Market Like a Human
What is it like to find yourself cold or hot or otherwise in need of contractor services for your home, and you place a call to your company for an appointment? Do you feel as if your call is welcome, and you’ll get prompt attention?
What is it like to have someone on your team show up at your home? How comfortable would you be with the diagnosis and solution your technician recommends, with the estimate that is offered and with the timeliness of the repair or installation?
How satisfied are you when the technician leaves the home? Do you feel that you got your money’s worth and that this is a team you’ll call again?
Let this be a reminder of the human equation of what we do.
Even in the digital platforms that contractors rely on to generate leads, it’s still a people-to-people world. So, as you study your metrics and analytics, recognize that these are not just numbers you’re seeing. Look closer, and you can almost picture in each number one person’s need to solve a problem in their home – multiplied by the number of actions your metrics reveal.
“Remember that everyone behind the technology is a real, complex human. And everyone on the receiving end is a real, complex human with hopes and fears, needs and wants, goals and pain points,” writes MarketingSherpa’s Daniel Burstein.
This is the kind of thinking behind “human-centric marketing” that is balancing the extraordinary reach and opportunity that online avenues provide – while gearing the strategies to connect with real people on problems they really have in ways that you can actually help them out.
Human-centric is no foreign concept. For example, we’ve been telling contractors to “promote benefits, not features” since we first learned to talk marketing. That’s human-centric. You’re explaining to the customer “what’s in it for them,” instead of bragging about technical features and eye-glazing terms. Human-centric is putting that benefit in a headline that gets a click to your website. And once there, your prospect can intuitively figure out how to navigate your site to dig deeper into the promises you make and trust the proof that you’ll do what you say. And once they make that contact? See above for how well that personal interaction goes.
Human-centric means that you understand how customers live their lives and how your services can adapt to those needs. This isn’t complicated either. Let’s say your customers are busy. They don’t like to spend their workday waiting at their house for the technician to arrive. Or they don’t want to come home to a freezing house on a winter’s day. So your human-centric response sets an appointment, gives them a 30-minute courtesy call before your arrival and you also respond to emergencies 24/7. All very human of you.
As you bring that approach to your digital marketing, human-centric means looking at the metrics for what customers want. You retarget people who visit your site, you segment your email campaigns based on customer activity. And you listen to your customers.
Tabitha Jean Naylor wrote last year in Social Media Today about an interesting and relatable example. She tells the story of Mike Diamond Services, a California-based plumbing company, and how their market research revealed a very human take on plumbing service. It seems that customers didn’t like it if plumbers were dirty and didn’t smell good when they arrived for an appointment. So Naylor wrote that Mike Diamond “used that customer feedback and transformed his company by becoming the ‘Smell Good Plumber.’”