The Most Important Skill in Business is Learning How to Serve Your Audience
By Latisha S. | latisha@pancakedigitalsolutions.com
Owning and running a business is not for the faint of heart. There are many hours of blood, sweat, and tears that go into trainings, leadership development, and managing other people. And while all of these are very important skills for a business owner or entrepreneur to master, the most important skill in business is learning how to serve your audience.
If you miss out on this essential business skill, then you won’t be able to build a sustainable business…even with the best trainings, leadership development, and team management.
But, this begs the question, “How do I learn to serve my audience?”
Know Who Your Audience Is
The first piece of this puzzle is simple…you have to know who your audience is!
- Are you serving single moms?
- Maybe your audience is couples who have been together for more than 10 years?
- Or you could be serving men and women in their late 20s-early 30s who travel?
If you don’t know the audience you are targeting with your service or product, then you won’t be able to actually show up for them and serve them. Make sure you devote some time to really figuring out who your audience is before moving onto the next piece.
Where Do They Hang Out Online
Next you will want to look at where your audience is hanging out online. This will help you know what kind of content to create.
For example, if your audience is always on YouTube, you know that you will need to create lots of video content. However, if they are on Twitter, your content will be more focused on short one-two sentence “tweets”.
Build a Relationship With Them
The best way to serve your audience is to build a relationship with them. When we build relationships with our audience, it shows them that we care about their thoughts and feelings and it also makes them open to our services and products.
Building a relationship doesn’t have to be hard. It just means being yourself, responding to comments, engaging with them on a personal level (ex. Tag them, call them by name, ask them how their day is going, etc), and listening to them when they have complaints, concerns, or constructive criticism.
What Do They Want
You can’t serve someone if you don’t know what they want, right? So, you need to look at who your audience is and where they are hanging out online and then from there figure out what they want.
And the best way to do that is to ask them!
Do polls, surveys, and questionnaires to discover what your people are saying that they need from you and then deliver it! It may be something that you don’t normally offer, but if you meet them where they’re at, then when you offer them what they actually need, they are a lot more likely to purchase.
Which brings us to the last piece of the puzzle…
What Do They Need
As we briefly mentioned above, once you’ve determined what they want and have offered that to them, you can focus on moving them towards what they actually need!
A lot of the times, people think they need one thing, when they actually needsomething else. It’s really not your job to try and pressure and convince them otherwise…but it is your job to serve them where they are at (with the want) until they move along their “buyer’s journey” and are open to hearing about what they actually need!
On the Table…
Serving your audience is the foundation of any business, allowing you to create a healthy, sustainable business.
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Learn more about building a relationship with your audience here