POV

How well do you understand your customers? Are you making a conscious effort to connect with your teams as people? Is the whole business on the marketing journey with you?

At its core, marketing has to be a business-to-human exercise. It shouldn’t be a binary choice between B2B or B2C practices - we need to focus on creating connections with people. Focusing on this connection and really tuning into our customers' needs and desires is the difference between having a passive customer, and a loyal follower that trusts in the brand.

Creating that emotional connection is crucial for generating more value from customers, with those who are ‘emotionally connected’ generating 52% more annual value than one who is just ‘highly satisfied’. Embracing storytelling, personalization, transparency and empathy is key for creating meaningful bonds with customers that engage, satisfy and connect on a human level.

At the same time, creating a human connection with your teams and the wider business is just as important. They are usually our best and biggest advocates. So, it’s crucial to connect with them on a human level, show them kindness, and bring them along on the brand journey.

The Power of Listening

For years, we’ve seen a binary distinction between B2B and B2C in marketing. However, fundamentally, all businesses are human enterprises. For the customer, it is about the individual just as much as the business decision. It is estimated that 80% of B2B buyers expect a B2C experience.

Decisions in business are often driven by various people, people with their own beliefs - and sometimes biases. To successfully influence customer behaviour, marketers need to learn how to understand these beliefs and biases. And the only way to do that is by listening and talking.

Talk to your customers, listen to them and take time to get to know them. To understand their beliefs, pain points, what solutions they are looking for to relieve those pain points and how you can help them. You can get this insight from your sales team who speak to customers and prospects constantly, or from customers directly. What’s crucial is that this information is shared with those throughout the sales funnel - from the sales team who collect the insight, all the way to the marketing and sales leaders in the business.

Businesses that take the time to listen to their customers and humanize the brand-customer relationship are finding that it not only drives engagement and growth, but that it’s vital to cut through the noise in our technology-saturated world. After all, business people are ‘people’, and business decisions are made by people. So why don’t we treat them as such when communicating with them?

Listening to your customers and prospects isn’t just powerful for planning your marketing activity, it’s also the best tool you can use to measure success. Your sales and support team can be helpful in gathering this insight by keeping in regular contact with customers to understand what’s going well, or finding out how prospects came about the business and made their decision to work with you. That way, whenever you’re looking to roll out a new campaign, you can use that firsthand knowledge, experience and opinion as the foundation for planning.

That doesn’t necessarily mean everything lands perfectly, but that’s why constant measurement is so crucial. And often, the campaigns that don’t perform well, teach us the most.

Creating a Purpose-Led Brand

A key factor in creating a human connection with customers is for businesses to have a clear purpose. If customers and prospects understand what you stand for, and resonate with that, they are more likely to feel connected with you on an emotional level. Equally, your teams perform best when driven by a single purpose that resonates with them.

In fact, the BrandZ Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands ranking shows that of the 87 brands evaluated in both 2008 and 2018, brands in the top third for brand purpose grew 212% in value, compared to 77% growth for those in the lowest-scoring third. In addition, almost two-thirds of millennials and centennials, who are fast becoming the economic engine, prefer to work with “brands that have a point of view and stand for something”.

So, how do you go about expressing that purpose in your brand? It’s important to go back to basics, and re-examine what it is the business stands for, how it should be presented, what is said, how it is said, and how the business behaves.     At all stages of creating a purpose-led brand, you need to engage the whole business. People are the force of change in any environment, and so it’s crucial your wider team is on board and resonates with your purpose, and each one has a part to play in defining it.

This can be achieved by partnering with key executives within the business, such as the Chief People Officer or the Chief Commercial Officer, for example, who alongside the CMO also have a firm finger on the pulse of what matters to your customers and teams.

A brand is only ever as good as the people who bring it to life, and so it’s vital that you bring people along the journey, manage change and drive engagement in the brand and business in partnership with executives and key stakeholders.

All of this will help to inform a purpose-driven marketing strategy that connects with customers and in turn, drives growth.

Connect on a Human Level

As marketing leaders, connecting on a human level isn’t just about our customers and prospects. It extends to our own teams too.

Engaging our teams doesn’t stop with just bringing them on the brand journey with us. We need to create an environment of empowerment, support and respect, and embrace kindness. Kindness is one of those hidden gems that we rarely talk about as leaders, but it’s something we should strive to use as often as possible. Focusing on kindness doesn’t mean we won’t challenge each other, it just means we’ll make a conscious effort to remember that there is another person at the end of that email, phone call, message, or whatever it is, and treat them with respect and understanding.

Not only understanding and accepting, but embracing and utilizing diversity in our teams is also crucial for marketing success. CMOs and marketing leaders should focus on creating more diverse teams that bring about a wealth of new ideas and experiences. It’s more than a HR decision, it’s a business decision. Marketing to a diverse audience requires a diverse team – this will maximise efficiency and effectiveness of any campaign or marketing activity.

True marketing success is possible when two factors work hand-in-hand. One, an internal team with diverse perspectives and experience which lives and breathes the brand purpose, with a leader who equally values listening and kindness. Two, a business that takes a human-centric approach, and keeps the needs, desires and beliefs of customers at the heart of all marketing activities.

The result? A business full of advocates who share your business story and a customer base, who are understood, valued, and connected to the business. That’s the true power of B2H marketing.