A fundamental marketing flaw (that I am sure all of us have fallen into at some stage) is marketing for the medium or the metric, not the man.
We become so focused on the click-throughs or optimising pages for Google that we forget – behind every click there is a real person.
How do we create more person-centric campaigns?
Create a picture
Many of us get to a point in our organisation where we know who our target audience so well that we can almost picture a face, sometimes we even give them a name.
At DoComeMonday Media we use “Jenny” for the agedcare101 website. Jenny is the 50+ eldest daughter of the family who manages mum or dad's aged care needs.
As you’ve gotten to know your target audience, it’s likely you have identified their pain points.
Identify the pain point – the ‘need’
The old-fashioned definition of marketing is: identify a need and then satisfy it.
Try asking yourself the following questions:
- What is the problem they’re experiencing?
- Why do you understand what they’re going through?
- How are you going to fix it?
And incorporate these messages into your marketing. This is often referred to as Humanistic Marketing or Empathetic Marketing.
For our “Jenny” we identified, she is time poor – trying to juggle her own family and her career.
We also know that assisting a parent to move into an aged care home takes time, the rules and regulations are complex and it’s very emotional.
One of our strategies
In the video on our homepage, we use language like “I feel guilty and scared, but we need somewhere for mum now” to establish our understanding of what Jenny is going through.
Then we provide the solution “here’s the plan”. We outline 9 steps and the time it will take to complete each step of the aged care process. We also emphasise the importance of taking the time to complete each step to get the best results for her mum or dad and that agedcare101 is there to support her.
The empathetic steps
There are some key contributors to successful empathetic marketing:
- Keep it as simple as possible. Use language as if you were speaking to someone in person.
- Keep your message consistent across all your channels, website, brochures, social media etc.
- Take your target audience description and write it down. Circulate it throughout your organization.
- Use emotion, through nostalgia, relationships, fear, success.
Next time you're strategising for a campaign, try making problem-solving for your target audience your number one objective and then focus on those impressions and clicks.
Allison
