If you do a quick Google search for ‘better engagement’, you’ll get over 7 hundred million search results. Most are blog posts. There are blogs about employee engagement, Instagram engagement, political engagement, customer engagement, and even ‘climate change engagement’ (definitely a thing that needs to happen).

The posts that are about marketing techniques for better engagement tend to be filled with complex instructions and LOADED with jargon. Some of which even we find hard to follow.

Engagement is everywhere, it’s ‘everything’! (Frankly, we’re sick of the word). But, as business owners looking to build a consistent pipeline of new clients, we all need to work on improving engagement. Just like mowing the lawn, it’s a lot of work and needs to be done frequently, but it makes life easier in the long run.

What does ‘engagement’ even mean?

In basic terms it means ‘getting a reaction from potential clients’.

When you boil it down, the steps to getting better engagement ARE simple: you create a piece of content, aiming to make it as good as possible, so that your audience can find it, understand it, and recognise something in it that they’re experiencing, so that they feel motivated to find out more about how your business can help them achieve their goals or resolve their problems.

Now, that sounds simple, but there are actually many complex tasks and challenges embedded in that short, simple paragraph. Each of these is an opportunity for something to go wrong, so you could spend hours crafting a piece of content that’s a work of sheer genius, but nevertheless an epic fail from a marketing perspective. Don’t beat yourself up if this happens to you, it happens to everyone from time to time.

We’ve previously written blog posts about making your content ‘as good as possible’ (like this), and helping your audience to find it (like this) but today we are sharing one simple technique you can adopt to allow your reader to ‘recognise something in it that they are experiencing’.

It’s a technique that any coach, consultant or practitioner can use to get better engagement with their content. And that is to ‘meet your client where they are’.

In case you haven’t heard this phrase before, it typically means adapting your sales, marketing, and/or service delivery so that it’s relevant for potential clients in the phase of life or business that they are at now, rather than tailoring your service so you deliver it in the way that best suits you. For example, adapting your opening hours so they suit the times your client is available, rather than the times you’d prefer to see them (something the high street banks had long been guilty of ignoring, until online banking arrived!)

Meeting your client where they are can be applied from a content perspective too, it means adapting in three easy ways.

Making these tweaks will dramatically impact the quality of your content, so that it ‘lands’ better with your target customers (in other words, they recognise their own experience in what you’ve got to say). When you make a stronger connection through your content, it’ll have a knock on effect on the number of potential clients who continue through your sales journey.

Here they are:

1. Use simple language and eliminate use of technical jargon.

Remember that potential clients haven’t been through your process yet. So, while your past clients might have spent enough time working with you to adopt your business language and the way you do things into their testimonials, feedback forms and emails to you, your potential clients have yet to become familiar with your internal language. Make sure that your content is simple enough to be understood by everyone, especially those who know nothing about your process, business, or industry.

2. Research their challenges and adopt their language

You can immediately up-level your marketing by becoming very familiar with the challenges that your prospects want your help to overcome. You know why you provide the service you offer, but what makes people want to buy it? Having this information up your sleeve and using it to formulate good content will be a game-changer for you. Get to the truth, don’t just make assumptions. And, don’t stop there. Use their language, rather than your own, to describe these problems. When you reflect back at a client like this, it makes them feel heard and understood, and helps you build a connection with them.

3. Stay up to date with the trends and pressures

Keep abreast with the pressures your clients are feeling, and the trends that are driving business for them. This is all part of meeting them where they are. For example, what effect is Brexit, more working from home, or the increasing pressure of climate change having on your potential clients? How could you use that information to create useful, engaging content for them? How can you support them with the issues that are most relevant to them and causing them headaches right now?

These suggestions all link back to one fundamental rule: set strategies in place to help you know and understand your target market inside and out. When you do that, your marketing always gets better.

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