Marketing has undergone a massive shift in the last few years. The marketing strategies you may have had before will likely not be effective enough today. Audiences have become numb to marketing, and thinking you can succeed by just sending out marketing messages will not work. Our audiences are asleep and disillusioned; here are a few tips to change your marketing strategies and wake them up:
Always be relevant
Most content people see is mediocre and uninteresting, so the best way to stand out is to make your content as relevant as possible. If people see your content as relevant, it won’t feel like marketing. Marketing is generally irrelevant because most people don’t understand their audiences. Instead of seeing their audiences as people, they use marketing statistics like demographics that don’t get to the source of what content people are interested in.
The best way to understand your audience is to ask them, “What gets you up in the morning?”, and “What keeps you up at night?”. The answers may vary, but with enough data you can understand what is really important to people. The meal-kit company Hello Fresh was able to connect with their audience by having a commercial where characters talk about the show Nine Perfect Strangers. The commercial aired while the show was on. Hello Fresh created relevant content by having a conversation that their audience was already having.
Despite what any “expert” tells you, the only important social media algorithm is measured by how long people stay on the app. If your content is relevant and has value, users will stay.
Fulfill audience expectations
A common mistake many creators make is thinking that everyone is following them for different reasons. People follow you because of their expectations of future posts and content. You can make use of these expectations by establishing yourself as the authority on something. Make sure your profile also demonstrates that authority. Don’t make your profile cute or funny, because that will hinder the image you’re trying to create.
Many people use their social media for nothing but sales pitches, but there is no relevancy in that. The bulk of your content should be posts, stories or knowledge. Showcase yourself as a resource to your audience. Be unique by inspiring your audience through your content, because so many people are uninspired. Use stories to showcase your lifestyle. Letting people see your family, hobbies or relationship makes you relatable to your viewers. More than half of Instagram users only watch stories on the app, so showing stories about your life is as relevant as ever.
Frequency is everything
Far too many creators put so much time into a single social media post. Single posts disappear fast, and audiences ultimately judge people on the sum of their parts. If a user is interested in you, they are interested in the whole of your content, not one post. Though quality is important, don’t waste your time on perfection and instead focus on frequency. The most successful people in your business are probably putting out far more content than you are.
If you lack relevance for too long, people will forget about you. To succeed, you need to make your content a daily viewing habit for your audience. When they open their devices, is your content the first thing they see? If it isn’t, you’re not posting enough. Eliminate any self-doubt about your posts, because that will only slow you down.
Talk to your audience
The number one sales and generation problem is not only a lack of content, but lack of conversation. This is where the marketing game has changed the most. We’re so focused on scaling our customer base, we forget that real sales happen when one person talks to another.
We communicate with the people closest to us the most consistently, so there should be no hesitation in communicating with your followers. When a person contacts you, bring the conversation out of the public forum and into a private message. We all want to feel significant, so make the person feel important and not like a customer being sold to.
Note: This article was created from the conference Achiever II, and is rewritten from the speech given by John Morgan.
After building and selling a successful real estate business, John Morgan became the founder of ACHIEVR: a company that provides coaching for entrepreneurs and leaders. He currently runs the ACHIEVR Tribe group coaching program and acts as a mentor to select entrepreneurs.
