A lot of businesses are guilty of thinking that keeping their audience motivated is a waste of time. You might hear brand managers say things like: “We’ve got a great product, a winning image, and a message people connect with, our brand is motivation enough to keep our customers buying from us.”
Any company who thinks like this makes the mistake of taking their audience for granted and puts themselves in a lose-lose situation. Why? Because they’ll lose their customers and lose their business. Simple.
Don’t take your audience for granted — learn what motivates them and create a brand that they will love coming back to time and time again. Here is how you can tap into the power of audience motivation.
Why It’s Important to Know Who Your Audience Are & What Motivates Them
Leading motivational speaker and sales expert, Jeff Shore, states that there are two main factors that motivate your audience to become your customers:
- Dissatisfaction – Your audience is missing something. This could be a complete physical absence; for example, they have an unkempt garden and are missing the tools to tidy it. However, it could also be a partial absence, namely, that they have a lawn mower but it’s not good enough to do the job demanded of it.
- Promise – Your audience has built up a picture of what they need to resolve their dissatisfaction; they can see the item they need and they can see the positive impact on their lives.
Once your audience has reached the point where they are motivated to be buyers you must give them the motivation to become your customers. They won’t just turn up at your online store and spend their money on your products. Why? Because they have so many companies, they can choose to buy from.
Many people might want to strike up a long-term relationship with a brand or product but they won’t give it to you blindly. Your business needs to strike up a great relationship with your audience to turn them into customers. Like all great romances, you need to keep on wooing them and surprising them to motivate them to stay.
Understanding the Power of Being Positive
The value of positivity isn’t just an old idea that’s used to sell self-help books. It’s a well-established and valuable business tool that you must apply to your interactions with your audience.
You know it yourself: when a colleague, friend, or customer speaks to you positively, it inspires positivity in you. This isn’t a vague, intangible notion; it’s grounded in scientific thinking.
Barbara Fredrickson is a psychology researcher at the University of North Carolina. In 2008 she published a paper in which she explained that when you experience positive thoughts and emotions, happiness, contentment, joy, you make yourself more open and more receptive.
These are exactly the qualities that you want to inspire in your audience. This is because when they are more receptive they are more likely to complete the journey from being observers to being loyal customers.
How to Motivate Your Audience to Become Long-Term Customers
There are so many tricks to giving your audience the motivation to commit to your business. These are some of the most crucial and your company needs to start putting them into practice ASAP.
Make Your Audience Want to Visit Your Website
The digital age is no longer an age; it’s the norm, the standard, and your audience’s minimum expectation (whether spoken or unspoken) is that your digital offering meets their requirements.
Your website is the net that catches your audience; you need it to fulfill this objective and then set them free to find their way to your checkout and become customers. To do this there are some basic things it must do:
Design for Emotions
Emotions drive your audience. One tool you can use to tap into your customers’ emotions is the ability to surprise. While this doesn’t mean you should tear up your website every other day, what it does mean is that you need to liven things up.
Using a store CMS keeps the relationship between you and your audience from going stale by making it easy to tweak the design of your website as you see fit.
You might also want to get a pro-designer involved if your vision requires a bit more than a few superficial tweaks. Colorlib has a great list of clean WordPress themes that give you the potential space to play, create, and visualize.
Design for Humans
The bots are here, but they aren’t yet part of your audience, and they’re a long way off becoming your customers.
I might have just told you to keep things fresh, but you still need a measure of consistency, and that comes from employing simple site architecture that lets your audience find exactly what they need.
Build your business in a way that gives your audience this certainty, and you’ll give them the motivation to keep coming back.
Design for Scalability
The technology you use motivates your audience by providing them with a better customer experience.
As your business expands, you’ll soon outgrow your current business infrastructure. This shouldn’t be seen as a challenge though — it should be seen as an opportunity. Spreading out and investing in new software lets you motivate your audience in new ways.
Take multi-channel eCommerce, for example. Multi-channel eCommerce doesn’t just provide your business with new sales channels.
It also delivers a greater CX by selling where your customers are. Bigger platforms diversify your channels, opening up native selling options like Messenger, social media, offline stores, and so on.
Beyond this, you could even incorporate real-world selling opportunities. It’s easy enough to get started with simple technology like Shopify POS and it gives you the opportunity to open up a genuine, in-person dialogue with your customers too — a great chance to motivate your audience face-to-face.
By blending customer-centric elements such as social media with sales channels, you motivate your customers beyond your online store or website. The overall experience is better for your customer, compelling them to return to you time and again.
Tell a Story Your Audience Can Connect With
Great public speakers aren’t just able to captivate their audience through sheer charisma alone. Public speakers are storytellers at heart and the very best are able to update the narrative so that it connects with whoever they’re speaking to.
Your business needs to harness storytelling to connect with your readers if you want your brand to stand out. Here’s how.
Be Entertaining
If your audience sees your brand as more than just a product, then you’ll motivate them to give you their loyalty.
By publishing entertaining content on your website and social media accounts, you make your business personable and make it easier for your audience to forge a personal connection with your brand.
Embrace Visuals to Inspire
I won’t tell you that a picture is worth a thousand words — you know that already. But beyond conjuring words, strong visuals have the power to elicit strong emotional responses too.
While high-quality original photography is the aim, it’s not always achievable. Stock photos have their place, but they’re often poor-quality or generic. Instead, lean on crowdsourced photo sites like Gratisography. These provide unique images that can uplift, inspire, or provoke your audience.
While visuals on their own will go some way towards motivating your audience, they’ll only go so far. Use images in conjunction with your copy to elicit feelings and motivate your audience on a deeper, emotional level.
Tell your audience what they’re getting from you.
It’s not enough to just assume the quality of your goods and services will speak for themselves; your audience wants clear and actionable takeaways from them, and that’s what you must provide.
Show and tell your audience how your products will improve their lives. Understand their dissatisfaction and make your business the promise of their future happiness.
Motivating your audience isn’t just a win-win situation. It’s a matter of life and death for your brand; if you can’t drive your audience, then you give them no reason to become customers, and if you have no customers, then you have no business. So put the lessons of this article into practice and give your audience the motivation they need to enter into a long-term relationship with your company.
target audience concept -DepositPhotos
