If every interaction you have with a potential customer is to sell them something – doesn’t that get kind of old? Through advertising, you’re always letting people know that your facility is open for business. That’s great, but what else is going on in your business’s four walls?
There are people there – people with interests. People who make the workday bearable for the other people that work there. If you bring some of that humanity out to your customers, you will engage with them on a deeper level. It’s called messaging.
Messaging is where a business volunteers a bit of their time and resources to simply start a conversation, with no agenda of selling. They do this by way of everything they say through promotions, websites, and social media, with content such as interesting articles, infographics and facts. Messaging is the way that customers can see your business’s human side. It’s an act of goodwill.
Okay, maybe the agenda of selling is secretly hidden there somewhere. But while you’re messaging, don’t refer to it at all. Lay aside your branding, your customer pains, your social proof – and just talk. If corporations are people too, isn’t it time they started acting like it?
When at a party, what conversations do you naturally join? You drift toward ones with accessible topics. If everyone can relate to it, the more likely you are to hear contributions from a larger number of people – keeping the conversation interesting.
But this interest has a shelf life. They’re not going to stay interested unless somebody has a particular insight – something that they wouldn’t have come across before. This is something you already have. If you sell bicycles, your sales reps have made you intimately familiar with the features of one bike over the other. Even your customers provide you with information you can’t hear anywhere else, when they come in and tell you how exactly their bike is performing for them. This makes for a lot of unique insight that cycling-inclined folks will be interested in hearing.
In a social information environment, people share what they like without looking too hard at its source. If your barbecue sauce company puts out a really interesting and fun article on the science of barbecue pairings, it will get passed around. Where did it this article come from? To those who pass it on, it’s an afterthought. To you, it’s a great credit. By volunteering your company’s intellect and passions, you’re attracting fans who don’t even know they’re your fans yet.
To engage in good messaging, simply be talking about what your customers are talking about. A customer may initiate contact with you when they’re ready to buy. But the fact is that people who aren’t ready to buy, or are unsure what their needs are, aren’t going to initiate a conversation with a commercial enterprise. To jump in on a conversation that someone is already having about their interests, however, is quite possible. Who better to start the conversation than you?
With quality information and engagement, folks start to see you as less of a profit machine and more of an authority. Just because you operate for profit doesn’t mean your genuine information is without merit. It’s about taking off the mask of business for a moment. It’s about stopping selling long enough to remind people that people – and their ideas – are at the heart of your business, and you wouldn’t have it any other way.
Experimarketing can help your business implement this. If you are at the stage where you are ready to hire a full time marketing employee, try us. We guarantee our services.