Talk With Your Prospects, Not At Them
- Published in Demanding Views
Seth Lieberman, CEO, SnapApp
Marketers have only one job: deliver value to their audiences. When marketers deliver value, good things follow. It sounds easy. However, cutting through the noise to deliver value can be hard, and getting customers to trust that you have value to offer is also hard.
Cutting Through The Noise
There is no shortage of content for prospects to search and read. Rather, there is a problem of too much content, and no clear cut way to find, organize, vet and digest it. This then, is the marketer’s challenge: How do you make sure your content rises to the top, especially in a world where as much as 90% of the purchase decision is made before a prospect ever talks to the sales department?
The answer? Human Interaction 101: Talk with your prospects, not at them. Turn the monologue into a dialog. Ask your prospects questions, listen to their answers, use that to guide the conversation — collecting the details you need, providing the details they seek. In this way you are engaging your prospects, inviting them into a relationship where they can learn more, and allowing them to share their concerns even as you, the marketer, also have an opportunity to learn more and address those concerns.
How do you engage in a dialogue with a prospect as a marketer? Interactive content. Interactive content is action-based content: “assess,” “test,” “analyze,” “calculate,” and it is the marketer’s functional equivalent of picking up the phone and talking to a prospect. In fact, during the early and mid-stages of the buying process it is often better than actually talking to the prospect because it allows the prospect to have the conversation on their own terms — on their preferred channel and at their own pace. Allowing the conversation to progress naturally is critical for building trust.
Providing Value
Once you are engaged in a conversation, providing value becomes relatively easy. You have already demonstrated that you are interested in the prospect’s perspective so you have earned their trust. And, when you better understand each prospect’s unique situation because of the conversation you’ve had, you know what the prospect is looking for and you can provide those details.
Early in the conversation, the value might come in the form of helping a prospect understand their current skills, knowledge level or product requirements, or benchmark themselves relative to their peers. Later, it might come in the form of sharing deeper information on a particular topic. Regardless, by sharing in the natural back and forth you have drawn the prospect in, shown them you are interested in their perspective, and provided them with the information they value when they are ready to listen.
This approach — engaging in a conversation, building trust, exchanging information of value — is the future of marketing. So put your audience first, have dialogues (not monologues) and deliver value early and often — you’ll win the vote of confidence from future customers.
Seth Lieberman is the founder and CEO of SnapApp, a content marketing platform that gives marketers the power to generate leads and drive revenue by creating, publishing, promoting and measuring interactive content that works across the web, email, mobile and social. Seth is a serial entrepreneur who has started three companies and four kids. Two of his companies have been acquired but none of his kids.