3 Small Business Strategies to Overcome an Apathetic Audience
Let’s say you’ve got a pretty good business model, with clear directives, a clear outline, and a great team to help you put it all into action. The mechanisms are all in place, and you’re producing enough to satisfy your calculated market demands. There’s only one problem: people aren’t buying, and they aren’t responding to your brand.
Customer apathy is a major problem for companies of all sizes, but it hits small businesses especially hard. Whether you’re a startup and you’re encountering apathy in your attempts to scale up, or you’re a small enterprise with a few years of experience that’s hit a major roadblock in customer demand, fewer customers buying can mean critically stifled revenue.
Larger businesses can ride out the storm, depending on their most zealous customers or experimenting with expensive new marketing strategies, but small businesses can afford neither option.
Instead, entrepreneurs must work quickly and efficiently to stir up greater motivation in their target audiences. These three strategies can help:
1. Differentiate yourself.
The typical cause for customer apathy is a lack of differentiation. If you don’t seem any different than your competitors, and you don’t offer anything unique, people won’t have any reason to be enthusiastic about buying from you. For example, let’s say you produce a line of athletic shoes, and there’s a competing company offering very similar athletic shoes. They have the same function, the same “look,” the same price range, and by extension, the same target audience.
If you were a customer, which brand would you buy? As there is no differentiating factor here, the answer is typically “it doesn’t matter,” or “whichever one is closest to me.” If, instead, your athletic shoes featured some new, eye-catching designs, or offered a scientifically engineered insole, customers might have a reason to seek you out—even if you sold them at a higher price.
The key here is not necessarily improving on something your competitor already has—this can be difficult, time consuming, and not worth the effort. Instead, it’s to conjure something that your competitor doesn’t have, even if it’s something intangible, like the voice of your brand. The specifics of that differentiating factor are up to you.
2. Find a way to get people talking.
Apathy is a contagious problem. If a group of potential customers are uninterested in your brand, they’ll be unwilling and unable to spread the idea of your brand to the next group of people. Fortunately, the solution is also contagious. The more you can get people talking about your brand, the more they’ll talk to other people, and the more willing those other people will be to buy your products.
There are two “subjects” of talking that are valuable to you. The first is getting people to talk about your brand. Your goal is to showcase your brand voice (typically online) in a context that warrants audience participation. For example, you could write an interesting blog article that criticizes your industry or talks about the exciting new developments coming to your products. You could hold a contest on social media and offer prizes to the top responders. The more you nurture your community and engage with them in open dialogue, the more they’ll want to talk to you and about you (and of course, the more mentions of your brand you get online, the better).
The second subject is just as important—getting people to talk about your products or services. One of the best ways to do this is to encourage consumer reviews. Get your customers to post reviews about your products or business on your website or on a third-party platform like Yelp. Encourage them to post video reviews when they open their products for the first time. Do whatever it takes to get them talking about your materials.
3. Make the customer experience unforgettable.
Last but not least, take great care to make every experience with your brand unforgettable. When you eat at a restaurant, if the food is mediocre, the waiter is apathetic, and the whole process is stereotypical, you’ll have no special reason to remember the experience. But if your food came out on a funky-shaped plate, your waiter made wisecracks all night, and the entire room was bustling with music and interesting designs, you’d have a story to tell—even if it wasn’t your usual cup of tea.
In a way, this is a further action of differentiating yourself. But it’s also a fundamental change to your business. Remember, your customer experience has to come first—do whatever it takes to make it memorable.
With these three strategies, you should have no trouble overcoming your temporary slump in customer motivation. Experiment to find what works and what doesn’t, and don’t be afraid to take risks—risky strategies might turn away a fraction of your audience, but they tend to invigorate all those who remain. Your goal here isn’t to please everybody, but to end up with an audience that is truly dedicated to, or at least enthusiastic about your brand.
