First name / Hello,,
Whenever I’m being pulled in too many different directions, with too many different demands on my time and energy (and wallet!), I ask myself one simple question:
How can I spend more time being human?
This theme of being more human, especially in an era of increasing automation, has been cropping up in many of my conversations over the last couple of weeks.
And yet, it seems that most people have not gotten the memo.
Having worked in sales for a significant portion of my career, and priding myself in my business development abilities, nothing irritates me more than seeing companies overuse automation when it comes to sales.
Whether it's the pest control company sending me an endless stream of automated emails I never asked for or the contact form I filled out that led the sauna salesperson to put me in an autodialer and call me endlessly, eventually turning to text messages when I don’t answer — it all feels invasive and inhumane. Not to mention ineffective.
But sales isn't the only place where we've forgotten our humanity.
Marketing is just as much to blame.
Here at Fearless Foundry, we practice something that we aim to not just preach but also teach… and model.
It's a concept we call
human-centric marketing, and it extends well beyond the emails we help brands send or the social media posts we help create.
It's a holistic concept that starts with a simple philosophy: market and sell to people the ways you would want to be marketed and sold to.
I don't know about you, but I don't know anyone who receives automated voice messages and thinks, “Yes, this is a company I would like to do business with.”
I also have yet to meet anyone who would welcome an onslaught of 100 emails in 100 days, when all they were trying to do was sign up for a newsletter or purchase a product.
But despite the fact that nobody asked for these tactics, perhaps because many of us are excited to adopt new technology, we forgot to ask the most important questions of all:
Is this helpful?
Is this how people actually want to interact and engage with my brand?
Does this draw people closer in relationship to my business, or does it repel them away?
Ultimately, it is asking these kinds of questions that lead us to figure out new ways to market and sell that connect to what we all crave most of all as humans: genuine relationships.
Now, before you write off this notion because you believe your brand is too big or you don't have time to actually connect with your customers, I would challenge you to think about a brand that you buy from regularly, even though you've never met a single person who works there, let alone the CEO of the company.
I, for one, purchased proudly this past week from
Dovetail Workwear, a brand I support with my money and my platform because I feel strongly about my relationship with them and identify with their values.
Dovetail Workwear is an incredible example of human-centric marketing. The company makes high-end, high-quality workwear for women and nonbinary people by disrupting a category that once only had ill-fitting workwear that was awkwardly patterned in smaller sizes of designs originally made for men. They added stretch and other design benefits for the types of bodies they aimed to clothe, pioneering a totally new kind of workwear.
I'm a fan of Dovetail because of how well their pants fit, the fact that they are a Pacific Northwest local brand, and because of the ways they show up on social media. I also appreciate the kinds of people they feature in their online catalog and the ways they communicate with their customers via email; they understand being inside somebody's inbox is a gift, and earning their attention is work that should be taken seriously.
In fact, I love this brand so much that I seek out opportunities to buy Dovetail locally, so my dollars do double duty supporting a favorite mercantile and a brand I believe in. I'm passionate enough about Dovetail that I could write a couple more paragraphs about them, but I think you get the point:
Companies are creating relationships with us, even if we don't know the people behind them.
So what does this all have to do with your brand or business?
A whole hell of a lot.
If you asked me, as we enter into this era of increased automation, one of the things that we should gain back is time.
My highest hope for humanity is that we will be wise enough to use time to be more human and that we take time to be considerate of our customers, reaching out to them in ways that feel real and meaningful, so they result in relationships that are more than just transactions.
I also hope we take time to strategize and gain feedback from the people in our communities and audiences we’re connected to, so we can cultivate content that speaks to them more truthfully and resonates more loudly. I may be naive, but I’ve been in the tech and marketing worlds long enough to be optimistic that instead of solely using all of the latest and greatest integrations and automation technology has to offer, we might instead pause and think through the process first, asking ourselves:
Is this something I would want to be on the receiving end of?
Sometimes these questions are hard to answer, and I can say from experience they can be easier to unpack if done alongside someone who genuinely cares about your brand and strategy. If you want to make your marketing more human in the years to come, my team and I would be honored to
help you in the process.
Here's to cultivating more real relationships through the ways we show up in our businesses.
I can't wait to hear what you decide to shift in the process.
-Madeline
