The art of persuasive engagement
How to engage your target audience without preaching to them + real world examples.
Early in my career, a CMO I worked for asked the marketing team what the #1 job of marketing was. We all came up with different answers, and none of them were what he wanted to hear. He walked up to the whiteboard and wrote one word—persuasion. Our job as marketers is to persuade the customer to engage.
When I hear a founder say, “We need to educate our audience about our product,” I roll my eyes. No one wants to “study” your product or service, and very few will have the time or inclination. That doesn’t mean they are not curious and interested. However, for many startups, customer education is bombarding their audience with endless facts and data.
In this post, I discuss how we can persuade and engage our audience without preaching to them or talking down to them from our high perches of knowledge.
Persuasion is the art of getting people to do something they wouldn’t ordinarily do if you didn’t ask. Aristotle
Persuasive engagement vs. education
The art of persuasion is not about convincing people to do something. It’s about understanding what they already want to do and helping them understand how your product or service aligns with those needs and desires. Good persuasive marketing is:
Emotional connection: We are ultimately irrational beings. Most of our decisions, even rational ones, like buying software, have some emotional anchoring in our fears, pains, needs, and desires. Good persuasive customer engagement starts with forming an emotional connection with your audience. Do your audience feel like you get them? Do you understand them and empathize with their needs and desires?
Behavior-driven: To persuade your target audience, you must first understand their needs and behavior. Good persuasive engagement requires you to understand your target segments’ behaviors, including what they use today, how they make decisions, their fears and worries, and how they compensate for that.
Belief systems: Your customer operates from a certain frame of mind. They already have certain opinions and ideas that are informed by a set of beliefs. For example, they may believe that fast usually means expensive, or zero fees mean some hidden charges elsewhere. Whatever it may be, you must understand these belief systems and talk to them from that frame of mind.
Why customer education fails
The main reason customer education fails is the mindset from which it is approached. The minute you think you need to educate your customers, you assume that they don’t know anything or, worse, that they are stupid, stuck in their ways, and not sophisticated. Terrible place to begin!
Educating anyone from this place of judgment usually fails because it lacks two key ingredients necessary for success: curiosity and empathy.
Most customer education that I see startups do have the following problems:
Too much: Too much information with too much jargon spewed too fast. It’s driven by product-first thinking instead of customer-first thinking.
Assumes prior knowledge: Founders who are deeply entrenched in the space often inadvertently assume prior knowledge of the technology or products. What founders often miss is knowledge of the business, which the customer has plenty of.
Boring and contextless: So many startups simply add a ton of FAQs, documentation, and tech specs to the site and think they are done. Often, the content is super dry and dull to navigate and, more importantly, lacks context for the customer’s specific business model.
Best examples of persuasive audience engagement
I’m sharing two examples below to showcase what best-in-class persuasive audience engagement looks like.
Hugging Face
Hugging Face launched before AI hit a feverish frenzy. Founded in 2016, Hugging Face initially gained recognition for creating a conversational AI chatbot. However, they soon shifted focus to developing cutting-edge tools and resources for the NLP community, establishing themselves as a leader in the AI and machine learning space by committing to openness, collaboration, and accessibility.
Hugging face model hub
Hugging Face created the Model Hub to democratize access to state-of-the-art machine learning models. The goal was to create a collaborative space that accelerates research and application in NLP by making it easy for anyone to find, share, and deeply cutting-edge models for various NLP tasks.
Accessibility: The Model Hub makes it easy for developers and researchers to access pre-trained models without the need for extensive resources or infrastructure.
Collaboration: It fosters a collaborative community where users can contribute their models and improvements, driving innovation and progress in the field.
Ease of Use: The hub provides tools for easy integration and deployment, reducing the barrier to entry for using advanced NLP models in practical applications.
The Model Hub has had a transformative impact on the NLP community. It has become a go-to resource for practitioners and researchers, facilitating rapid experimentation and deployment. The hub has also seen widespread adoption across various industries, showcasing its versatility and effectiveness.
Rather than talking at you, Hugging Face is talking with you. By creating a safe place where NLP enthusiasts can actively engage, share, contribute, and learn, Hugging Face is also learning, growing, and leveraging the community’s contributions to improve its products and services.
Too Good To Go
Too Good To Go’s mission is to reduce food waste by connecting consumers with surplus food from restaurants, cafes, and grocery stores. Did you know that a staggering 40% of the food that we produce globally goes to waste? 🤯 Their vision is a world without food waste, aiming to make food consumption more sustainable and environmentally friendly.
How it works: Restaurants can minimize food waste by selling surplus food that would otherwise go to waste on the Too Good To Go app. Users can see which grab bag is available near them (usually for a substantial discount), reserve it via. the app, and pick it up.
Gamified impact tracking and recipes
One of the things that their app does well is impact tracking. The app helps the users see how much food waste they’ve saved and the corresponding reduction in carbon footprint. This tangible way to engage the customer promotes a certain behavior. Their blogs, videos, and webinars about the impact of food waste and sustainable practices also help educate and inspire users.
Their blog also provides recipes to turn food waste and leftovers into a delicious meal!
Two key takeaways
Form an emotional connection with your customer by aligning your purpose with their aims and desires.
Persuade them by engaging in action. Engagement is a two-way street; education is often a one-way street.