How to Create a Deeper Connection With Your Target Audience
Today I want to help you connect deeper with your target market. Why would you want to connect deeply with your audience?
You have two choices in business if you want to make a good profit:
- Sell lots of lower-margin products or services to lots of people. People do not need to have much affinity with your brand, but it does mean you are often in danger of being a commodity.
- Sell higher-margin products and services to fewer people. That requires you to connect deeper with your target market than your competition so you truly understand them.
But there is another option … Imagine if you could sell lots of high-value products and services to lots of people. Then you will do even better, right?
If you can create a deep connection with your prospects and serve them well then your brand can grow and spread further than you could ever dream of.
Fostering a Deeper Connection via Storytelling
How do you look back on your days, your weeks, your life? How do you share your experiences with other people?
We tell stories.
Humans are narrative creators. Stories are how we make sense of the things that happen, we weave a cause-and-effect relationship even when none exists.
Telling stories helps us deliver a lot of information, produces emotional responses, and allows us to bypass our natural inclination to be cynical, all in a fun and informal way.
One of the best ways to make your stories and anecdotes resonate even more is for you to show how you can relate to your audience and connect with them through shared interests and experiences.
Shared Experiences and Interests to Connect with Your Audience
A great deal of content is very dry and formal, but blog posts do not have to be. Blogging is meant to be informal and person-to-person. Use that!
One of the ways you can be more of a person, and therefore connect with people better, is to provide insight into human experiences:
- Feel, felt, found – “I appreciate how you feel because I felt the same way, but what I found is …”
- Sound and auditory – Does it whisper or does it scream? What are you hearing?
- Paint a mental picture – Imagine using the advice that you discovered here and seeing that your audience has a closer connection with you – what would that be like?
- Relatable Experiences – We haven’t all nearly drowned while kayaking but we all understand what it is like to be frozen with fear.
- Shared interests – What I call letting your inner geek out.
Focusing on Value Versus Visitor Count
You can provide a small amount of value to a huge audience or create a deep and lasting experience for a smaller audience.
While eventually, you can offer a great deal of value to lots of people, when you are starting out, you have the choice of wide or deep, and reaching a mass market is extremely difficult when starting from zero.
This is why I do not aim for big traffic with my new blogs, instead, I try to provide tips and advice that will resonate deeply with a subset of the overall niche.
Although I have more subscribers here than some other blogs, I am actually choosy about how I grow my subscriptions because I want a certain group of people who actually want to hear what I have to say.
This means I consciously leave certain high-traffic subjects to other bloggers even though I know it would grow my readership. I even deleted a highly visited post from my website because it was attracting people who were not looking for what I could offer.
Consider my free flagship content ebook. People do not search for that term, and it is not the kind of resource that would ever go viral or get on the Reddit front page.
Instead, it is something I think people should read if they want to know how to create valuable and compelling content, not something people are scrambling to read because there is an untapped desire out there in the market.
Create Deeper Connections with Conversation
Deeper connections start with how you approach your audience:
- Be very visible to the people who want/need you most, where they want you to be,
- Show up as approachable, helpful, human, and capable,
- Offer help with what matters to them in the way they find it most useful.
For bloggers that means concentrating on crafting one or two very good posts per week rather than lots of filler and me-too fluff. When you promote your latest work, be present and make yourself available to follow up with answers and conversation.
Connection Relies on Intention
Do you really have a desire to help or are you looking to make a quick profit? People can often tell the difference.
Yes, I charge for consulting because if I didn’t I would be never doing anything else, there is always a long line of people who want to pick your brain or hop on a call!
However many people have found that I will always try to answer quick questions in social media and emails.
An authentic intention to really help is paramount.
Authentic interaction is key because that is a core way that people will experience you.
It’s not just about broadcasting your expertise but making your conversations two-way. If you are truly interactive you will learn what people respond to and how, and they will get to know you better and trust you more.
The more positive impact you have in your niche community over time the more referrals and positive word of mouth you will generate.
The main point is who you want to attract, and how you can really make an impact for them. Traffic with no purpose is vanity, much better to gather readers and prospects you can truly serve in a substantial way.
