Can Marketing to Anyone Help Sell to “Someone”?

In this Say It For You blog, I love to share with readers marketing insights gleaned from  my own “reading around”. On Tuesday of this week, I shared thoughts from Jay Baer’s book, Hug Your Haters, highlighting ways insights gained from customer complaints can be turned into positives through content marketing. Today’ I want to share some ideas I found in Leil Lowndes’ How to Talk With Anyone…

In her “self-help” book, Leil Lowndes offers tips and suggestions for building strong relationships with others, discussing the importance of body language and teaching how to use “mirroring” (imitating  another person’s mannerisms to make them more comfortable relating to you). As a content marketer, I couldn’t help but be intrigued by one of the 92 tips the author lists for keeping a conversation from coming to a hard stop…

Brief, “naked” introductory questions often lack conversational “bait” to encourage further dialogue, Lwondes points out. For example, when asked “Where are you from?”, if you respond with “Washington, D.C.”, there’s no easy way for the other person to continue the conversation.  Instead, use an expanded statement to offer a specific, interesting detail, making it easier for them to ask a follow-up question and keep the conversation going. At an encounter at an art show, Lwondes would follow “Washington, D.C.” with “which, by the way, was designed by the same city planner who designed Paris.” At an all-woman gathering, she might have added “I left D.C. because there were seven of us females to every man there”…

In content marketing, we’ve learned over the years at Say It For You, while you’re offering facts, opinions, and observations, it’s important to keep the “door open”, so readers can relate their own experiences to the topic and encourage them to “continue the conversation”.

Most business owners will tell you they have more than one target audience for their products and services, which means that not every piece of content is going to be helpful to everyone. Fortunately, content is made of very “stretchable fabric” Today’s blog post can slant in one direction; tomorrow’s can take the same theme or “leitmotif” and deal with it in a different way, offering some valuable information or advice relating to just one aspect of your business.

Yes, you’re from Washington D.C. But how does that relate to where your reader is “coming from”?