Shift your marketing from monologuing to dialoguing

In the post, Are you communicating with self-pushing statements, we learned the difference between monolguing and dialoguing. Messaging expert Rita Coco followed up with this guest post:

What can you do today to shift your marketing from monologuing to dialoguing?

Start creating powerful dialogues within your marketing communications; prove that you can solve the prospect’s problems. Instead of self-pushing statements, here are customer-directed questions you can use to initiate a dialogue:

• Do you need…?
• Do you desire…?
• Is your business being affected in this way…?
• Is this shift (describe the shift) what you want your business to take?
• Is this positive result (describe the result) what you are looking for?

How you complete these questions will make or break your dialogue. For example: how do you know what your best customers’ most important needs and desires are? (Remember: your product or service is not their desire or need; it is the results of buying and using what you have that they want!)

Here are some initial steps to create your own customer dialogue:

1. Look critically at customer testimonials you already have; pick and use the content in the impactful testimonials for your communications.
2. Revisit your passion: your passion is something that changes your marketplace for the better. What impact do you want them to experience?
3. Be selective in who you want to serve; then you can focus on a specific impact for a specific marketplace.
4. Start talking to your customers.
5. Start collecting testimonials.

Should you become ‘aware’ of self-pushing monologues, you will want to take immediate action - but won’t know how. Steps 4 and 5 (above) are the most difficult steps to perform because they involve spending time with current customers; time you and they may not have. You must know exactly how long to engage your customer, what questions to ask and how to ask them, so that the time is fruitful for you - and a lovely touch point for them.

Just preparing for this level of dialogue can be discouraging – but it does not have to be that way!