Have you experienced being talked into purchasing a product or service? Telemarketers persistently calling your home and office, or perhaps a company flooding your inbox with email promotions. We all have encountered these hard sell tactics once, twice or many times. And like many people, I don't enjoy buying a product when I feel pressured to do so or annoyed at the approach. Many people nowadays are smart consumers and wary of misleading promotional tactics and hard sell advertising. These pushy tactics often create a negative customer reaction. And with the power of online customer reviews, you don't want to risk your brand reputation on unwise marketing practices.

As a business, how then can you thrive in a very competitive online marketplace? Perhaps, non-interruptive marketing is the key to your social media strategy. Instead of bombarding your target audience with product offers, non-interruptive marketing involves developing rich content that draws the right people to your brand.

Marketers often struggle to engage with their audience. It is easy to post an update on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and many other social media platforms. If you have a lot of time on your hands, you can post as many updates, share articles, videos, and even use tools like Hootsuite and Buffer to automate and schedule your social media posts in advance. But that effort doesn't always equal success in engaging with your audience. In fact, some social media pages are like graveyards with so many posts but with little or no engagement at all. It is so quiet there you might just hear a pin drop or an echo of the remains of what your social media campaign will be in a few months doomed to fail. But don't die just yet. There is time to reconsider changing your approach.

If most of your social media posts are links to your website's product or service landing page with what seems like an engaging caption saying, Call us now, Check us out, Our products are great, or We can help you, then don't expect to be noticed. If you are pushing products and services so hard, you will likely push away your audience. Keep in mind that people hitting the follow or like button can just as easily click unfollow or unlike, or ignore your posts altogether. If you want to keep your audience interested and gain more followers in the process, here are a few points:

It's a two-way street.

Have you ever met a person who constantly talks about himself that you become uninterested and would rather talk to another person who actually engages you into conversation? Imagine that person is your social media page. When you constantly talk about product offers, readers will lose interest, and they will probably go to the next guy that does the job of engaging them and learning about their needs. It is interruptive to constantly talk about your brand so start listening to your audience.

Know your audience.

Identifying your target audience, understanding their profile, and finding out topics relevant and important to them will help you formulate social media content with the potential to be highly engaging. What content do they want? When and where are they most socially active? Answers to these questions will help you create and curate the right content for them. In this way, you don't only deliver content that you want to share but also offer content that people actually want to read about.

Give value and offer solutions instead of products and services.

With so many content shared online and in social media, it is easy for your message to get lost in the sea of random social media posts and information on your readers' newsfeed. Thus, you have to make the most of every social media post by creating content that has value to your readers. Instead of constant sales pitches, share content that is helpful, informational or educational - like whitepapers, comprehensive guides, infographics, and videos. People will trust you if you go the extra mile to provide information that helps them rather than information that just define your products and services.

Add Humor

Engage followers with occasional humor. Memes are great examples of how you can add humor to your social media page. Plus, it adds visual element that is more engaging to readers. Make sure it is relevant to your brand, product or service. If you do this correctly, you'll keep your audience interested and give the impression that you are not just about selling products and earning profits.

Conclusion:

In non-interruptive marketing, you give people the choice to opt-in to your content stream. And they will be happy to do so and even purchase a product or avail of your service if you have gained their trust through valuable and helpful information. Non-interruptive marketing helps you be found by the right customers through good strategy and rich content. That is more effective, less costly, and essentially offers long-term business value.What marketing tactics do you use today? Is it working for your business? Share your experience in the comments below.

References:

‍https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/stop-selling-start-storytelling-how-content-marketing-max-maccari

‍http://blog.corpnet.com/why-hard-sell-sales-tactics-are-doomed-to-fail/

‍http://www.quickmeme.com/memes/Business-Cat/page/3/

‍http://www.marcobraggio.com/content-marketing/