A familiar saying observes that a good salesperson can sell ice to an Eskimo. The subtext is that a good salesperson can convince someone to buy something even though that person may not need it. Selling requires knowing your intended audience, catching them at the right time in the purchasing funnel, and tailoring the message to their particular needs. Buyers are more sophisticated than ever, and you have to do more to attract their attention. Discover the following three tips to deliver a message at the right time to an audience.
Understand Your Audience
You have a product you need to sell, and you know the audience you’re targeting. But do you understand how people use your product or how they may need it in their lives? It’s one matter to present a product for sale and hope it sells itself. It’s entirely another to present that product in such a way that potential customers feel it’s something that fits their needs and enhances their lives.
You can use multiple avenues available to gain insights into the minds of your customers, including market research for similar products, gathering data through surveys, click-through numbers, and other measurements. All of this information can help you determine when the time is right to deliver the message.
Collect Information and Use It
Once you have the information gathered, you need to determine how to use it. Put your focus on the information that is most likely to generate the largest amount of returns. For example, you’re selling a product targeted to women of a certain age, demographic, and income. If your product is something they can use throughout the year and is essential to their lives, target the pool of buyers who are your strongest potential buyers along with some focus on those who fall outside of your pool. All of these focus areas put together can help you find when and how to market your message.
Get Out the Message
Now that you have your customer data, you need to do something with it. If you collected metrics on how much time your target group spends on social media, you can set your advertising to show up on the social media site of choice. Ultimately, you want to get your message out when your potential customers are at their most relaxed. That is to say, you want to target your ads to them when they’re using their social media or entertainment of choice.
Think about why people use social media and focus your marketing around those reasons. Many users go onto these sites or watch videos for the distraction they provide from their lives. Putting your marketing message on these sites at the time of day members of your audience are most likely to be looking or watching increases the views and increases your sales.
Additionally, you can use influencers to help you maximize the reach of your messaging. Influencers have a built-in audience that actively follows them and stays up-to-date on their activities. Leveraging influencers can help you spread your message to the right audience.
When you do your homework to determine when and how you should promote your message, you can reach more people and increase your potential for more sales.
Image via Flickr by Cydcor
