Why relevant marketing is more important than ever in our ‘Age of Anxiety’.
In what’s been dubbed ‘the Age of Anxiety’, are your marketing activities adding to people’s daily stress levels or reducing them? Sound strange? Read on.
It’s been said that on any given day, we are each presented with anywhere between 4000 to 20,000 marketing messages . The fallout of this amount of advertising resulting in around 16 billion in wasted revenue each year. (Forbes)
Even if you don’t suffer from full blown anxiety on a daily basis, we are undeniably a ‘rushing society’. The books I have in my own night-stand include mostly self-help from ‘Rushing Women’s Syndrome‘ (Dr Libby) and ‘Stop Thinking Start Living’ by the late Richard Carlson. It is what it is and I know I’m not alone…
Never-ending to do lists, expectations to meet, children to nurture, careers to forge, dreams to realise, exercise to tick off and generally staying informed. And…in excess of 4000 marketing messages contributing to that picture.
For that reason marketers are often given a bad rap. At Christmas time my family (mostly in jest), love to tell me that marketers are “what is wrong with the world” ….. And I have to say don’t always disagree. People spend too much, consume too much and crave material assets for self-worth, all contributing to increasingly negative consequences.
A new breed of marketer?
But I still defend marketing. Because the type of marketing I subscribe to – along with many of my peers, is the breed that truly endeavours to understand people. Marketing that strives to be relevant, genuinely wants to improve lives, make things easier and language simpler. Essentially ‘sustainable marketing’ if you will, reducing the environmental clutter, spam and irrelevancy.
Digital opportunities for marketers have enabled much greater scope for relevancy. But it is a constant pursuit. The ability to use data and platforms effectively to understand what people need, their problems and behaviours allows us to better connect the right people with the right products – when they’re ready to buy. Even encouraging opt-out where there is not a good fit.
And anyone who’s run a successful ‘Inbound’ marketing campaign – where the focus is on a problem that the company can actually solve, will know the respectful best practice of not rushing a customer to purchase – instead giving them valuable info to make their own decisions, in their own time. My how the worm has turned…
But what about my privacy?
It’d be foolish of me not to recognise that in all this effort to be relevant lies the data and privacy debate – which would take this article on a whole new tangent. But to address it quickly as a marketer – my view aligns with Seth Godin’s in that we’re all part of it.
Unless you’re a nomad living in the Sahara – we have all submitted to data capture in some way since a very long time ago. It’s here to stay and hopefully for the most part it can improve our lives (see https://seths.blog/2014/03/who-cares-about-privacy/) but what we’re obliged to do as business owners and marketers, is to care for that data and be effective with it in the commercial arena to help ‘declutter’ life, improve decision making and reduce anxiety.
The buck doesn’t stop at digital.
Being relevant and being better, shouldn’t stop at digital marketing. The offline customer experience is fraught with irrelevancies, clunky processes, poor customer service and blood boiling frustrations all which contribute to people’s anxiety.
These things are the big opportunities. The perfect ways to become unforgettable.
Top tips for anti-stress marketing
So rose-tinted or not, I go into bat for marketing. I debate hard on the efforts that we go to, to filter, refine, and make purchasing easier and more enjoyable. Albeit a constant pursuit.
If you’re on a journey down this path as a business owner or marketing leader I salute you. To help you out here are my top tips for reducing anxiety in consumers in 2020 and put people at the heart of what you do:
· Sacrifice – stop trying to appeal to a large diverse group of people. Stop being afraid of cutting one of your personas, or one of your products loose. Sacrifice gains you huge focus. And makes for more satisfying work for your team.
· Sacrifice words. Wherever, whenever possible. Less words. More impact. No jargon. Tell. It. Like. It. Is.
· Help me like you. Put your very best foot forward as a business and then make sure you right the wrongs when things don’t go swimmingly for your customers.
· Don’t try and be cool before you’re ready. Basics before innovation. These are many companies trying to implement the latest CRM, the latest Chatbot and looking into AI….all the while their website is a crap experience, they have poor staff retention and customers are churning at rate of knots. Just stop. Shift from glamour to basic – or at least do it in parallel.
· Scrub that data. Your data is your treasure. Those are real people in that CRM. So clean them, enrich them, and then talk to them.
· Then retarget it. Great data allows you to keep shifting people through the sales funnel. Retargeting if done right is a game changer to the buying journey and can make for a very relevant buying experience.
· Do run awesome inbound campaigns. Produce great, helpful content. “If you build it they will come”. The Inbound method came after the power balance shifted in favour of the consumer. “Just Google it” is the phrase of our time and the fastest way to solve a problem. Great content that speaks to problems and then nurtures leads, is a method that has relevance at its core.
· Find those who love to serve – your people are your marketers. Whether they run your advertising or your accounts department. So find staff who truly care about people. About their problems and about great service. This is not easy. But you must find ways to flush out these traits when you’re recruiting because more and more I’m a believer that you can’t teach these values – they are innate 🙁
Tell me what you think! What ways does your brand help in this ‘Age of Anxiety’?