How much time do you spend on marketing?
How often do you find yourself writing update after update on Social media?
How about email marketing?
You work and work to build up an audience so that you can tell the world what you do. But who is listening, or even cares?
Time and time again, so much effort goes into crafting a new blog post, a long form article or a social media post to showcase your product and services. You have all the keywords, spent hours on Photoshop or Canva to create an awesome graphic, and the result?
A small handful of people read or engage with your post and then nothing. It is lost to the next post, or time has moved on and it seems like no-one cares.
Unfortunately, you may be correct. Nobody does care about what you are selling.
Benefits, not features
I provide SEO, Web Design, Hosting, Content Writing and Paid Search management and nobody gives a sh*t and why would they?
People aren’t really interested in what a stranger does for a living, if I tell you I am the best at SEO in the North West it would barely raise an eyebrow, if, however I told you I could get you more visitors to your website and double your online sales, that may make you take an interest.
The point is, trying to sell your features will never work. Explaining the benefits it has for your potential client will have a much more powerful impact.
If you can bear this in mind each time you are talking about what you do you will start to see a difference in engagement. Tell people what benefits they can enjoy with your services and they are more likely to listen. It would be fair to say that there is a element of selfishness and self-absorption involved, but that is true for all of us, understanding the ‘whats in it for me’ mentality will help you describe your services more effectively.
Emotional buying experience
Deciding to buy is an emotional choice and rarely happens on the first engagement with your website or social media channel, so don’t be too down if you don’t get the conversions straight away, it can often take 5 or 6 interactions between your channels before a conversation or sale takes place. Keeping your message consistent – describing the benefits for your audience across your channels – is the best way for short AND long term success.
Don’t get me wrong, including the features of your product or services is important, but not above the desire to find a solution to a problem. Stats and features should be listed once the interest is achieved
Find your audience
Look at the ads you see on TV. Each one will try to draw an emotional response from you regardless of what they are selling, from selling breakfast cereal to big city banking, it is the emotional response that is being used to create a connection with that brand and make you remember it for later, or search out another interaction that may (or may not) result in a sale or lead at the end of the marketing funnel.
Games consoles such as Playstation and Xbox will show happy gamers before they mention the amount of pixels per inch, or the size of their hard-drive etc as that is the most important aspect for their audience.
This change in mentality when it comes to marketing and advertising can be a tricky one to accomplish, but there are ways to help. For instance, filling in the web form and getting touch with me, will start a process of finding opportunities on your website and digital marketing that will helps understand your audience and what is important to them. Once you understand this, you are half-way there.