SBM 078 : You Are Trying To Sell Too Much Too Early with Alex Khan

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How to Attract More Customers to Your Business

Even if you don’t admit it to it, there is one thing that you or your business would want to be in the market: liked. This is not some sentimental thing, mind you, as popular businesses tend to perform better in the market compared to those are not that well-known or worse.

For some reason, people like to part with their money more if the business receiving it is something that they know and trust. It’s a fairly straightforward notion and is something that any business should do their damnedest to achieve in the market.

The question is: how do you do that? The short answer: in more ways than one.

The KLT Factor

One thing you have to understand is that the market’s behavior has drastically changed in recent years. Sure, people still tend to trust certain brands over others but the reason why they do so has changed. See, brands that are being well-liked today enjoy from their reputations not because of what they say not their audience but what they can offer.

Simply put, people today do not actually give a damn about things like branding, brand awareness, brand loyalty, and all those other traditional marketing concepts and strategies. This is a newer, more convoluted yet effective marketing strategy that we will talk off later on.

How Does it Work?

How KLT works is really simple. Think of it this way: have you ever wondered why you buy the same products at roughly the same stores? Or how about those instances when you stop buying from a certain store Chances are that you buy from these people because you, well, like them or trust them. On the flip side, you stopped buying from certain businesses because you stopped liking and trusting them.

The philosophy behind KLT is to think of your business as a person, one who has its own set of personalities and quirks that you need to make attractive for people. It’s just like what author Zig Ziglar once said “If people like you, they’ll listen to you. But if they trust you, they’ll do business with you.

So how do you go about making people trust your brand more? Believe it or not, making them do so operates on the same principles as making a person love you more. This is called the KLT Factor and it is divided into three steps.

• 1. KnowFirst and foremost, you have to know who you are selling to. What kind of people are buying from you? How old are they? Why do they buy from you? Identifying who buys from you will actually go a long way not just in making KLT effective but also the other marketing strategies.

  So, once you have known your demographics, how do you get their attention? There are many ways to do this but, for online, it’s best to refer to the oldest trick in the product marketing book: free samples.

  From trial versions of your online product to excerpts of a blog you are about to publish, there are actually quite a lot of creative ways for you to get your audience to know your brand. You might be surprised as to how easy it is to convince people if you give them something of value for free.

• 2. LikeOnce they’ve come to know you, the challenge you will have to deal with is making them like you. So how does one go about being likeable? That’s a broad subject but, as far as your business is concerned, you only need to perform two things.
  • Find Common GroundHere’s a scenario: Two known Star Wars fans meet each other on the park. What’s the first thing that you can expect for them to talk about after the weather? Star Wars, of course.
    Or how about when two baseball fans meeting each other on the dentist’s lobby? You can be sure that they are going to talk about their favorite teams and how they performed in their last games.Being likeable is something like those i.e. finding a point of interest or topic in your business that your people can relate. From your community relations to the values that your business stands for, there are quite a number of things that you can use as subjects for the content that you will publish in any of your platforms.
  • Be Vulnerable (Selectively)If you want to be liked, then you have the option to show a bit of your humanity to your audience.Let’s take a close look at Sony’s most recent hit videogame, God of War. Being the 7th entry in a series that began in 2004, this reboot is resonating with a lot of videogame fans and critics for its portrayal of its main character. Once an intense, perpetually angry badass, Kratos is now this mellow, wiser man in his later years trying to raise his own son while still retaining much of his coolness factor.

    

    The developer’s decision to “humanize” the character actually made him more relatable and, added with a good story and fine-tuned gameplay, propelled God of War as one of the best games of the year.

    You have to understand that perfection, though an admirable standard, does tend to make you disconnect with your audience since, well, nobody’s perfect. People like to know that you can make mistakes, too, since this means that you, at least from a certain point of view, know what they are going to through.

    Of course, you have to be careful as to how much vulnerability you want to show to your audience. Do it too much and people might think that you are incompetent or, worse, pandering to them.

