Have you thought about how you can humanize your marketing?
Why do we need to be more human-centered? What is human-centered marketing?Being human-centered feels like this to customers
This post is going to focus on why you may want to reconsider your current marketing approach and 4 ways you can practice human-centered marketing.
Why do we need to be more human-centered?
We have more marketing to sales technology to connect with customers today, but they’re tuning us out.
Why? Because marketers and sellers are using technology in a way that is creating barriers to real customer connection.
For example, I was talking with a VP of Marketing recently about helping their SDR team get better results with empathy.
We looked at the SDR team’s activities and saw her team was sending a significant number of emails to targeted accounts.
When she saw the data, she talked about also getting a “ton of cold-emails” and how she felt like every technology provider put her on their ABM hitlist.
She said, “I feel like someone painted a target on my name when I got promoted.”
And then said, “I delete them all… they all seem to copy each other’s approach.”
The irony wasn’t lost that her own SDR team was doing the same exact thing to their potential customers.
What is human-centered marketing?
Human-centered marketing requires empathy because it puts customer experience at the center of all our marketing and sales efforts. It begins with understanding our customers’ perspective, desires, and motivations, so we’re relating to them as humans and not objects we’re trying to convert.
He said, “We are not thinking machines that feel; rather, we are feeling machines that think.”
When you are marketing to people, you’re trying to get them to do something or buy something you want. That’s object-based marketing. But when you’re marketing for people, you’re advocating for them. You’re focused on helping them get what they want. That’s human-centered marketing.
[click_to_tweet tweet=”Marketing isn’t something you do to people. It’s something you do for people. That’s human-centered marketing #h2h #b2bmarketing” quote=”Marketing isn’t something you do to people. It’s something you do for people. That’s human-centered marketing”]
Being human-centered feels like this to customers
As our marketing technology, machine learning, and tools become increasingly smarter, so do our customers.
Customers know authentic- sincere – communication from the scaled messages we send. They feel it.
Your customers know what good marketing really feels like. They also sense when you’re sending them scaled or generalized messages.
Let’s look at email campaigns.
You may be saying, people write the email templates.
The email (even if it’s well written) and personalized in a few places, still often doesn’t feel right.
Why? Because it’s scaled. The promise of technology to deliver personalization at scale requires us to embrace the human part first.
But it’s easy to forget that when we sit at our desks. Or when we try to think like our customers.
