Connecting with customers, when done right, can feel like magic. Every word of your pitch stops feeling like simple sales speak and takes on meaning and relevance to someone else as they discover how well your product or service meets a need. However, there is a way to reproduce this phenomenon without feeling too robotic! Let’s break down the various ways you can use language to amp up how you speak to customers to give each one that magical feeling every step of their customer journey.
What Are You Saying?
While it may seem obvious, the first and most important step to communicating effectively with potential clientele is to have a clear understanding of your own message.
What is Your Why?
The easiest way to cut to the chase with your brand messaging in how to speak to customers is to focus on why your brand is valuable to your audience and learn how to best share that with the widest range of people while still keeping customer interactions feeling unique and personal.
Who Are You Talking To?
You can find your target audience by creating audience personas, researching your competition, brainstorming the ideal customers for your product or service, and then tailoring your sales speak to them. Marketing to millennials sounds different than crafting an exciting sales pitch for Gen X or working to show up on Gen Z’s radar through social media algorithms. While each of these audiences has general intersection points (as in, most general information would make sense to people of each demographic), a vague approach means risking losing attention, which is your brand’s most valuable asset in relation to modern marketing. Taking care to create the context in your communication is key to keeping audiences of any origin interested.
Managing Audience Awareness
Creating a scale of awareness to measure your audience’s understanding of your messaging is important to keeping track of effectiveness and learning how to repeat your efforts with minimal lost energy or resource. Your target audience likely has a lot in common, so focusing on those points is key. Developing your brand voice within those parameters helps audiences find you relatable, but the real conversion game changer is varying the levels and styles of communication within that same brand voice that continues to draw each customer in until they finally are ready to make a purchase.
Use OATH to Navigate Different Types of Communication
Michel Fortin describes a way to figure out where your customer is on their purchase journey and how to talk to them in an increasingly nuanced way: Where are they in their OATH to your brand?
O - Oblivious
A - Apathetic
T - Thinking
H - Hurting
Each of these stages requires different ways of communicating.
Oblivious
Think of these as your cold leads. As the word implies, these audience members have no idea how well your brand can help them with their pain points or problem that your product or service solves.
Apathetic
These are part of the warm lead realm, just like the next category of Thinking, but before anyone will even think about your brand as an answer, you have to overcome the baseline “why should I care?” stance newly aware audiences have when hearing new sales pitches. Everyone has a universal aversion to advertising (if you ever want to prove this, think about how badly you want to skip an ad on YouTube, how much people spend monthly for ad-free TV, or fast-forwarding through commercials from a recorded television show. The only way to overcome this and keep the audience's attention is to have a compelling reason to act, be it a new sense of urgency or exclusivity that differentiates you from your competition while making your brand a must-have.
Thinking
Warming up warm leads into hot leads takes emphasizing your brand’s value through a compelling USP because these audience members are actively trying to solve their problems now. They’ve overcome their reluctance, so this is the time to be ready and able to help solve their problem by continuing to remind them of you and offering information about your brand without overwhelming them.
Hurting
This label fits all of your hot leads because they know they need an answer to their problems, they’re eager to have your brand be that solution, and they just need that last bit of reassurance from your team to get them over the finish line to purchasing. Contact at this stage should be the most familiar and reassuring that they’re making the right choice in choosing your brand. Validate them as they choose you with the confidence of being well-informed and feeling like they’re getting the most value for their hard-earned money.
How Are You Saying What You’re Saying
Powerful communicators harness the power of how they use words, space, and context to leave a lasting impact on their listeners. This same energy should accompany how you speak to customers. You have several behavioral targeting tools at your disposal to make the most of each connection.
Speak Like Your Audience
Learning the lingo of your target audience is the best way to fit in. At first, much of this is trial and error of making attempts to connect and seeing what helps them improve. However, there are ways to speed up this process or start from a more effective square one right away.
Data is Your Friend
Phrasing an impactful message works best when using recognizable and relatable terms, but how can you master these quickly and easily, especially if your product or service is in an industry or niche where you have limited innate understanding?
Given that you already have a strong sense of your why, how you talk to customers needs to reflect what makes your offering make the most sense for meeting their needs over other industry options.
The age of the internet makes it easier than ever to find information about your audience, including the right words to use for how to speak to your customers. Most industries and niches already have forums or groups on community websites like Reddit and Tumblr or have found each other through hashtags or groups and fan pages on social media. Couple browsing these arenas and doing some basic audience research, and you’ll be sounding like your audience in no time!
Using customer psychographics, you can get a better understanding of what matters most to each target audience for your brand. You may have a very specific niche that requires specialized jargon or content, or you may have a crowd-favorite fit for the whole family. Knowing how to speak to customers comes down to paying attention to what they like and showing how your brand relates to that seamlessly.
Get Personal
Personalization is a buzzword in marketing and plenty of other industries because customers from every background value tailor-made curated digital experiences. With the rise in normalizing mobile phone internet access and heavier social media use, most touch points for users are full of highly relatable content, product suggestions, and relevant info that fits their experience.
Who Is Talking to Your Audience?
Every ad, social media post, review, photo, and other touch point for customers leave an impression. This means each step of the customer journey serves as a point of contact and should be treated as such. While salespeople or customers.
When You Have a Small but Mighty Team
If you’re a “solopreneur” wearing several hats to run your business, you may have a crystal clear vision of what you’re trying to provide and articulate to your audience, but that closeness to your product or service and not having other minds to collaborate or clarify points with can end up stifling your impact. Studying data analytics and integrating that feedback into your content and designs is crucial to counter this effect.
For Larger Teams
If you have a strong group of employees working hard on producing your vision through creating the products, services, and/or experiences for your customers, knowing the goals and knowing the sales speak to go with them are two different things. Without a deep understanding of a product or service’s purpose, it can be easy for teams to get carried away trying to hit vanity metrics or miss crucial conversions due to a lack of helpful resources or miss the mark on how to seal the deal. Making sure everyone is on the same page from the start and checking in regularly while also empowering teammates by having them check metrics helps boost morale and sales.
A Quick Fix?
Partnering with an agency like USA Link System can help distill your business goals and content at the same time through our innovative approach to marketing brands. Our international team values communication as a core of who we are and how we work together to make your branding dreams come true. We take the time from the start to thoroughly understand your unique needs and provide thoughtful, in-depth, data-backed solutions to common and complex problems alike.
Need to Talk It Out?
Figuring out the nuance of communicating with audiences and learning how to speak to customers is critical to converting customers. The details of getting the most of your sales to speak differ for every industry and niche. To make sure your brand gets it right from the moment a person takes notice of your brand, turn to the experts at USA Link System! We’ll find the ideal way to create a unique bond with your customers together! Book your free meeting with us for more!
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