How To Humanize Your Technology Marketing
The world is becoming more digitized by the day, and marketing is no exception. Marketing technology is king and includes artificial intelligence, customer relationship management (CRM) software, data management platforms, and social media.
Technology has revolutionized the way companies serve their customers and has allowed them to streamline sales processes and reduce labor costs. Digitalization has its advantages. But in this race to embrace tech, a key element is being overlooked: empathy. Consumers still crave personal attention and validation while demanding better and faster service. To that end, companies must humanize marketing while still reaping technology’s many benefits.
Human-based Marketing
Humanizing marketing may seem like a return to the good old days when consumers had to interact with a person to complete their transactions. That’s not the goal. Instead, humanizing marketing means keeping the channels of human communication open in addition to providing the advantages of marketing technology.
The needs of the customer must always come first. Many people still want options for interacting with a human being even if they’re buying online. In recent years, customers have come to prefer live chat (41%) over phone contacts and emails. Live chat’s immediacy offers more satisfying customer care than AI chatboxes or seemingly endless wait times for humans with spotty cell phone connections. This service can be considered a near-perfect blend of technology and human-based marketing.
However, human-based marketing is more than just giving clients the choice to interact with a person instead of a bot. Human-based marketing means empathizing with clients and customers. That means companies need to care about them, be truly interested in what they want, and fully appreciate their experiences and challenges. Technology has encouraged businesses to see clients as data points and not as individuals. Fortunately, they can take some relatively simple steps to reverse this perception.
Implementing Human-based Marketing
An AI-powered chat box is certainly not enough to satisfy the clientele. Companies need to dig a little deeper. Here are three ways to humanize marketing.
In-Person Feedback
Not surprisingly, humanizing your marketing means actually seeing more people in person. When designing a marketing plan, companies may send surveys to consumers asking for their feedback on their services. These surveys have value, but nothing beats one-on-one time with real clients to learn what they really want and need.
Businesses should make it a practice to solicit opinions from consumers in person, when possible, so they can better understand how consumers feel by bringing them into the office and meeting with them face to face.
Sophisticated Chatbots
Today’s consumers demand excellent customer service, but they also want it to be fast and convenient. The right technology can help a customer service department direct its assistance to those who need personal attention instead of to those who do not.
Certain chatbots can determine those customers who are most likely to buy and can direct them to live representatives. Those contacts who only want general information can be completely serviced by the bot. Those who want to speak with a person will automatically be connected, another excellent way to humanize your marketing.
Use People to Spread the Word
People still trust people more than corporations and general brand messages. When employees and current customers share a company’s marketing efforts via social media or in person, the message is considered more authentic.
To use this type of “brand advocacy,” companies need to provide ways to spark online conversations about their brands. These efforts may include creating interactive content, such as blog posts with a comment area, surveys, or open questions on social media They should also keep customers engaged and encourage social sharing and writing product reviews. Humanizing your marketing means keeping the focus on human interaction but still using technology in a thoughtful, effective way.
Final Thoughts
“Humanize your marketing!” may sound like an odd motto, but it reveals a disturbing reality: marketing has become less people-oriented in many ways, despite the absolute necessity of reaching target audiences. At its best, marketing technology offers consumers a frictionless experience. At its worst, it makes consumers feel isolated and unheard.
People have more opportunities to communicate than ever before, but their in-person interactions have often dwindled, particularly in commerce. Learning to humanize marketing simply means keeping the focus on the individual, designing processes that honor their needs and concerns, and offering them the necessary interaction with company representatives.
