Four Ways Your Business Can Generate Attention
The behavior of today’s prospect and customer has changed in that they poke and search for informational solutions primarily via search and social media and social networks. Your company needs to have useful and relevant content at the right time—when the consumer is looking to solve her problem—and in the right places—where the consumer will find you. But that’s great because the Internet has liberated attention and no longer is it captive.
With this change in consumer behavior over the past 4-5 years, that means changes in how your business attracts, engages and motivates to action. What are some of the most important changes your business can make to adapt and stay relevant today?
Understand that there are four ways your business can generate attention :
- You can BUY attention. This is called advertising and all advertising is voluntary now. You can’t force someone to read your news story, or watch your ad. There’s more media choices and our attention has been segmented.
- You can BEG for attention. This is called Public Relations. There are two kinds of PR: publicity (which is going to fade away) and there’s public relations which is story telling. Storytelling is going to get more and more important.
- You can BUG people one at a time to get attention. This is called sales. If you have a sales force, their job is not take orders because you can outsource that or put that on the internet. Their job is also not to bother people into buying from you either because that is not a scalable strategy but what your sales force must do is communicate emotion. But you can’t communicate trust and emotion to someone if they are not listening. So the forecast should always be warm. Warm introductions are critical because cold doesn’t work as well, and with warm, listening and leads multiply.
- You can EARN attention online. You earn attention by creating and distributing relevant and valuable content that your clearly defined and understood target audience wants such as YouTube videos, white papers, checklist, blogs, Twitter feeds, infographics, photographs, charts, case studies, product pages and ebooks— and it is all free.
These changes in technology and consumer behaviors in how information is discovered, consumed and engaged upon has turned businesses into media companies we all seek new ways to connect with audiences and monetize.
Question: How are YOU generating attention?
Indispensable Marketing takes a process approach to developing and installing your small business marketing.