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| Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay |
Forget B2B and B2C and say hello to ambassador marketing. As columnist Joe Hyland stresses, marketers should start embracing peer-to-peer (P2P) marketing to engage with their customers on a more humane level.
The emergence of the digital world has blurred the future of business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) and gave way for companies to reach their customers on a personal scale.
Steve Casey, a Forrester analyst, called the P2P as the rise of the "B2B consumer" in one of his research.
Even though some are skeptical at first, nowadays, marketing campaigns are not motivated by people's organizational responsibilities anymore.
More and more consumers are getting interested and would want to engage with products or services when the marketing ad speaks to them as human beings, not as the CEO of a big company.
Personalization draws people in. It piques their interests to see what the seller has to offer and then shares their findings to family and friends.
With lots of marketing ideas that competitions come up with, businesses should begin focusing on person-to-person marketing and let go of the B2B and B2B campaigns to come up with a more sincere and out of the box strategies.
Let us then see the P2P ways that you can explore to make your marketing and content tactics genuinely connect with your customers.
Pitch your story, not the product
Articulating your business to prospective customers can be challenging at times. But sales-focus pitches are just added white noise. You need to tell your story and explain to your customers how your business can help them in their different journeys.
When your marketing content tells a compelling story, consumers will be curious and show real interest.
One classic example of a campaign that has used the storytelling approach is from Goldman Sach. They made their usual boring case study alive and exciting by making a short film that celebrates the leaders of the cities and companies their investment portfolio.
Focus on emotional connection first, and the form-fill customer information will surely follow.
Make your brand more humane
Finding connections between your labels and concepts that people can easily relate to is a must in P2P marketing. It will help if you think of ways to reframe your business proposition using quick and straightforward analogies.
MailChimp has successfully made one campaign wherein they regarded marketing automation as a second brain. With this concept, their services were instantly understood and transcended their core email marketing solution.
Empathize instead of glorifying the job
Marketing gurus are not made overnight. They survived many daily struggles before getting their first triumphant campaign.
You need to keep this in mind and empathize with other marketers and recognize the nitty-gritty work to get the results.
HubSpot's Facebook page was able to convey to the customers how their productive employees do their job and contribute to the company's success, dimming the light on how the company operates as a whole.
Share your cause
Demonstrating what you stand for is telling your customer that you are beyond your product and have a bigger vision than the ultimate profit.
Toms shoes knew that lesson early on and has done an incredible job in utilizing it.
Another brand, American Express, celebrated local entrepreneurs by launching their Small Business Saturday after Black Friday.
Measure what actually matters
Playing the long game and trying to measure the impact is not easy.
Metrics are needed to determine if you've won your customers' hearts and minds. To put such in place, you need to think outside of the box, such as creating interactive feedback loops or holding livestream events.
You need to understand the consumers' behavior and attitude by measuring how engaged they are, how much time they spend on your content, how interactive they can be, and how they opt to your advocacies and programs.
At the end of the day, treating your customers like humans that are more than just clicks and views will enable you to take good advantage of P2P, today's and the future's best marketing campaign.
