One of the biggest challenges that you face as a business owner is to get your marketing to engage your prospects. The average person sees 1,700 banner ads per month. When you add online videos, newspapers, billboards, radio, and TV, it’s easy to see that consumers are inundated with ads.
That’s why it’s so vital that you market in a way that really speaks to your prospects. Think of how much more impactful your marketing will be if you can make prospects feel like you’re reading their minds. Doing this will get your prospects to focus on your message while also helping you establish a connection with your prospects.
Here are three different things that you can do to achieve this.
1. Deliver on What They Want
A common mistake that business owners make with their marketing is trying to communicate to their prospects what they need. For instance, take the Impossible Foods company. They made it a mission to provide a meat alternative that is just as delicious as real beef.
What people want is a delicious burger, not an alternative that doesn’t taste as good. What if Impossible Foods tried to push the message for consumers to be responsible and eat a meat alternative because the production of meat is one of the biggest environmental problems in the world? This would never work.
Instead, Impossible Burger focused their marketing on its identical taste to real beef. They got many people trying out their burgers and sharing feedback about how delicious and authentic it tasted.
This was when they reinforced their message of why people needed to eat their burgers.
They communicated that their meat alternative was sustainable, healthy, and affordable. By focusing on the core want, they got the attention of their target audience. By following up with explaining why the audience needed the product, it gives the logical justification for why customers need to purchase the product.
If your problem is not knowing exactly what customers want and even need, here is a set of questions to learn about your target customer.
2. Use Reverse Selling to Draw in Prospects
It makes a lot of sense for business owners to be aggressive when it comes to their marketing and sales. But this can be very counterproductive in some cases. The more a salesperson tries to put the pressure on and get the prospect to make the purchase, the more resistant the prospect can get.
Instead, you want to use reverse selling techniques to draw in prospects and get them committed to your message. One technique you can use is to rally prospects to your side. By being more vulnerable and honest, you can create a personal connection with prospects.
This can be done through stories and personal anecdotes that relate to the issues prospects face. The salesperson that admits that he was skeptical of the product he was selling when he first discovered it will do a far better job in engaging the prospects than the salesperson that is constantly trying to move the prospect to buy. This scenario would even be more convincing if the salesperson shares anecdotes of other products he’s tried and compared.
Another technique is to get the prospects to qualify themselves. Ask prospects why they were interested in your product or service. Ask them why they took the time to meet with you. This gets the prospect is selling themselves on why they need your product or service.
This is also a great way to pre-qualify your prospects. You want to make sure you are using your limited resources on prospects that actually have an interest in what you have to sell. Here are a couple of different ways that you can qualify your sales leads online so that you attract the right audience.
The third reverse selling technique is using negative qualifiers. By communicating who your product or service isn’t for, you are conveying the product’s uniqueness, pre-qualifying prospects, and also engaging the right kind of audience. Some prospects may even feel like they are missing out if they don’t fit into the qualifications.
3. Emphasize What Your Audience Can Lose
One of the most puzzling aspects of consumer psychology is the fact that people will do more to avoid loss than to gain something. This is referred to as loss aversion in marketing. The reason people behave this way is that they want to hold on to what they know and are comfortable with rather than possibly gaining from something they’re unfamiliar with. How can you use this in your marketing?
There are many different ways to emphasize loss. The most direct way is to offer your products at a discount for a limited time or offer a limited number of your products at a lower price. There’s a reason why the biggest companies always offer steep discounts during the holidays for a specific number of days.
But what if you’re trying to target a new audience and bring in new customers? Try to come up with a loss aversion angle tied to the product or service you are offering. For example, what if you let your audience know that they’re losing 10 percent of their home’s value by neglecting an important renovation or maintenance job?
Another approach is to let your audience understand how your product can help them save money or educate them on how much money they’re wasting by not using your product. It always helps to quantify exactly how much they are losing and get them to imagine what that money could’ve been used for.
If you are having problems reaching your prospects and getting them to focus your attention on your message, then you need to change your approach. You want to market in a way that reads your prospects’ minds. These three strategies will shift the way you create your marketing campaign and consequently improve your campaign results.
