One of the things we hear over and over as marketers is that we need to engage our target audience. But what does that mean, exactly? Well, it can mean a lot of things, most of which are critical to your marketing success.
Get Out There
Let’s start with the most basic: getting your message out there where your prospects can see it. You can’t rely on them to seek you out – say, via web search – and even if you could, there has to be something they can sink their teeth into when they find you. You need to put your message out there so prospects know how you can help them and what outcomes they’ll achieve working with you.
As with most marketing concepts, engagement works best when it is focused on your prospects’ needs and interests.
Easy enough as far as that goes, but what qualifies as “something they can sink their teeth into?”
Emotional engagement
For starters, you’ll want to engage with your audience on an emotional level. Yes, qualitative evidence to back up your claims can help, but that information will resonate much more with your audience if you can relate it as part of narrative.
It’s important to note that any stories you share have to be about the client success rather than how you helped a client succeed. Seems like a subtle shift, but it’s significant in that truly engaging narratives will feature your audience as the hero and you as the trusty sidekick.
Interactive Content / Demonstrations
There’s a quote attributed to Confucius that’s applicable here:
“Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I’ll understand.”
This pretty neatly captures the value of marketing content like assessment tools, self-evaluations, and other hands-on demonstrations of how and why your solution would work for the prospect, particularly if they feel that the tool is helping them understand how your solution could be customized for their particular needs. In other words, you can’t offer interactivity for interactivity’s sake. The exercise has to provide value to your prospect.
Be Human
It’s easy for me to tell you to forget the formality, but the very conversational style that works for me may not be a good fit for you, your brand, or your audience.
That shouldn’t be taken as an excuse to create marketing that presents the facts, all the facts, and nothing but the facts. Share who you are and why what you do is important to you. (And by “you” I mean your entire team or organization, unless you’re a solopreneur or otherwise a very small operation.)
Whether B2B or B2C, people buy from people, and prospects nearly always want to know what it will be like to work with you. Let your marketing open that door for you.
Engage Sides of the Brain
Quantitative and qualitative approaches together are stronger than either on their own.
The facts I mentioned above can’t stand on their own. We don’t believe them any more, and not just because of the current political landscape that seems to call into question the most basic of truths.
For many years now, we’ve been inundated with facts and figures presented to us to back up claims that a marketer is making. Rarely do we have any way of verifying those claims independently, or evaluating their worth to us. (I love listening to pickup truck ads: nearly every single one I see promising “class-leading” horsepower or torque or payload or some other measure of truck utility.
Which begs the question, if all these trucks are class-leading, doesn’t that mean they’re all tied not only for first place … but for last?
Most buyers have tuned that kind of noise out, so the value of quantitative data often lies in a qualitative presentation. As in, the story of how my Super Max Duty truck’s class-leading payload helped me complete a job faster and make more money.
In other words, it’s not really the award that matters, nor is it the feature that earned you the award. What matters is how the award (and the feature) demonstrate how what you’re marketing will help the prospect.
As with most marketing concepts, engagement works best when it is focused on your prospects’ needs and interests.
Occasional large-scale changes can re-invigorate a marketing plan that’s beginning to falter and can provide a blast of inspiration that ripples out through the rest of your marketing.
By the way, if you’re interested in hearing some of my podcast and radio appearances, you’ll find a few of them listed on the Andigo website.
Photo by Alekon pictures on Unsplash
