Marketing.
It covers a huge range of practises today - both digital and traditional. But Marketing has also gone through a lot of changes over the last few decades, from aggressive advertising to collaborative solution making. What about today? Well, people expect a different relationship with brands than they once did. That means we need to ensure we add a human element into marketing. Here's how. People are powerful
Most businesses, brands and Marketers understand the power of the customer today.
They are well-informed, educated, empowered and have a lot of choice. With technology rapidly interconnecting global societies and our lives racing at a faster pace than ever before, today’s Marketing efforts can often fail to evolve in sync with such a speed. This has meant that our target audiences are becoming increasingly resistant and more elusive when exposed to ‘same-old’ practises. It's the brands that understand people desire human relationships in everything - including their purchasing and loyalty decisions - that produce the best marketing campaigns and earn the best results today.
So, what do brands need to do with their Marketing?
Marketing just because ‘we can’ is not a good enough reason.
Yelling “notice us!” more frequently and loudly to the masses is not good enough. Communication strategies solely based on numerical statistics and quantifiable metrics are not good enough. A lot of Marketing today has lost touch with its empathetic, artistic qualities and has forgotten the humanistic roots essential to connect with an audience. Today, all target markets are extremely well-informed, intensively focused and exceedingly time poor, leading them to become increasingly frustrated with blatant bombardment of intrusive, irrelevant and unengaging messages. This is not an emerging trend - it has become a bit of an unfortunate reality. What's the answer, then?
People first or Human marketing!
On the surface, this doesn’t seem ground-breaking - but therein lies the truth of our issue: Marketers think we know this, but we can often lose touch when it comes to execution. Marketing evolution theory states that our focus has moved from production, to product, then selling, marketing and finally to societal marketing. I believe we now need to shift forward to the next stage, which I have coined as Empathetic Marketing.
This means not simply scoping out the customer and surrounding society alone and throwing a blanket over it all, but to delve deeper to really connect and truly understand a person's true priorities and what parts of their environments actually have relevant meaning to them.
This is completely possible now too, given advancement in technology: it is us as Marketers that need to catch up. Our products and Marketing efforts must actually matter to people, not bombard them because we now have access to more channels than ever before. We need to conduct our efforts to truly thrill by putting ourselves utterly in the customer’s shoes, rather than spam the market and hope in the statistics that tell us a handful may care: this is now a zero-sum game.
What is Empathetic Marketing?
Empathetic marketing is the development of a strategy which focuses on catering to the human person.
These modern methods of marketing are now far more effective and people-friendly. For example:
These examples demonstrate the approach of empathetic marketing in that they treat customers as humans with individuality, not just as consumers with money to be extracted. The distinctive feature of empathetic marketing is that it encourages all marketing efforts to offer people value, and not just the final product itself. By offering information and interesting content rather than pretty pictures of the product with a price tag, it’s more catered to their satisfaction at all touch points.
People expect more than noisy, forceful messages.
They want to be catered to, appreciated, wooed and persuaded. They distrust forceful messaging, and look to other sources they deem as more trustworthy.
These other sources are essentially other types of marketing executions (for example, blogs, podcasts, etc), so it’s, therefore, crucial for an organisation to provide these avenues, facilitate them or at least participate. However, this doesn't mean that you can use marketing to manipulate them in newer, subtler ways, as that's not true. Today, people are highly educated and informed, and are extremely judgemental about these channels, so effective marketing requires high-quality efforts. Poor executions and uninspired campaigns will surely fail. Today’s marketing channels are new, innovative, fluid and highly digital, and so marketing efforts must reflect this, offering the consumer engagement, well-researched information and interactive advice. The P that the old Marketing Mix forgot was People.
Today, people are powerful influences who discern and care and want and choose. Because they can.
In a modern world with unlimited choice, Marketers need to wake up and refocus on ensuring the right people care, and this book is the way to realign and reacquaint our perspective with the progressive and individualistic humans we hope to engage every day. How Can Melotti Media Help You?
To engage your customer and achieve ongoing business success today, you need a powerful message, quality copywriting and consistent content. However, this is easier said than done.
Perhaps you’re time poor and spread thin, or writing may not be your expertise. So, let us take care of your message marketing, copywriting and content marketing needs! For more information or to speak to a quality marketing copywriter to get the results your business deserves, contact me now at chris@melottimedia.com.au. Our Message Marketing services can sharpen your words into achieve your goals, today. Christopher Melotti Melotti Media | Copywriting & Message Marketing Bureau www.melottimedia.com.au Let's chatSubscribe to our FREE Content Marketing ShotsClick here to view our FAQ page for all you need to know |
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