An audience outreach can be difficult for a business to perform, especially if your business is yet to mature. So, how can you grow your audience and make your audience more intrigued with your service or product?
Many organizations across the world including some internet personalities use Q&A for engaging with their customers. But, this is more than just an interaction session. As q&a can provide to be really helpful with shortening the time gap of converting a prospect into a customer, businesses need to take them seriously.
In this article, we’ll look at some neat ways to engage with your audience and build trust.
Questions and Answers
So, lets get to the first and most important part of how you could outreach to your audience to learn more about your product.
First, you need to identify the common and most sort after answers in your service / product. That’s right, you need to identify the things that your customers expect as answers, instead of looking just at their questions.
Because, if you were to just look to the answers. You will be more able to visualize their personas. This is essential in digital marketing as creating a persona of users for your app, is essential to growing your product.
Your Q&A session doesn’t exist only as a means to let your audience know about the product and how it works, it also exists to let you know about your audience.
For example, if an audience from your Question and Answers Session asks you about “How the product works in x ways and by x means?”. There are two things that you can pick up from such a question such as, the interest your audience shows. And the willingness to experiment.
Interests and Experiments in your Product
As mentioned in the example before, there are two factors that need to be looked at when analyzing the questions your audience is asking you. Which is the context of their interests, and their experimental usages of your product / service.
Showing Interests
Now there are two ways a prospect can show interests towards your product, such as. They can either ask about the product in simple means, example “So what does it do?”, “Why does someone need this?”. Or they might ask it in a more practical use case, such as “I’m in the profession of using this, can it be helpful in doing x?”, this is a direct example of experimentation based questions, which we’ll cover later on. But for now lets look at the first examples which we talked about.
The formal and simple questions that an audience can ask about your product, will help to identify the newcomers directly. This is what most organizations are focused on, when it comes to products. Answering simple questions such as how does something work. Will not give your prospects an idea into your products. In order to outreach and gain the interests of your audience, You need to find the situation of the user.
Converting a Q&A to a Conversation
If someone asks you a simple question such as “What does the product do?”, try and answer it so that you can ask your audience a question from within your answer, such as “Does anyone in here need to know how the x feature works with x?”. The difference between a one-on-one session and a Q&A session is that its one to many, sometimes even too many people on the receiving end.
So, this could lead to a lack of interaction between the product demonstrator and the audience. Hence, by answering your audiences questions and leading it to an answer, you create an interest, gaining engagement and this is called conversational marketing.
Experimental Questions
Now that we’ve got questions based on simple interests figured out, we need to take a look at what questions with experimental interests are like.
Let’s go back to our very first example, which was “How the product works in x ways and by x means?”. Now this question shows that our audience is interested in the product, and they’re portraying it through the question. Which is why they would like to find out the ways and means of using your product.
The experimental interests your audience provides in your Q&A outreach can be considered as an evolutionary step in their questions. Because, first comes their interests, and then their desire to apply it for their use cases. Which we in this article categorize as their experimental interests.
By analyzing the experimental interest of our audience in our Q&A programs, we can find out what direction to take our product towards fulfilling our audience. This is key in digital marketing, since we have to have a direct communication with our production teams to enhance the product.
Audience Outreach through Social Media
Social media is a great means of approaching your audience, naturally, you’ll use this as a platform to get the most opinions of your consumers. But, unfortunately, most social medias don’t fulfill the objective of an audience discussion session.
This can be due to several factors. But the most common factors that we should consider when running a social media driven audience outreach are, as follows.
- Who's on it? - The general idea amongst digital marketers is that, if you keep spending money on campaigns and keep running a promo. It’ll eventually find its way through to your ideal customers, and you’ll both be happy. But, this is wrong. You cannot guarantee that the ideal customer would be in a platform. Each platform and its use cases are different. Of course you must give all social media a try, but, only some can help fulfill your mission.
- Will you get any responses? - As painful as it sounds. Generally, social media is not a platform where people talk about their interests, give feedback and tell you what they want. Social media users can be a tough crowd to entertain. But, the only way to collect responses the fastest, is through social media. The reason for the difficulty is because there are so many product / service providers that go on social media. This can flood the users social media feed and make them disinterested. So before you decide to invest your time and money on a social media. Take a moment to identify where your existing product users might be and how you can use them to grow your followers more.
- Is it worth the time / money? - This generally applies to everything. As a digital marketer, you’re highly required to make sure that the churn rate between your expenditure and profitable are performant. So, you first need to ask yourself, this question “Will my social media followers, buy my product?”. It all comes down to money, you wouldn’t waste a dime on a nickel, right. If you did gain a large following, would they be able to engage with your product / service.
The three mentioned factors are some of the most important factors to consider when selecting a social media. But, keep in mind that there are also other factors not mentioned here that need to be considered. So always have a watchful eye on your budgeting and expenses.
My Social Media Recommendations
Now, that I’ve mentioned of the potential risks involved with making a choice on your social media. Here are some of my recommended social media for an audience outreach.
Quora
By no means is Quora a platform to promote your product. Given that its a questions and answers only platform, you should only use it as such. But, sometimes a prospect could be found on the platform looking for a solution to the problem. That your product solves. And so, you should use this opportunity to help outreach to your audience and answer their questions.
Reddit is an open space for many alike and unlike to gather and share their thoughts on ideas. Most would do this under a subreddit, such as r/announcements, r/AskReddit and etc. This can be a great form of collecting user opinions for your products, or to track down and find out how redditors are engaging amongst themselves about your product. Or rather, you could also use this as a means to explore how people who face the problems your product solves communicate. This can give you useful information to help pivot your product, or present it to the user. But, be sure to not present yourself as a sleazy salesman trying to squeeze something in.
Conclusion
An audience outreach can be quite simple, any yet also complicated at the same time. In order to utilize the moments that you receive during your Q&A sessions with your audience. You should always have motivation to go beyond just a normal scope of basic questions, and answers. Try and identify what your product / service is to your users, and use this to promote your product to them.
There are multiple opportunities that you get as a digital marketer to reach out to your audience without having to pay. Just, make sure to not overdo your promotions and sound natural. Also, remember that you want your audience to speak mostly, there’s no point in talking by yourself in an audience outreach session, right.