The Art Of Genuine Online Interaction

Marketing the business online is about creating emotional value to go along with an already valuable offer. But people tend to guard their emotions against blatant attempts at marketing. They know what you’re after, so they’ll close themselves off against you to some degree. It’s your job to break through that guard and being genuine is genuinely the best way to go about it.

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Don’t assume you always know what they want
It’s a good idea to constantly revise your assumptions about what exactly customers are looking for online. It gets you closer to what they actually want. Your initial market research isn’t always going to be the best guide to follow. Create a customer persona and work through the kind of challenges they have that can be solved by your services. Then go a step further and actually ask them what they want. Get complacent and your thinking becomes too insular. You’re focused too much on the corporate message, not on the customer.

Make it their idea
If you want interactions to be genuine, then let them take the first step. That doesn’t mean taking a hands-off approach to online marketing, of course. What it means is focusing more on organic methods of building leads. Get active on social media. Use the expertise of an SEO agency to make it more likely they’ll find you just by browsing the web. Create content that they’re going to want to read. Don’t interrupt their time. Let them come to you when it’s their own idea.

Be active
Beyond bringing them in, you want to make sure that customers stick around, too. You need to appear genuine in real time. One of the ways you can ruin that is by spending less time on social media when it’s simply not convenient to you or reposting the same content because you don’t have the will to create new stuff. For one, start by having a content generation pipeline that is constantly working on new ideas and picking one at a time to focus on. But more important, get more active on social media. It’s okay to focus the majority of your effort on the times of day when social media is most active. If you have to schedule ahead, do it. Then make sure your accounts are linked to your mobile devices so you can reply on the fly when you have a spare moment.

Not everything has to be a close
If you’re constantly trying to sell, trying to get subscribers, and constantly trying to get clicks on your own site, people will see your game and get bored of it. Online users have no illusions of why brands want to be friends with them. But they’re willing to ignore it so long as you’re not being too pushy. Entertain them and find them content they’ll enjoy that has nothing to do with your business. Content curation tools allow you to tap into the pulse of social media if you’re ever looking for things to share.

You need to find the right voice and the right time for more genuine interaction with the customer. Getting under that guard isn’t just going to close more leads, it’s going to build a community and a brand that keeps bringing people in for as long as you’re in business.