Digital marketing has become an affordable and effective way to market your brand. Unfortunately, it’s easy to lose your perspective in social media and blogs and email blasts. While you can carefully curate your online presence, marketing messages can get overwhelmed in notifications, news feeds, and updates.
While this is unfortunate, no business that hopes to evolve can ignore the potential of digital marketing. Whether we understand it or not, the world has become a digital consumer, meaning not even the smallest business can afford to disregard the importance of connecting online. With a single upload, business has extended their commercial potential, reaching new customers and markets. But this is alongside consumers discovering more junk mail flooding their accounts, more abandoned shopping carts and, worse, knowing there are a kabillion places to find the exact same products and services.
Putting a Face on Your Brand
They may love their devices, but customers still appreciate an authentic and personalized experience. If a business wants to deploy digital marketing, they need to manage one of the most critical components of their campaigns and that’s to maintain a human relationship between their brand and the customer. As a business, you have to recall a day when a name and a brand meant something to a customer.
So, how do you bring more humanity into your digital marketing?
Start with Persona Based Targeting
Persona-based targeting begins by grouping your customer base by shared interests and commonalities. This gives your business the opportunity to better personalize messaging. Despite their sophistication, customers still want emotional connections. They appreciate brands that make the effort. Persona-based targeting helps you develop marketing lists, design effective conversion ads, manage compelling website content and tailor email campaigning to different audiences.
Maintaining Face on Facebook
For all-important social media interaction, the challenge to remain human can be great. Social media marketing is often coordinated and organized like a social calendar and many forget its effectiveness is dependent on active participation. This can be difficult outside of having a team devoted solely to the endeavor. Still, we have to find a way to manage personal messaging in social communities. Find a balanced approach to content categories and targeting specific customer segments. It might be good to do a little research and see where groups and organizations are already segmented in social media communities with customers you want to reach. There is tech that can automate the process while still allowing the business to remain human through compelling and original content.
Support Channel Partners
Customers are not the only entity that may require a human approach to digital marketing. If you have channel partners, they could be looking for guidance and support. We often assume these operatives already know what to do and how to use programs from the onset. This can be a risky assumption. Channel partners may be looking for personalized support. See what guidance they may need and manage communications to ensure everyone is always on the same page.
Create Human Experiences
The Internet gives us greater opportunity to exchange information, but it’s become so easy we often forget to replicate the human experience. Real world interactions engage visual and emotional cues. Since that can be difficult to duplicate through a keyboard, our safest bet is to rely on the best aspects of social contact.
- Let your customers know their opinions are respected and want to be heard
- Take the time to create strong relationships
- Understand the frailty of trust and how it has to be earned
- Give customers the opportunity to voice their concerns, be it through email, chat, social pages, etc.
- Use polls and surveys to get better views of what your customers are thinking and want
- Use incentives, discounts, and programs to reward loyalty
Conclusion
From getting leads to good reviews and referrals, your digital marketing campaigns will be vital to success. While we cannot duplicate the one-on-one contact with the real world on the Internet, we can create a sense of empathy and understanding in our digital media campaigns. The human approach is living digitally using the same mutually beneficial social contracts from the real world.