Last week I wrote about Joe Turnbull and his 5 ways to smash video marketing in 2022. From his presentation at the S’Peaky Digital Marketing meet up.
This week i’m reflecting back to the meet-up to highlight another wonderful speaker.
I have heard about Belinda Shipp through some of my own clients. Who have worked with Belinda on their own branding and I’ve admired from a far.
Belinda runs The Cornish Marketing Consultancy and talked about human to human marketing. She talked about the human Psychology behind marketing in her talk ‘The Human Marketing System.
The Human Marketing System
Belinda started by highlighting that most businesses waste a huge amount of money working on marketing that fails.
To avoid your marketing failing. You need to think people first. People only buy when your message connects with peoples hearts and minds.
If you paralize your potential customer with too many options. You risk sending them down a path of fear and indecision and then they buy nothing!
As marketing professionals, Belinda suggests It’s time to change the marketing narrative.
Marketing often talks about targets. People aren’t people anymore. They are customers they are targets. When you think of a target, you might think of a shooting range or a bow and arrow with a target on your back! Not the nicest way of depicting someone you’d like to become your customer.
When we talk about a conversion. We are talking about a person as a conversion. As a metric, as a statistic and its all a bit creepy and icky. As marketers we have lost the human connection to our customers.
The idea behind marketing is to build trust and to talk to people as a person not just a target or a conversion.
Ideally you want to help people to find the solutions to their problems and guide them in the right direction of the solution.
At the end of every piece of communication between your brand and your potential customer there is a real person. We need to remember this and put it front and centre of all the marketing that we do.
Head
Remember, every customer has a brain. If we put human Psychology at the heart of all marketing. It will work better.
Belinda blew me away with these stats. The human brain equates to only 2% of the weight of your whole body. Yet it uses 20% of the bodies energy to function. Put simply, to use your brain you burn calories.
When you translate calorie burn into marketing. The easier our message is to understand, the less calories your customer burns digesting the message. The easier it is for our potential customer. The more the marketing resonates with the customer and the more successful your marketing will be.
Make your message really clear and simple for maximum success. Belinda quotes Don miller, “if you confuse you lose”.
Belinda highlighted as consumers. We don’t buy the best product on the market. We buy the one that’s easiest to understand that resonates with us.
When Apple launched the iPod over 20 years ago. There were already lot of MP3 players on the market. Was iPod they the best product? Maybe? Maybe not? But they made their marketing and advertising so clear and simple that people bought into their brand. There tag line was ‘iPod; A thousand songs in your pocket’ People didn’t yet understand MP3 players and digital music so take up on other MP3’s was slow. But people understood the simplicity of a thousand songs on a thing in heir pocket.
Humans are emotional beings and our hearts rule our heads. If you appeal to your customers hearts and create emotional connections. You’ll earn their loyalty forever. A great example of this is the hugely emotional John Lewis adverts that have us all shedding a little tear every year.
Belinda reminds us that ‘Me marketing’ is really boring! No body likes that person that goes on and on about themselves and nothing else. Brands that talk about themselves all the time are also really boring.
When we talk about our customers and put them at the heart of marketing. When we discuss that they have a problem that they need to solve. We show that our brand understands their problem. You begin to grow empathy and rapport with the customer. If you solve the problem and the pain it makes the customer feel. They will have gratitude to you and your brand for solving their issue.
Help your customer to visualise success. If you paint the picture of what success looks looks like for your customer. They are more likely to buy into the product that you are promoting.
As humans we don’t like being lonely. We like to find our tribe and we have a desire to belong with other human beings. You don’t buy ‘who gives a crap’ toilet paper as you have a desire to buy bamboo toilet paper. You buy because you want to help the planet and care about the environment. You buy to become a part of a community, a movement that depicts who you are.
There are only ever two reasons to buy something, to move towards and to move away from something.
Our heads give our hearts the permission to buy, if you can master the art of answering the questions in your customers minds. You have the key to success.
We need to do the hard work for our customers and do the thinking so that they don’t have to! If you make it hard for them to buy they won’t. Remember, 20% of the bodies calories are exerted using the brain. So make it easy for your customers by allowing a conversion with as little brain power as possible.
Feet
If you don’t show your customers the way forward, and give them the path to walk, they won’t move towards a purchase. If you don’t give your customer a call to action, they won’t perform the action.
We need to see or hear a message at least 7 times before we take action!
Make the action that you want them to take really obvious to avoid losing sales.
If you are confident in the product you are offering you need to be confident in asking them to take action.
It’s not our customers job to remember us. It’s up to us to remember them.
The job of a marketer isn’t to make the sale. Its’ to nurture the relationship and build the trust. Show value and show you care to generate trust.
Your business needs to be seen and heard. Attract attention with messages and visuals that encourage them to stop, read, and listen.
Be on the channels where your customers are. You don’t need to be on every channel. Just be on the channel where you are good, and where your customers are. If you’re a very visual ecommerce brand. Then Instagram might be your sweet spot to be. Whereas Linkedin might be a hard slog trying to cut through professional matters and push your product.
Images are important. Accountants that show pictures of their building are a pet hate of Belindas’ and got the audience laughing. You are not selling your building. By showing people doing accountancy things, real people, calculators, computers, smiley faces. It helps your potential customers visualise you working with the service and what you are buying into.
Text – The first thing a customer doesn’t do, is read!
Customers don’t read as they don’t want to read content that doesn’t work for them. They aren’t going to burn precious calories reading something that doesn’t resonate with them. They look at headlines, bullet points and they skim read. They don’t read big blocks of text. Make text easy to digest. Nobody has time to read long blocks of text or watch long videos. Things need to be 3 – 4 seconds long so break your messages down.
We are not just marketing to humans! It’s acting like a human to by having two way conversations. Rather than just putting a message out there and advertising. Create a two way conversation and build engagement.
If you capture the hearts and minds. Customers will take action.
Always share what you know to build trust of your brand. Often people have a view that if you want access to knowledge you have to pay for it. Whereas constantly sharing your knowledge for free shows you are trustworthy. It shows you are helping people. And you are ready to help those new customers that come on board too.
It’s often easy to think that B2C and selling a product is easier that B2B. That there is no shiny product to promote. However, even in b2b the shiny bit is the information and resources that you can share.
I literally wanted to give a massive whoop whoop and a high five to Belinda for talking such straight forward advise.
It was so refreshing to hear a talk that spoke about customers being people. Putting people first and helping them. So many events that I have attended push the latest technologies. The latest tactics, the latest data and processes. It was so interesting to pull it all back and think about the reason we are all doing our jobs in the first place and put people first.