The Silver Bullet for Scaling Intimacy
Just because it’s now easier than ever to scale, doesn’t mean you have to. Scaling is encouraged, yes. The ease, the opportunities, and tools readily available for us to use make it a no-brainer to follow this path.
But the thing is, now that it has become easier than ever, our cravings for things that don’t scale have risen tremendously. This is a massive opportunity for brands to take advantage of.
As the world becomes noisier and noisier, it is easy to get lost and be forgotten. It is increasingly easier to become nothing but a statistic.
And this my friend is an open field where brands can make a killing — if they do it right.
Relationships
The value we place on time has risen exponentially over the years. As Napoleon once said:
“Space, I can recover. Time, never.”
Relationships need effort, and effort requires time and attention.
Are you willing to devote time, effort, and attention to an area of your company that does not guarantee sales? Why spend time engaging with your audience when you can focus on improving your sales team?
The fact that you can allocate your resources to advertising or to sales rather than this is exactly the reason why personalized and intimate audience engagement given much more appreciation. You didn’t have to, yet you chose to do so.
That’s why we feel more love when we receive a handwritten letter rather than a gift card with X amount of cash. You simply understand that someone spent time, spent something that they can never get back just to let you know you are special.
The problem is, this is difficult to scale. As your brand grows, this becomes a bit unmanageable. it is difficult to have these conversations especially if your brand gains more ground. There are simply too many people to engage with.
This is when it becomes tempting to outsource this to just about anyone. This is when the fairytale small businesses transform into robotic corporations. It gets tempting to devote time and effort on something else. Which sucks because this is exactly the point when a simple personalized hello now has the fire-power to convert normal-folk into defenders of the brand.
It is difficult to cope with the number of engagements you will need to make as your brand grows, but here’s our silver bullet on how to make it a breeze.
The Empathy Mindset
This may sound like something with all-fluff and no punch, but this approach has helped us do at least 200 engagements every day. Simply changing the way you see conversations can change its impact on your audience.
So what is empathy? Empathy is defined as the ability to identify yourself with, and understand another person’s feelings, situation, and motives.
In engagement, your approach should be to converse with people by being concerned for their concerns. Your concern should be about the needs of others. Here are some questions to ask yourself as you engage with your followers or with random people on social media:
How can I help you?
How can I brighten your day?
How can I motivate you?
What can I say to take some weight off your shoulders?
How can I make you feel that you are important?
How can I make you feel that you are not alone?
We immediately felt the difference of asking these questions in our minds before we do our daily “listening” and engagements with people on social media. We felt more like heroes, rather that marketers trying to get publicity.
Our focus shifted from having X-number of engagements into having X-number of people we were able to brighten up, motivate, and comfort. Can’t stress enough how asking these questions have made this routine feeling less like a chore and more of a quest towards making the world better, one person at a time, one tweet at a time.
Remember: People are drawn to what is authentic, to what is real. What makes them stay is empathy. Empathy cements the trust.
It’s like dating. We are drawn to attractive people, but we commit only to the one that is concerned about what concerns us, cares about what we care about, resonate with our feelings — the bad, the good, and the ugly.
Empathy. Approach with empathy, and your relationships with your tribe become gold.
Call To Action
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Partizan Media is a social media + branding agency that works with purpose-driven brands, non-profits, and social enterprises. We believe that profit should not only be the standard of success but also their impact on society.
