Companies are often dumbfounded when their hard sell marketing tactics come up short on results. While the old-fashioned “hard sell” techniques can be effective marketing outlets for certain endeavors, they will not garner the best results alone. In fact, the modern market tends to shy away from obvious advertisements. Which is why it’s important to market for engagement to increase sales.
Marketing for the Modern World
Knowledge is power. With an extensive wealth of information at their literal fingertips, your target audience wants to learn before they buy, thereby ensuring a well-informed decision. You can tap into this trend by marketing for engagement instead of sales. Don’t worry, the sales will quickly follow.
What Marketing for Engagement Means
Marketing for engagement means offering company content that your followers will find valuable, entertaining, and share-worthy. It should be something which prompts them to like, comment or share.
Think about all the viral blog posts, articles, videos, or images you have seen that have been shared by friends on your personal social media accounts. While the topics may be different there is one thing they all have in common: they prompted their audience to share or engage with the content and they invoked some kind of emotion. Sometimes these emotions are positive. Other times they are negative. As a business, you will most likely only want positive reactions to your marketing efforts.
Ideas for Engagement
Marketing for engagement opens a new world of potential content. The only true rule is that you must offer something pertaining to your company for the strategy to work, although, it can be loosely tied. For example, a dance shoe company offering articles on varying types of dance or even music.
Here are a few tried and true forms of engaging with the public to begin your efforts with:
- Ask questions, or answer them
- Offer facts, statistics, research studies, and other useful information
- Respond to comments on your content
- Blog about current trends
- Stay active on social media
- Keep your blog page current by updating regularly
- Run surveys and polls
- Host giveaways on social media
- Use hashtags appropriately – this includes creating a branded hashtag for your company
Know your audience on social media and get them interested in your brand by providing information that is helpful and interesting. Generate new leads and sales by expanding your reach through engaging content and material.
For more information on best marketing practices contact us today.