Human-to-human marketing (H2H) is an approach to marketing that actively strips everything back to the simple reality that people buy from people. It encourages organizations to treat people as individual human beings rather than as ‘personas’ or other representations of customer/prospect groupings.

In doing so, it places significantly greater emphasis on an authentic, personalized experience. But H2H marketing is more than just a humanization of customers – it cuts both ways, enabling organizations to reveal their human qualities and promote customers’ engagement with the real people who work for them. By driving meaningful, personal one-to-one interactions at scale, these organizations can communicate and be perceived as more human by their customers.

 

This isn’t a million miles from how businesses interacted with their customers years ago. Indeed, in the pre-internet age, a common approach with business customers would have been to develop personal relationships on a one-to-one basis and invest substantial time and money in physically meeting with customers face-to-face. As years passed, companies found that by dropping this approach, they could be significantly more efficient with their sales and marketing efforts to reach, attract, and retain many more customers.

Why is using human-to-human (H2H) marketing important?

At the same time, as better, more digitally-enabled ways have emerged for how brands and customers can communicate, people have become tired of robotic, generic, and overly automated marketing strategies. Instead, they expect to feel valued and served almost instantly – or they will go elsewhere. This requires a human approach that combines empathy, connection, and conversation.

Human-to-human marketing is designed to achieve the benefits of human interaction such as affirmation, mutual respect, and trust. Machines can be highly intelligent but cannot ‘relate’ to human beings in an emotional sense. In other words, they can’t form or build relationships. This is what’s so important about human-to-human marketing – the ability to develop long-term relationships and a sense of customer loyalty that’s almost impossible to do any other way.

One study found that people with an emotional connection to a brand have a 300% higher customer lifetime value, will remain loyal for 50% longer, and recommend that brand at a much higher rate.

How human-to-human marketing differs from business-to-business marketing strategies

Human-to-human marketing is an evolutionary step beyond traditional B2B (business-to-business), and B2C (business-to-consumer) approaches to marketing. The H2H step brings the evolution of marketing back to where it started – a kind of ‘back to the future’ progression to how organizations dealt with customers in the past, but now with the benefit of modern digital technology.

That’s because committing to an H2H marketing approach that personalizes customer experiences and promotes one-to-one interactions requires technology to overcome the enormous difficulty and expense of doing this at scale. Many B2B and B2C strategies that have come before have scaled brilliantly, but typically at the cost of treating customers like numbers rather than people.

Why is human-to-human (H2H) marketing so effective?

Human-to-human marketing works because it’s pushing at an open door. What customer wouldn’t prefer a more human service, customer experience, or marketing to be better suited to them as individuals and the challenges they face in work or life? People instinctively want emotional connections and responses. They need to be heard, understood, valued, accepted and humanized. Marketing can be many positive things, from a source of problem-solving insight to a form of entertainment. But it can also be extraordinarily cynical and even aggressive. The promise of human-to-human marketing is more appealing to customers because it centers on human-like qualities that must be positive and embraced to succeed.

The other reason human-to-human marketing is so effective is that it helps the organizations that use it stand out against competitors. Human-to-human marketing reveals the personality of a business and its workers too. These can be memorable experiences that profoundly affect customer perception and loyalty.

How do you apply human-to-human marketing to existing marketing practices?

Human-to-human marketing is partly a mindset shift. Among the best things you can do – at least to start with – is reframe your marketing approach to be more cognizant of customers and other stakeholders as individuals and to think about how to promote the human characteristics of your brand. Then you can start being more conversational and empathetic and create more experiential interactions.

Beyond that, here are five ways you can apply human-to-human marketing to your existing marketing practices.

Be more human and stop selling all the time

Human interactions are governed by more than just understanding, anticipating, and empathizing with the other person’s perspective. Marketers who believe that’s all they have to do to succeed with ‘human-to-human marketing’ are missing one crucial part of the puzzle: self-awareness. Self-awareness regulates human behavior to act in specific ways at certain times.

Imagine two people: a sales representative of an insurance company and a buyer at a business that requires insurance. If human interactions alone will drive any successful outcome, it’s unlikely to work if all the sales guy does is try the hard sell at every opportunity. That approach only works if everyone involved perceives it as a transaction for a commodity product based solely on price and availability. There’s no trust, relationship, or meaningful reason to repeat the experience.

Human-to-human marketing is self-aware enough to go beyond merely communicating value to embodying value. Brands can achieve this by using marketing to:

• Research and identify customer problems
• Build and stimulate communities of customers and prospects where individuals can share their problem experiences and how they’ve addressed them
• Highlight and promote examples of customer success where the product/service has solved the issue
• Create and disseminate valuable content assets that aim to support customers and prospects in solving their problems (rather than being a thinly veiled sales pitch for the product/service)

Tell a story with human-to-human marketing

Another key human characteristic is the ability to communicate through the telling of stories. People instinctively understand stories' structure and meaning, making them a richer and more inviting approach than simply producing marketing content. Being on the receiving end of a well-told, people-centered story invites individuals to see themselves as an active participant. And stories are more memorable too; our brains find them much easier to process than, say, a datasheet!

It's only really when telling stories that many marketers can break away from using corporate language and technical jargon and have their content talk like an actual person. Simpler words, engaging analogies, use of humor – all come to the surface when telling a story. Stories also enable brands to be more honest and transparent or at least appear that way – even if that means looking a little rough around the edges. This breaks down barriers and allows brands to become refreshingly authentic.

