Humanize Your Marketing For 2023

Marketing In The Pandemic

Let’s face it, the 2020 pandemic changed everything. 

Every single client I work with had either their best year ever in 2020 or absolute worst year. 

It seems these last 2 years have changed the game of digital marketing. 

At the beginning of the pandemic digital advertisers saw the price of advertising rise substantially.

This was happening because everyone started selling online.

Competition increased everywhere. 

So how do you get your messaging above the noise?

 

Humanize Your Marketing For 2023

It is no secret that in marketing, creativity will always win. 

Utilizing every marketing channel is wise but when you spread your messaging throughout several channels you may lose touch with your audience. 

Humanizing your marketing is all about keeping that personal touch.

Vanity metrics like impressions, clicks, or conversions can really make you lose sight of the customer experience. 

The customer experience is the most important aspect of your marketing. 

I recommend focusing your time on only the most valuable platforms that you can monitor effectively. 

Platforms where you can engage with your audience more authentically. 

Keeping your messaging hyper-tailored to your target audience will help catch their eye. 

Once you have your audience’s attention, you then can explain how well you understand their pain-points.

This is true across all marketing. 

 

Speaking Directly To Your Audience

Regardless of paid ads or organic marketing, if your message does not connect to your audience you are not marketing effectively.

If you are an experienced marketer you might be reading this thinking it is something you already know. 

But I get brought on to a lot of marketing campaigns where the target audience is way too broad. 

Keeping your audience very defined helps your messaging.

If you want to target more than just one buyer persona, then you need to create a completely separate campaign for each audience. 

 

Creative Marketing Ideas For 2022

Let’s get a little more specific into a few marketing ideas you can implement for 2022 to humanize your marketing. 

 

Retargeting an audience of 1

This method is really awesome for prospecting in a B2B industry. 

Creating an entire campaign for just 1 high ticket prospect could really get their attention and set yourself up as an expert marketer. 

I used to give presentations and say “imagine your scroll through your newsfeed and see your name in an ad”.

“Hey Brenden, what do you think about this?”

That would really get you to stop and look, wouldn’t it? 

Now, what if you made a landing page for your biggest prospect, John Smith.

You add a Facebook pixel to this specific unlisted landing page and wait until you see traffic to that page.

Sending direct mail, a gift, an email, a direct message, a Christmas gram, etc., could get them to your landing page. 

“Hey John Smith, I made a specific webpage just for you at this link: themarketer.co/john-smith. I added a lot of information you may find valuable in the real estate space right here in St. Petersburg, FL.”

If I see traffic to that unlisted webpage, I know it most likely is my prospect. 

I can then set up an ad on Facebook, Google Display, or even LinkedIn, where I retarget everyone who went to that page.

And the only person who went to that page is my prospect. 

Now in my ad, the first two words would be “John Smith”.

This will almost always get their attention and show that I know what I am doing as a digital marketer. 

Maybe this is a bit too extreme, but take this example and see where it may fit within your marketing. 

 

Free Should Mean Free

Anything that says “free” has a catch and shouldn’t.

Companies want my information to try to sell to me later.

If I give you my email address you will spam me. 

Maybe they will sell my information to another company to spam me more. 

People want what they want, and most of all, they want to be left alone.

Retargeting is great for low-cost conversions, but interrupting the user experience to deliver an ad only makes your brand “annoying” in the eyes of the customer. 

So what do you do for your marketing in 2022? 

 First of all, offer your freebie completely for free.

Stop making people enter email addresses to download something they want.

I guarantee you will start getting more downloads and building more trust with your target audience.

Also, they would have entered your pixel audience anyways to eventually retarget them with follow-up messages. 

My “freebie” The Perfect Marketing Plan Guide has my branding on every page.

So business owners who download this pdf will 100% know my brand before they finish reading the guide.

Un-Automate Your Marketing In 2022

Stop sending mass messages on social media to anyone and everyone you connect with.

It doesn’t work and needs to be stopped.

I use direct outreach daily, but before I reach out to anyone I have spent 5-10 minutes looking at their profile, website, and posts.

When I reach out it is a thought-out message asking them specifics about things I found on their profile.

More likely I get a lot of responses this way rather than sending the same message to over 100 people within 5 minutes. 

Add the “human touch” to your marketing.

A lot of times I will send handwritten letters to prospects or past clients, just to check in with them.

I am not offering anything up-front but just a connection, letting them know I am here to help. 

I get direct mail promotions almost every day but I rarely receive a handwritten letter from a company trying to connect. 

Chewy.com is actually great at personalizing messages to customers.

They send hand written letters to their customers, and unprovoked birthday gifts for their pets.

They even give hand painted portraits of their customer’s pets for free to selected customers.

Marketing in 2022, the pendulum is swinging back towards personalized experiences and human connection.

Make sure you are incorporating this into your business model now before the pendulum swings back to digital marketing. 

 

“Grow Your Following Quick With These Tips”

Have you ever read that book?

How to Win Friends and Influence People?

I read it every month when I was in High School.

The two biggest things I took away from that book are:

• People love the sound of their own name
• The best way to get someone to care about you, is to show you care about them

The best way to grow your social media accounts is to focus on one person at a time.

It may be easy to see someone with thousands of followers and want to climb that mountain fast.

I have a social networking tactic that gets me 3-5 followers per day and it only take me 15 minutes max.

Before I go to sleep, while I am in my bed, I go on my instagram (for my travel account @bonnieandbrenden).

I look up relevant hashtags and navigate to the most recent posts.

Then I literally take that time to look at every single post, like it, and leave a meaningful and relevant comment.

The person who posted the picture, typically looks at my profile and sees that I also travel full time and have a YouTube channel.

They may follow me, they may subscribe to me, but either way, they now are aware that I exist.

I usually get a reply to my comment and I made that person feel better about the content they posted.

I do this for about 10-15 minutes every day before I go to sleep.

When I wake up I typically see 3-5 new followers and about 1-2 new YouTube subscribers.

 

If you still need help with your marketing, I recently did a speech for The Creative Coast about Marketing Funnels That Keep Your Pipeline Full.

This speech takes on the core concepts of humanizing your marketing to really reach your ideal clients.

Also, you can always reach out to me directly through my contact form here.

Thank you for reading, let me know if any of these tips help your business.