Marketing conferences are always filled with discussions on B2B (business-to-business) versus B2C (business-to-consumer) marketing. It’s important to tailor your efforts to your customer, but a speaker at a recent conference stressed a common thread that ties both together. She calls it H2H (human-to-human) marketing.
Even in B2B, there’s a human on the other end of the sale. And we humans, whether we realize it or not, make decisions based on feelings created by stories brands tell us. A list of attributes is a starting point for that story, but it’s not the finish line. Attributes will win the day at times, but there are typically deeper motives at play.
Think about your own purchasing habits at home and in the plant. If you dig deep enough, you’ll likely find you were persuaded by something a company did to make you feel a certain way. Or maybe it’ something a company did that made your peers feel a certain way, and they persuaded you.
Materials that compete with precast have been hard at work with their stories. Most precasters have seen this in at least one of their product lines. So now it’s your turn. What feelings do you want the humans at the other end to think about you, your brand and your products?
A good place to start is to ask your regular customers why they buy from you and what separates you from the competition. Next, think about other brands in different categories that are like you at a high level. If you decide at the highest level you solve a problem with reliability, what else does that? Maybe a certain tool? See what you can learn from the top brands in that space and apply it to your company.
The actual tactics come later. First, you have to make a commitment to telling your human story, not your corporate story. Make your customers feel something. It will carry the sale some of the time and all the work you do on attributes like quality will complement your efforts and help you out in instances when feelings don’t come into play. It’s time to create your story and stick to it.
Kirk Stelsel
Director of Communication & Marketing, NPCA
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