In this digital age, where consumers live in a fast-paced environment, their time is very limited, as is their attention span. People are bombarded with information at any given moment, whether they are on their phones or just driving their car.
This means that putting out a mediocre marketing campaign in an already flooded environment will not get you any results, not to mention it would be wasting your consumer’s time.
But promoting your product does not end with marketing campaigns. In fact, not having well-optimized service interactions is one of the biggest contributors to consumer loss.
So what can you do to promote your product while simultaneously not wasting your consumers’ time? In this article, we will explore some of the ways with which you can manage to do both.
Have a well-optimized website
A website that runs too slow already wastes your consumer’s time.
It is definitely a bad look for your brand if your website is slow. People may get irritated with loading times and simply ditch the whole thing altogether.
Having a website that provides smooth experience, and is optimized for mobile platforms as well, will do wonders for your business. Mobile users far outweigh desktop users, so you should take into account mobile marketing when developing your website.
Here are some techniques you can use to optimize your website’s speed and performance:
Moving Hosts. Sometimes your website is held back by the server it is hosted on. Thus, changing to another, more reliable host may solve current performance issues. For example, sharing hosting is the most popular hosting type because it is affordable and significantly increases website speed (due to shared CPU, RAM and disk space with other websites in the server).
Reduce Plug-ins. Plug-ins usually add cool features to your website but that comes at a cost. If you want to increase the loading speed of your website, get rid of plug-ins that are not absolutely necessary and keep the ones that are.
Implement Website Caching. If there is a lot of traffic coming your website’s way, it may cause too much of a burden for the servers to handle. Website caching solves that issue by storing versions of your website on a user’s computer.
Reduce File Sizes. Some websites are full of heavy media content that overloads the website. Reducing the number or even compressing those files to decrease size will open up a lot of memory, therefore improving your website’s speed.
Don’t automate everything
Sometimes things are better when left to be run by people instead of computers. When you automate every task, thus leaving out the human factor, you increase the number of steps customers have to take.
Regardless of whether a consumer wants to talk to a customer service representative, register on your website or apply a promotion on a purchase, sometimes automation gets in the way by adding unnecessary steps.
That is not to advocate completely disregarding automating some tasks. In fact, a lot of workflows can be automated. For example, you can automate customer support by means of chatbots, which can be used to conduct surface level communication with customers. Then again, AI cannot solve all or adequately respond to some consumer queries, and this is where a human touch is needed.
Automation helps solve a lot of issues that otherwise require a lot of manpower but it should not necessarily remove all of the human component in some tasks.
Create content that is engaging yet short
People do not have much time to spare during the day. So whatever time you can get, you have to make the most of it. If you produce a video advertisement, try to keep it short but in a way that will be engaging and entertaining for your customers.
If you produce a video promoting your product that is 10-minutes long, you are simply wasting your time and your consumers’ time, because no one is interested in watching videos that long.
In a similar vein, if you are conducting a promotional campaign—part of which is providing coupons and offers to consumers through your content—do not waste your consumers’ time by complicating the steps or process of getting those codes.
Don’t make promises you cannot keep
Too often brands try to promote their upcoming product by launching preorder campaigns. While it makes for a good promotion and raises brand/product awareness, if you know from the start you cannot fulfill your orders, then cancel the whole thing before it gets out of hand.
There are many disastrous examples of companies biting more than they could chew with similar kick-starter campaigns that collected money, yet could not fulfill the orders when the time came. As a result, they wasted consumers’ time and money, and lost the interest of people. Not to mention a lot of the public credibility in the future.
Value time
The old saying that time is money has never rung truer in today’s world.
Consumers value their time and so should you.
Because the advertising market is oversaturated, you and thousands of other businesses are fighting for whatever little time you can get from consumers. Following the tips mentioned above will speed up a lot of your workflows, thus helping you make the most out of that time to promote your product without pushing consumers away or wasting their time.
