Human Marketing
A Human Scale Challenge Demands A Human Focused Solution
That permeates to all aspects of business today.
Now is the time to be true to your brand promise and adopt Human Marketing.
We’ll show you how.
Authenticity, Empathy, Advocacy
Action #1
Nurture Your Relationships
- Reach out if you have not already
- Let them know how and if the coronavirus is affecting your company and what actions you are taking
- Let customers know what you are doing for them, this is a good time to help in real ways
- Ask them how it’s impacting them
- Regular outreach (vs. one-off) is important to ensure brand trust and loyalty
- Put yourself in their shoes
- Remember Human Marketing is about authenticity, empathy, advocacy
Action #2
Humanize Your Digital
- Connect, Listen, Support
- Now is the time to use stories, anecdotes, humor, etc.
- Show your company’s personality
- Share your activities and progress
- Human-focused Content
- Thought leadership – inspiring, insightful
- Persuasive – entertaining, educational
- Storytelling – engaging
- Descriptive – to the point
- Human-Focused Delivery
- It’s not about the format/channel but your “voice”
- Have a conversation
- If you’re having fun, they’re having fun
Action #3
Cultivate Your Community
- Your Community is
- A big tent
- Your sales funnel
- Community attributes that matter
- Strength: passion, connectedness, trust
- Size of community is important but secondary
- Define and explicitly cater to member categories
- Grow community
- Encourage participation via online forums, meet-ups, events
- Online courses, forums, user tips, demos, tutorials, etc.
- Inspirational content
- Share resources, how-to’s, trends/opinions, etc.
Resources
Our Advice
Remember: human-scale challenges demand human-focused solutions.
Look for, and celebrate, and share the many good things that are happening everywhere. Good people doing good, selflessly. They have our admiration and gratitude.
1) We see demand and supply shock in many areas but also new activity in some others. Ability to pivot can be critical.
2) If you can weather the storm, now is the time to strengthen your brand and your community.
3) Human-scale problems demand human-centric solutions. That has to show across all business decisions.
Corona-fatigue is starting and will accelerate, so next week is a good time to start covering other topics.
Focus on insights, learnings, and simplifying the complex, entertain and educate, have fun so your audience can have fun, and go a level deeper and start actually sharing some of your secret sauce, not just tease the audience.
Working from home and managing teams remotely require more explicitness, active listening, and separate 1-1 calls to go over things and make sure there is mutual clarity.
Being cooped up for days can cause people to get impatient. You have to remove stress and make your conversations something people look forward to.
- Allocate some time for personal updates
- Communicate with empathy, show your aim is mutual success and with appreciation of realities
- Listen not just to understand but to satisfy others that you heard them
- Re-state what you heard and ask if you understood the point, recognizing that the exchange may cause the speaker to come up with a better point. That’s a good thing.
- Avoid loaded words, be super clear in your own mind what point you are trying to make
- Take turns talking, let people get enough air time so they can finish their thoughts
- Be nice!
Webinars
Coronavirus and its Impact on Marketing
As face-to-face activities disappear, digital marketing must become more human. In this webinar we discuss how human-scale challenges demand human-centric solutions, why a “Human Marketing” approach will be the norm, and four actions you can take now to make sure your marketing remains effective.
How to Create a Podcast Series
Continuing with our Human Marketing series of webinars, we cover podcasts, an important part of the marketing mix. Join Dan Olds and Shahin Khan on this on-demand webinar to hear what they’ve learned about effective podcasting after 500+ episodes and thousands of listeners.
Build and Strengthen Your Online Community
A healthy online community is critical for a successful marketing strategy during this time of transformation. But, how do you build, grow, and engage community in an age of physical distancing? In this OrionX webinar, Celia Chase and special guest Linda Crowe of IBM share best practices for creating a thriving community.
Competitive Intelligence: Strategy to Organization
In part one of this webinar series, we show you how to navigate organizational issues to build a trusted Competitive Intelligence function. We discuss various organizational models, key competitive processes, and the big rules that govern a successful effort.
Customer Sentiment Surveys: The Power of Knowing
OrionX survey expert Dan Olds discusses how survey-based research can help you get a deeper understanding of your markets and customers, and how to design, analyze, and interpret the information. If you’ve ever wanted to know what your customers are thinking or how big your market is, then periodic surveys are for you.
Competitive Intelligence: Organization to Intelligence
Collecting and transforming data into actionable competitive intelligence (CI) is a difficult phase of CI, so having a few proven processes can really help. In this part, you will learn analytical methods to scrutinize the raw data along with the ability to synthesize this data into a relevant and compelling narrative.
Watch the recording now.
Competitive Intelligence: Intelligence to Action
In part three of this webinar series, you will learn the basic principles of how to turn competitive data/research into actionable sales resources. Watch the recording now.
Presentations
Please contact us for a copy of the slide deck for any of the webinars.
Useful links
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Data
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Examples
- Lear: Safe Work Playbook Download in Word format
- Dove: “Courage is Beautiful” ad
- Intel: “Meet the Maker” Series
- Bottomline Technologies (computer security)
- How Airbnb and Apple build their brands with storytelling marketing
- 7 Examples of Storytelling Content You Can Use in Your Marketing Campaigns
- 5 Examples of Brilliant Online Brand Communities
- Geico: Commercials
- VW: Classic ads
- BMW: “The Hire” short films
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Advice
- New Research Identifies 8 Ways Marketing Is Changing Due To Covid-19. The number 1 finding is the human aspect coming to the forefront.
- Virtual Conferences on the Rise – How to Get the Most Out of Your Next Virtual Conference
- Informing the conversation on racial bias and social injustice
- Growing market share is easier in a recession than a boom: Here’s how to do it
- Oldie but goodie! This is a good short document despite being old and focused on B2C: A Marketing Guide: What to do in a Recession
- Why You Should Create An Online Brand Community
- Silicon Valley’s Self Fulfilling Prophecy Of Mediocre Marketing, How One of Tech’s Most Persistent Biases Obliterates Value Everywhere It Goes
- Adapting to more digital and social ways of being