This is based on the excellent book, Conversation Marketing: How To Be Relevant and Engage Your Customer By Speaking Human by Kevin Lund. You can deliver the right kind of content to the right audience at the right time when you have a deeper understanding of who they are, what they want to talk about, and how they want to be spoken to.
Conversation marketing adds value to your business. It promotes engagement since it allows you to connect with your customers on a deeper level. It adds a personal touch since you can make your customer feel valued, special, and appreciated.
It also maximizes conversions by letting you develop a lasting connection which ensures that they respond positively to your product or service. According to Lund, when customers trust a brand, they automatically gravitate toward the company.
This book discusses 10 ways to be relevant, engage your customer, and speak human to them. We will briefly look at each way.
How You Can Earn Attention For Your Brand
- Develop your brand’s voice: your brand’s content personality and style
- Choose your brand’s tone: your brand’s attitude; be interesting and engaging
- Be clear: plain, use language your audience will understand
- Be clever: memorable, amusing, heartfelt, and/or captivating
- Be concise: sometimes it is the shorter messages that have more impact
- Be consistent: your brand voice and tone should be consistent for your audience
- Regularly publish: useful, memorable, and shareable content
Tell A Story
Good storytelling lets you hold someone’s attention long enough to break down a topic, engender his or her trust, so that he or she remembers you and is left feeling smarter. Good storytelling presents facts in a compelling and meaningful way. Benefits to telling stories:
- Translates complex data through a narrative lens: appeal to their mind and heart through feelings and emotions, not facts and data
- No one can argue with a story: a story is processed completely different than data
- A story elicits an emotional response: they remember how you made them feel
- A story touches the hearts of the audience: we are reminded in a positive way every time we hear it
Stay Humble
- Be approachable and relatable
- Focus on your audience’s pain points
- Know your product/service/industry
- Do not talk about yourself
- Don’t pitch—teach instead
- Show how your company makes a difference in the lives of others
- Write to you audience to address their needs
Pick Your Party
Content is created to attract and retrain your customers. Conversational content includes: blogs, videos, social media, podcasts, native advertising, digital newsletters, white papers, print magazines, digital magazines, books, e-books, and webinars. The audience is your priority. Stay focused on their needs. Be able to answer the following questions:
- What are we trying to accomplish?
- How do we want to get there?
- Where are our customers hanging out?
Be Relevant on a Molecular Level
- Make sure you are talking about topics that interest your audience
- Address their pain points in a language they understand
- Make sure relevant content gets to each person at the right time and place
- When you solve problems and provide easy-to-find answers, you’ve become a resource to them
- Build an audience with good, relevant content
- Give that audience a reason to buy from you
- Know how you can address, answer, or solve their pain point in a relevant, unique, and useful way
Open Up and Listen
- To be a good conversationalist, you must be a good listener
- Listening validates the other person
- What do customers/prospects need right now?
- What are the topics they want to talk about?
- What is being said about your brand?
- What are your audience’s pain points?
- How can you take care of their needs right now?
- How can you make them feel connected to you?
Start the Conversation
- What is your unique selling point to your audience?
- What does your target audience need to know about right now?
- How can I talk about it in a way that hasn’t already been talked about?
- What do you want them to do?
- Captivate your audience with content that explains how to accomplish one task activity, goal, or result
Know When to Stop Talking
- Know what your audience is saying, not saying, and what needs to change
- Use tools like Google Analytics and Hootsuite
- Look at blog and video comments and survey responses
- Interpret the data correctly, make sure you have enough responses
Get Your Customer Involved
- Find influencers, fans, and brand ambassadors
- Generate content from fans and customers
- Monitor what customers say online and respond
- Always respond to what is being said by your customers
- Encourage them to share your content
Ditch the Checklist
- Ask bigger questions about your company and their ultimate goals
- Make sure your unique marketing strategies align with a deeper motivate than earning money
- Every brand has its own personality and mission
- The mission needs to be a goal, task, or endeavor you feel passionate about and are willing to stand by
- Forget about what everyone else is doing
- No two content marketing strategies will work the same
- The difference today often comes down to content
I highly recommend this book since it shares excellent examples of real companies and brands. Their successes as well as lessons learned. How can you relate more to your customers? What kind of content are they looking for? How can you stand out from your competitors? What are your clients saying about you online? These are all important questions to reflect upon and then you must act.
