How to promote your startup without annoying customers
Customers won’t come until you start going to them. There are platforms where customers hang out online.
Go there. Create valuable content and engage with them on those platforms. How can you do that in a lovely way without annoying customers?
Focus on giving customers what they want
Before you go to where customers hang out online, ask yourself this question:
Are you selling what customers want?
There’s no reason to promote your product or service if customers don’t want it.
Knowing what customers want isn’t hard at all.
Ask them.
If you have customers’ emails, message them. If you have their phone numbers, call them. Some customers would love to talk.
Meet customers. You’ll learn a lot more when you meet them in person. You’ll get more information than would through other forms of communication.
Before the meeting begins, ask customers if you can record the conversation.
Going back to the recording after the meeting could give you a different perspective from the answers you got.
Social media is another channel you can collect customer feedback. Billions of people are using social media platforms.
The growth of social media usage in the past five years is striking. There are 3.4 billion social media users in the world. The number is increasing each year.
Follow your biggest competitors on social media. What topics do their followers discuss? Engage with them and reach out.
Ask your competitors’ social media followers what they want to see improved.
Conduct polls on social media. The results you get from polls would tell you what customers want. Use the information to create a great product or service people want to buy.
If you already have a product or service you sell, use the feedback you collected to improve it.
When you sell what people want to buy, you won’t annoy them.
Don’t overload customers with too much information
Always keep in mind that a customer isn’t on your site to stay there forever. And they are probably doing other things at the same time.
For example, a customer may be at a restaurant waiting for their meal and decides to check out your site. You need to get to the point quickly before food is ready.
So, don’t create a 3,000-word article where a 300-word article would do. Don’t create a 30-minute video where a 3-minute video would do.
Customers will continue to seek more content. But it doesn’t mean they want to spend the next 30 minutes on your site.
Web users have a short attention span.
Nobody wants to read long content that contains unnecessary points. That’s why few people finish long content most times.
Don’t get me wrong. Web users still watch long videos. They still read long articles. The point is, when it’s long, it should be because there’s no way it could be short.
AZ Family Dental created a long-form article on bruxism, and it explains the issue at length and how to deal with it. The site receives thousands of visits per month from that article alone.
The article got to the points quickly. There aren’t unnecessary words or paragraphs. That’s a perfect example of great long-form content.
Don’t create long content for the sake of it. It would be frustrating, painful, and annoying for customers to consume.
You don’t want a potential customer to leave your site irritated because of long-form content.
Don’t copy and paste the same message everywhere
For example, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn are influential social media platforms. But these platforms are different from each other.
Web users have different expectations when they are on each one. They don’t expect to see the same message on all four platforms.
Some people may follow you on every platform. These people would become irritated if they see that you’re copying and pasting the same message everywhere.
Only share content that resonates with prospects on each platform. The content your prospects like on Facebook may be unacceptable on LinkedIn.
Also, you shouldn’t post the same message twice on these platforms. Don’t send the same Tweet in the morning, and then Tweet it again in the evening.
Social media users want to see unique content each time they check their Timeline or Newsfeed. They want to see something they’ve not seen before.
Email is another platform where you could annoy people if you send the same message twice or more.
Tell customers the cost before checkout
The checkout stage is the most important part of a customer journey. It’s where money changes hands.
Studies show that about 70% of shopping carts are abandoned. The number one reason people abandon their carts is high extra costs.
Imagine you run a physical store. Customers put products into their carts. And just before they pay at the cashier, customers realized that they would have to pay some high extra costs they didn’t expect. So, they abandoned their carts and leave. Isn’t that sad?
That’s exactly what happens online.
Customers got angry and left their carts because they were surprised by the cost.
How can you prevent this from happening?
Tell customers the cost before checkout.
Customers love good surprises. But not when they must pay more.
Tell them all the cost, the credit cards fees, and shipping cost before they get to checkout. When you do that, customers won’t be shocked when it’s time to pay.
Doing that reduces frustration, friction, and improves the user experience.
Take care of site errors
There’re a lot of things that could go wrong when a customer is on your site. Some site errors are so annoying that they could make a customer leave and never return to your site.
What’s the most common site error that makes businesses lose lots of sales?
Slow site speed.
Site speed is the time it takes your site to load.
The longer your site takes to load, the more visitors you lose.
Google conducted a study where they found that if your site takes 1 – 5 seconds to load, the probability of a mobile visitor leaving is 90%.
If your site takes 1 – 10 seconds, the probability rises to 123%.
Your site must load within 1 – 3 seconds if you want to keep your visitors happy.
It’s annoying when a site takes forever to load.
If your site loads faster, you’ll bring in more money because people will browse your pages, learn more about your products or services, and buy.
If you’re spending money and time to bring people into your site, you could be losing them to a slow site’s speed. So, ensure that your website loads extremely fast. There are a lot of useful web site analysis tools you can use to track and fix site errors.
Payment processing errors are another kind of error your customers can find annoying. Ensure that customers can pay for your product or service with ease when they’re ready to do that.
Take care of 404 pages. In case you don’t know, 404 pages are pages on your site that aren’t available. It’s annoying for customers when you click on a link, only to realize that the page doesn’t exist. It makes customers wonder if they can even trust the site with their money.
Always be timely
Sending the right message at the right time is key to delighting customers with your content.
There’re two kinds of content:
- Timely content
- Evergreen content
Timely content is only relevant right now. In the next days or weeks, it could become completely useless.
An evergreen content would continue to be useful to your audience for a long time to come. The content could still be useful and relevant 5 years after it was published.
Digital marketing experts love talking about evergreen content because it generates the most ROI. Knowing that a content you published years ago is still generating new customers is cool. You want to publish more content like that.
But the truth is, evergreen content isn’t much useful except it’s timely.
If your customers want to read an article about what’s trending in your industry right now, that’s the content you should publish. They don’t care if it’s evergreen or not.
Timely content always wins. If you want customers to engage with your brand, publish timely content. That’s how you ensure that your content doesn’t annoy customers.
Conclusion
And that’s it. You can promote your brand without annoying customers.
Now, I have no doubt that you’ll be able to promote your product or service and without annoying customers.
Michael Akinlabi is the chief content crafter at OmniKick. OmniKick has developed a popup technology that helps small, and big businesses collect emails on their sites.
