How often do you share or discuss things with your market?
I don’t mean putting up a new website that tries to sell them one of your products or an article that is designed for search engine optimization to bring new viewers your way…what I DO mean is having a useful and valuable conversation with your marketplace?
When you enter a particular niche market it better be with the intent of getting involved and helping that niche with their challenges and desires, if it’s not, then you may as well move on to another career
Great marketing has always involved:
- Getting to intimately know your market and their overwhelming challenges, frustrations, questions and desires
- Engaging with that audience (or at least appearing to engage well enough to convince them you are ONE of them or that you understand them)
- Target specific interests, passions and desires for an end result
- Leverage feedback to keep the engines running
- Knowing when to mention, introduce and sell your products or services
Increasingly we see people like Seth Godin, Tim Ferris, Guy Kawasaki, Tony Robbins and others engaging with their market through Twitter, Facebook, their own blogs and videos – sharing stories of their travels, the inside of their business, their daily activities, new resources that they value and of course, some promotional material on their courses or services
We may see a dozen or more contact points with their market in a given day, but definitely 2-3 daily – are you anywhere near that number consistently?
I know we have spent more of our effort (even hiring some extra help) the last half of 2010 to increase our consistent connection to our markets – and YES it has paid off immensely in terms of involvement, feedback, participation and yes, sales.
Interestingly we have found that much of our content has improved in Search Engine Ranking as well — likely a combination of natural aging as well as regular, high quality, relevant content with various quality incoming links from our work on other blogs and social networking posts.
If there is one thing you do entering into 2011 to improve your business – look at how you can get more connected with your market. You can expect to get more traffic, more loyalty, build more of a loyal following AND make more sales because of it.
