There is a disturbing trend in real life society that has flowed like lava from a volcano into online society. This trend is to forget about what the consumer wants or needs and instead make it all it all about you.

The first and most important aspect in any type of communication is to listen. You have to listen to what your potential customer wants.

Don’t tell them all about you. Don’t bore them with details about your personal life and nothing more – or worse, your company pursuits 24/7. Your company ranked here in this survey, your company won this award, x amount of your customers thought you were just the cat’s meow, you have this many employees, you’re planning to go global…

me..me..me

As a marketer, you simply can’t afford to think in a ‘me first’ way. No matter how proud you are of your business.  You don’t need to be the one center stage. Keep the spotlight on the consumer.

The consumer doesn’t want to know all about you, no matter how they arrived on your social doorstep. True, they’re knocking, looking for information – but what they really want answered is, “What’s in it for me?” (WIIFM)

Remember the old adage, ‘the customer is always right?’ Technically, the customer may not have been right, but that’s not what’s important. The adage was never talking about an actual right or wrong.

It stood for serving a customer, putting their needs, their issues, and their problems first and then finding a way to fix that problem in a way that caused them to leave satisfied with the outcome.

You have to discover what motivates your target audience, what matters to them, what’s the benefit to the consumer. What’s their problem? Whatever answers they’re looking to find, you need to supply or someone else will.

Your consumer has already been bombarded with ‘buy this, get this, try this.’ You have to slice away all that external gibberish to get to the core of the matter. And the core is what they’re looking for.

It’s been said that it’s better to give than to receive. In marketing, this is all too true. On http://www.TiffanyDow.com I give my customers a free report when they want it. Then I often provide free downloads – like an autoresponder tutorial, a lesson on Amazon Turk, and so on!

Take a look at your social media. If you can’t answer the question WIIFM from a customer’s perspective, it’s time to rethink how you’re marketing and keep in mind who you’re marketing to.

Does this mean you lave out any details about yourself? Not at all! In fact, it’s crucial that they do get to know you so that they can build trust in you. However, remember to make it mostly about them – with a little bit of you sprinkled in for good flavor.

Tiff