Will technology solve all your marketing problems? If you believe the hype you can simply buy the right tech stack, automate the crap out of everything and sit back and wait for the leads to roll in.
Heck, sprinkle in a bit of AI and you don’t even have to create the content that feeds your lead gen engine. Happy days!
Your business growth ambitions can now be solved through procurement.
OK, you smell a rat.
It can’t be that simple. So what’s missing?
Make human connections
The best marketing – by which I mean the stuff that actually works – succeeds through making human connections.
John Caples is one of the most successful direct response copywriters of all time. For him, ‘finding the right appeal’ was critical. That’s what makes or breaks an advert or campaign.
It isn’t about ad spend, placement or even clever copywriting. It’s all about identifying a pitch that connects with a target market at a human level.
This is as true for B2B marketing as it is for selling soap powder.
Positioning is all about customers
This leads into how you position your product, service or brand.
Positioning can be a simple matter of choice based on how you assess market opportunities. But be wary of betting the farm on data, as I’ll explain in a bit.
David Ogilvy gives the example of Dove soap. According to him, exactly the same product could have been marketed as a product for men with dirty hands. Instead the brand targeted women with dry skin – with huge success.
If he’d tried to target everyone, it would have been just another soap bar among dozens of alternatives on the shelf.
Positioning a product specifically for women with dry skin means knowing what that feels like and capturing the alternative in an imaginative way.
OK, you sell phone systems, not soap. But who to exactly?
How can you connect (forgive the pun) to the specific human needs, problems and anxieties of your chosen market segment?
Good luck finding the right marketing appeal unless you’re really connected to your ideal customer.
Empathy
Empathy is the key to making connections and building a successful marketing message.
It’s unlikely that you’ll understand your target customer without a lot of spadework. The more you know about their everyday reality, the language they use and how they really make (or avoid) decisions, the more you can empathise.
You could simply state that you tailor solutions to the needs of each customer (many B2B businesses do exactly this). Or you could show that you know what those needs are and that you have trustworthy solutions.
I think you can guess which approach would be more likely to land.
Make your marketing a perfect fit for the customers you want. Aim to do this at the most human level possible.
It’s another example of why your product or service isn’t the story you need to tell.
Beyond data
We live in a world swamped with data. If only we can master the data and draw the right insights we’ll have certainty.
Except, we won’t.
Data is great for telling you what’s happened. What will happen is almost anyone’s guess. How many uber-confident business strategies were derailed by a simple organism called Covid-19?
Steve Jobs didn’t have any data to tell him how successful smartphones would become. There was also no way of knowing how social media, messaging and other apps would proliferate to cement these devices well and truly into our everyday lives.
What there was, however, was an understanding of how people used existing devices and the frustrations and missed opportunities they created.
If Apple had relied on data rather than intuition (a very human quality), the i-Phone would never have come into existence. Somebody else would have been the pioneer and the big winner.
If your tech stack miraculously develops the qualities of curiosity, empathy and creativity, and can synthesize human experience, it might just do the job of setting and executing your marketing strategy.
Until it does, maybe put more trust in humanity and human qualities.