• 3. TrustBuilding up trust can be a rather demanding task. However, being trustworthy is generally easier to accomplish if you and your business have three qualities.
  • 1. AuthenticityBeing authentic as a business involves being as real and sincere as you can be. From the practices that you follow to the marketing strategies that you use, everything that comes out of your part should reflect who you truly are. The less that people see everything that you do as a marketing ploy, the easier it will be for them to trust you.
  • 2. TransparencyNever, ever, hide things from your audience when there is no reason to do so. People actually trust brands more if they tell the truth even under difficult situations. You can easily do this by disclosing all the necessary information in all your official communications. In other words: if there’s no point in hiding the truth, don’t.
  • 3. ConsistencyThis is arguably the simplest aspect to remember but often difficult to pull how. How do become consistent with your business? Simple. Do whatever you promised or follow whatever standard you have set yourself. When you establish some principles to follow, it should be you yourself leading the charge in implementing them.So, this is how KLT really works: let your business be known to people, find ways to make them like you, and finally, earn their trust. If you can do this, you should quickly make your brand an attractive one in the market and profit, hopefully, should follow soon.

Why Selling Too Much Too Early Does Not Work

“Wait a minute,” You might wonder. Isn’t more always better? How can overselling be a bad thing? After all, the whole point of being in business is to quickly establish your brand so shouldn’t doing more sales lead to better chances of success?

The answer is no. Always remember that setting up everything in every level of your business takes time. This includes collaborations with suppliers to hiring and training people. Nothing in your business is ever instant since you have to take the time to cover every aspect of it if you want your business to be successful.

Overselling might be good for making your brand more recognizable but it won’t do any favors for you as the one offering the products or services. If you start overselling, you start taxing your productions, your logistics, and even your administrative operations to the point that you start failing to deliver on your promises.

There have been too many instances where businesses started overselling which lead to delays, missed deadlines, shoddy product quality, and so on. This then leads to, you guessed it, angry customers.

As such, it is best that you keep your marketing and sales teams in line with the current capacity of your operations. Remind them constantly as to what your business can do and how much it can deliver at this time.

It’s a bit harsh to put a leash on your teams’ creativity but always remember this: it’s better to meet small demands consistently than having letting manufactured hype make changes on your production schedules.

How to Personalize Customer Interactions

Soon enough, we will enter into the age of Conversation Marketing where all types of promotions and advertising will take a more direct and personal approach. In paper, this should help in ensuring unique experiences for each of your audience but, on your part, it might be overwhelming.

Adjusting to this new form of marketing will take time but it should not be impossible for any business. Here’s how:

• 1. Come Up with Customer PersonasAnticipation is a major skill you should hone these times as your business has to directly interact with a lot of people at the same time. Since it is impossible for you to know what a particular person wants, you can “predict” such by coming up with customer personas.

  These customer personas will be based on the different demographics you target and will give you a good idea as to how a certain customer acts based on their given profile. It won’t actually tell you what they want but, at the least, it gives you an idea as to how each conversation will go down. Coming up with your customer personas will take a lot of research so it is recommended that you start profiling your usual customers as soon as possible.

• 2. Pay Attention to Customer CuesEven if you are employing a conversational style of marketing now, none of it is going to be effective if you still are trying to talk AT your audience, not TO them. You must take notes as to how a person is reacting to every part of the conversation and shift your style accordingly to meet their needs.For instance, you might suddenly pick up that the person you are talking to does not want to talk about a certain topic. Common sense dictates that you don’t push the issue and talk about something else.
• 3. Leave Room for the UnexpectedPeople actually hate talking to marketers and advertisers especially if they can tell if what is being said to them follows a script. There’s just something about saying a line that has been repeated to hundreds before that can make any statement seem insincere.

  Look, you can’t expect to do advertising without a script but, if possible, allow for some variations of what you will say just to keep the conversation interesting. If that person wants to talk about something not in your script, allow them to do so. It’s up to you to find ways on how bring the conversation back on track so you can meet your marketing goals.

In Conclusion

In the years to come, you will find out that many tried and tested marketing strategies will give way for something new. Most of these new marketing tools will focus on the customer as an individual whose needs must be met on a personal level.

Keeping your business attractive to customers during this new era of marketing might be demanding and results will take time to be really felt. However, you should be successful with this new marketing scheme so as long you remember one thing: it’s all about the value of the ting you offer to customers, not what you say you can offer, that really counts in the long run.

Have you tried reaching out to your customers on a more personal level? What other methods have you tried to make your brand even more trusted in the market? Let us know in the comments below.

ALEX IN ACTION

THANK YOU FOR LISTENING!

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