ll Actually Use
It’s always easy to fall into the trap of doing things the way they’ve always been done, even though that may not be the right thing to do. Marketers do this all the time. When a customer signs up at their site, for example, they might ask for their birthday, though they have no intention of sending them a special offer on that date. They might ask for their merchandise preference, despite lacking any plans for customizing their shopping experience. The list goes on and on.
One key for better building engagement with your audience is only asking for the information you actually plan on using. Otherwise, you set up false expectations on their part. Some of the best information you can ask for is your users’ preferences, as this allows you to engage your customers in a way that can have a meaningful effect on how you market to them.
Get Involved on Social Media
Social media is simply too important an opportunity for companies not to take advantage of it. Chances are no matter what your demographic is, the majority of your customers are using one social media platform or another (or many).
As your customers are on social media, they’ll expect that you will be, too. But simply creating a bunch of profiles to prove you were there doesn’t cut it. Your social media presence contributes to your customers’ trust in your company. They want to see that you’re invested in making communication as easy as possible. So, go where they are and respond when they speak.
Craft Your Narrative
Between all the information you can gather the old fashioned way and the data you can collect through social media, you can build quite the profile for your customers. So, don’t waste all that hard work by not using it. Start by adopting a tone that respects your familiarity with them, while remaining consistent with the fact that you’re a business. Remember, your purpose is still to drive the sale. You’re just using more information to instill that urge. But don’t forget that, in the digital age, your call for action is more like a conversation. When they respond, it’s essential that you react in a timely and appropriate way. The better you get at having these interactions with your market, the better you’ll know when it’s time to pull the trigger. Learn their signals, and you’ll see when it’s time to send them a time-sensitive offer to give them that final push towards a sale.
Engaging your customers has never been easier than it is today. But that doesn’t mean it’s without hard work. Consider the above advice, and you’ll soon be engaging your audience in a much more productive way.
Source:
http://www.marketingprofs.com/articles/2014/24097/engage-your-audience-from-profile-to-preference
Learn how “RelSell” can help drive your sales through social selling: http://www.ridge-consulting.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/RelSell-Highlights-V3.pdf
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