Marketing to Introverts: How to Attract and Keep the Reserved 50 Percent as Customers

By Marcia Yudkin

Increase your understanding of psychological diversity and its impact in business.

If you’re in business and love hanging out with other people as much as you can, it’s essential to recognize that not all customers think and feel as you do. Some 25 to 50 percent of the population are introverts, and overlooking this misunderstood category of people in marketing and sales can damage your income and your success.

In this groundbreaking report, learn about introverts’ attitudes, behavior, preferences and beliefs as they pertain to buying products and services and carrying on business relationships. Find out which stereotypes of introverts are myths and which correspond to actual tendencies.

Discover the implications of introvert leanings for lead generation, face-to-face selling, promotional copy, training, meetings, content marketing and more. Absorb the insights from four in-depth case studies of business professionals who have developed a deep sensitivity to the needs of their introvert clients and colleagues.

Author Marcia Yudkin, who has published well over a dozen books on business and communication, estimates that 70-75 percent of her clients over the decades have been introverts. Marketing to Introverts incorporates results of surveys and interviews she has conducted as well as her observations and quotes from experts.

After implementing the suggestions in this ebook, you’ll experience fewer interpersonal misunderstandings and conflicts. You’ll make better connections with a wider swath of people and enjoy more productive business relationships. You may expand your flexibility, empathy and offering options. And the payoff will include more relaxed and satisfied customers who stick with you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Marcia Yudkin
• Release date: Jul 31, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370838417

Marcia Yudkin

Creative marketing expert Marcia Yudkin has an unparalleled ability to find the right words for a message, an unusual angle to get folks to pay attention, and the promotional strategy that pays off handsomely for her clients.Her 16 books include 6 Steps to Free Publicity, Persuading on Paper, Web Site Marketing Makeover, Meatier Marketing Copy and Freelance Writing for Magazines & Newspapers, a Book of the Month Club selection.Marcia’s articles have appeared in hundreds of magazines, including the New York Times Magazine, TWA Ambassador, USAir Magazine and Business 2.0. For eight years running, she served as an official site reviewer for the Webby Awards and has helped judge the Inc. Magazine Small Business Web Awards.She has been featured in Success Magazine, Entrepreneur, Home Office Computing, Working Woman, Women in Business, dozens of newspapers throughout the world and four times in the Sunday Boston Globe, as well as on National Public Radio.Her clients range from grizzled entrepreneurs to nervous newly self-employed professionals, from software publishers and ecommerce startups to media companies, associations and independent educational programs.Marcia Yudkin holds three Ivy League degrees, including a Ph.D. in the humanities.

Book preview

Marketing to Introverts: How to Attract and Keep the Reserved 50 Percent as Customers

by Marcia Yudkin

Author, 6 Steps to Free Publicity and 16 other books

www.yudkin.com

Copyright 2017 Marcia Yudkin. All rights reserved.

Smashwords Edition

Contents

Introduction: Why This Approach?

Part I. Myths About Introverts

Part II. Introvert Preferences, Tendencies and Beliefs

Part III. Marketing to Introverts Case Studies

Part IV. Advice for Specific Situations

Part V. Resources

Introduction: Why This Approach?

What if you’ve inadvertently been failing to respect a good percentage of your potential customer base? If you have never stopped to consider the implications of personality in marketing and client interactions, chances are that this blind spot is costing you business.

Here we focus on one crucial, inborn personality dimension: extroversion versus introversion. Briefly, extroverts are folks who thrive on the hubbub of social interaction, while introverts charge up when they are alone or with one or two others whom they know well.

We live in a society that defines extroverts as the norm, with introverts as the odd or different ones. Even though it’s stressful for them, introverts are encouraged to behave like extroverts and to pretend that this is a reasonable expectation. Therefore, business owners, corporate decision makers, sales representatives, consultants, trainers and front-line customer service people are often insensitive to the distinctive needs, tendencies and responses of introverts.

There are four ways in which this insensitivity can be damaging your bottom line.

First, by acting as if the whole human race consists of extroverts, you could be turning off potential customers without realizing it. For example, extroverts tend to feel that bigger is better. Everyone would rather do business with the more popular company, for example. Anyone who earns more money or has more followers on social media is of course to be admired. Crowds are desirable and exciting. These attitudes may seem normal and obvious to you, but they are not universal.

A couple of years ago, I clicked to a promotional page for a blogging conference that showed an auditorium containing many hundreds of filled chairs, with each attendee no more than an indistinct dot. This photo of the previous year’s conference was meant to persuade me to sign up for it. But as an introvert, I had exactly the opposite reaction. I clicked away immediately from the promotional page and felt no interest in going. Regardless of any benefit to me of the event’s informational content, its apparent size and anonymity signaled that it would be overwhelming and alienating. They lost me - and others like me - at the start.

Second, your habitual modes of operation could be driving off people who did decide to do business with you. For instance, when my dentist outgrew his cozy, home-based office, he moved his practice to a building containing numerous bay windows. He obviously invested a lot of money in the new office’s design and construction, and it looked spiffy and modern. However, because of the bay windows, the walls between treatment rooms did not close them off completely. While having your teeth cleaned or discussing your cavities or gum problems with the dentist, patients in the next room would hear you, and you would clearly hear them being diagnosed or drilled.

Introverts often care more about privacy than the average person, and when I told the dentist how distressing it was to hear others and be heard in a medical setting, he argued that I was unreasonable to feel that way. You don’t know them, and they don’t know you, he said. So I don’t see the problem. Nevertheless, the lack of privacy bothered me intensely enough to get me investigating switching practitioners.

Third, you might unknowingly be putting up barriers that prevent some clients from experiencing the full benefit of your knowledge, talents or services. For instance, I’ve observed two different organizations that created an opportunity for their members to connect with important authorities at one of their events. They both ran their event as a free-for-all that rewarded those who could fight their way to the front of a crowd and demand attention, while others who shrank from the loud commotion and aggression of the setting got nothing at all.

In one case, what was at stake was the chance to pitch your work to a top literary agent, and in