And according to research, not only do most (77%) people think it's a good idea for brands to tell stories, but more than half (55%) are more likely to buy products from companies whose brand stories they love.

Use human-to-human marketing with personalization and automation combined

Scale is a massive challenge with marketing and human-to-human marketing in particular. This is because attempting to provide person-specific marketing engagements and offers naturally consumes more effort per customer, potentially making it impractical even before you’ve started.

The stakes are very high for getting this right. According to McKinsey, around three-quarters of consumers:

• Expect personalization
• Build and stimulate communities of customers and prospects where individuals can share their problem experiences and how they’ve addressed them
• Highlight and promote examples of customer success where the product/service has solved the issue
• Create and disseminate valuable content assets that aim to support customers and prospects in solving their problems (rather than being a thinly veiled sales pitch for the product/service)

There is only one solution: combining personalization and automation in your approach. People like automation when it works for them. It’s when it makes them feel like a number because of mistargeted messages or offers that it really grinds.

A good example of personalization and automation working together can be found in how many companies organize chat interactions via their websites/apps using both chatbots and human agents. The chatbots can triage inquiries by allowing customers to self-serve answers from a knowledge base and – if that fails – to escalate to a human agent. Depending on the market, customers might prefer to know the difference between machines and people, or they might prefer that the distinction remains opaque – in which case you can work on making the language that your bots interpret and articulate more natural, informal, and human.

You can apply a similar approach to social media interaction, using automated workflows to follow back, invite or respond to social media contact, but with humans on hand to take over to optimize each personal engagement if and when required.

Harness all the channels you own to humanize marketing

Just like a real person will answer however you address them, brands must be ready to engage with audiences across every conceivable communications channel. More than that – brands must be able to demonstrate a contextual understanding of each customer wherever and whenever they wish to engage. Humans can cope with this because they have memories, but companies often struggle when customers ‘switch’ between communications channels.

The answer lies in an omnichannel strategy and the technology that underpins it. Omnichannel marketing empowers customers to carry on the same conversation with a brand as part of a continuous, unbroken experience without ever having to repeat a stage of the customer journey. It demands that the brand experience is consistent across channels and that omnichannel experiences are effortless – made that way by brands that understand customers want interactions to be as quick and straightforward as possible.

Omnichannel is also a two-way street – enabling the brand to choose the optimum way of communicating proactively and facilitating each customer’s preferred method of getting in touch. Omnichannel strategy can be leveraged further by human-to-human marketing by timing when communications happen for maximum context. For example, using a trigger event like a hotel guest checking out of their room to send an email asking how their stay was. Such an exercise appears thoughtful when, in reality, it’s another automated workflow.

As well as covering all relevant communications channels, human-to-human marketing can encourage customers to communicate – indirectly – with one another. This is done by fostering, encouraging, and promoting user-generated content which, in many cases, takes the form of personal stories that also serve as authoritative third-party validation for the brand concerned.

Leverage email signatures for human-to-human marketing

Maintaining brand consistency across communications channels can be tricky – not least when some organizations are guilty of favoring some channels over others or overlooking certain channels altogether.

One such communication channel is email signatures, one of the most significant, valuable, and highly trusted channels – especially in B2B.

Some marketing emails are read – ALL customers read business email

One-to-one business email (distinct from one-to-many marketing emails) is personal correspondence; about as personal as business communications get, short of meeting face-to-face. Email signatures are the last thing that recipients of such emails see, and each is an opportunity to imprint the brand, promote important calls to action, andprovide key contact data.

More and more marketers are consciously adopting email signatures as a channel to harness when delivering more personalized, human brand interactions. Business email is highly trusted and invariably read, making the ‘real estate’ of the humble email signature an extremely valuable marketing property.

Consider how you can utilize the email signatures of all company employees to ensure consistency of brand experience and to extend personalization to narrowly segmented audience groups. For example:

• Incorporating consistent branding and brand messaging into email signatures across the organization. Ensure that every employee’s signature carries only the latest version of the brand's logos, and that none are incorrectly sized, shaped or rendered. All should be tested to appear perfectly, regardless of the device, screen size or email client used by the recipient or sender.
• Capitalizing on the space available within the email signature footer area to publish trackable marketing banners, promotions and calls to action with links to supporting campaign content and forms.
• Applying personalization data to present different email signature campaigns to different groups of email recipients according to who is sending (and who is receiving) the business emails.
• Inserting additional functionality into email signatures such as maps, appointment scheduling buttons, customer feedback survey icons, etc. in order to facilitate the most human possible experience and collect fresh customer insights data with which to learn from and continuously improve marketing approach.

Key takeaways

Humanizing your marketing is an effective way to reach your customers and attract new ones. The human-to-human (H2H) marketing approach can help you stand out from competitors, differentiate yourself from the crowd, and grab attention by connecting with people on a personal level.

Human-to-human marketing helps ensure that your company's content always resonates with your audience by being relatable and personable. This way, when potential customers see an ad campaign, read a blog post, or see a video on social media that talks to them at a human level, they are more likely to engage with the brand.

The value of email signatures should not be understated as a trusted and personalized communications channel. They don't have to compete with other advertising channels and are incredibly low-cost. Your email signature is appended to a message already delivering valuable content.