by Julia Perlmutter
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How Human Is Your Marketing?
As brokers, marketers, and business owners, both big and small, we all rely on marketing campaigns, automated engagement, and advertising in order to reach our consumers and sell our properties or products. But what if someone told you you’ve been doing it all wrong?
The Rebellion Has Begun
Mark Schaefer, author of Marketing Rebellion: The Most Human Company Wins may be the person to help you realize this. According to Schaefer, “things are just not working like they used to because marketing is going through an existential crisis.”
In our blog post, An Experiential QuantumListing Experience, we explain how technology helps us automate and streamline processes, which in turn drives down costs and increases efficiency but we often forget that we still need the human component. To what extent we need technology versus human touch is up for debate. Mark Schaefer would say that “technology is the enemy” and engagement and advertising don’t matter.” So if our preconceived notions of advertising and marketing are all a lie, how do we market our products and even try to turn any profit?
The answer, which has been right in front of us this whole time but many of us have ignored, is our customers. Make your customers your marketing department, Schaefer says. Forget about the four P’s (Price, Product, Placement, and Promotion). Focus on building a business based on truth, integrity, and values. As he puts it, “whatever the battle, the consumers will eventually win, as they always have and we must follow their lead”
What’s In Your Tool Box?
So has everything we’ve ever characterized to be effective marketing just been thrown out the door? Are technological advances in marketing no longer the way of the future? If so, does this open the door for a new age of marketing? Fortunately, marketing technology is not being completely thrown out the door. Maybe it is not as important as we expected, but we still need to rely on it to some extent. When it’s used, as Schaefer would emphasize, it should be a tool to help your company become more “compassionate, receptive, fascinating, and useful,” rather than a way to own your customers or a sales funnel.
The 10 Principles of Customer-centric Marketing
Okay, perhaps all this sounds great until you have to put it into practice. How do we approach this marketing revolution? The good news is Schaefer has outlined 10 key principles for us all to take into practice:
1. Stop doing what customers hate - get out there and discover what customers love
2. Technology should be invisible to your customer and only used to help your company be more compassionate, receptive, fascinating, and useful
3. You can’t own customers, a buyer’s journey, or a sales funnel. Claim a market space and help people belong to it
4. Never intercept, never interrupt, earn the invitation
5. Be relevant, consistent, and superior. Build trust into everything you do
6. Be fans of your fans. Make them the heroes of your story
7. Transcend the public’s inherent mistrust of your company through relentless honesty
8. Don’t be in the customer community be of the customer community
9. Marketing is never about your why it’s about your customer’s why
10. The most human company wins
What Does Your Company Do To Connect?
To hear more about the key lessons Schaefer speaks about in his book, visit businessgrow.com/rebellion. For now, let’s turn back to this ever-pressing question about how to approach marketing now. Here at QuantumListing, we rely on technology but also try to have as many personal interactions as possible through our webinars, marketing sessions, phone calls, conferences, and meetings. What does your company do to connect with its consumers? Can we still use technology to our advantage while also becoming more human? If so, to what extent?
Tell us what you think in the comments below.
