How Does People Based Marketing Work?

Right now, business owners across the US are looking for ways to get an edge up. They want to grow their businesses. They are trying to stay relevant. To excel in growing your business in 2020, you need to know how people-based marketing works. It’s critical for a marketer or owner stay on top of their competition, but not only play catch up and do what they do. You need to be different. You need to have a clear insight into your ideal consumer and the process they follow when making buying decisions.  Do you fully understand the buyer’s journey? For instance, how does a typical consumer makes a buying decision? For most of you, your next customers perform a search for the problem that they are facing right now. They are at the top of the sales funnel.  They are researching their symptoms and trying to identify the root cause of the problem. They will read articles and watch videos from business owners like you who are creating valuable and helpful content. At this phase, you should try to be the Wikipedia for your industry. When you are the one who is helping them identify the problem and being extra friendly, you begin to build trust. The prospects view you as the authority figure in the space. Eventually, they’ll get to the point where they know exactly what the problem is and they’ll start searching for solutions.    Or maybe they know what type of product or solution they are looking for and search for their favorite brands. Then compare the recently emailed coupons in their email inboxes. They may also check what other consumers are saying across social media and forums about the product or service.  Finally, they settle for one.  Why do you think they settle for one and not any other? Do you know why brands spend a hefty amount on marketing and get low ROI?  The answer is using a people-based marketing approach. 

What is people-based marketing?

People-based marketing is marketing tailored to the right people and not proxies or cookies collected over time from third parties. This kind of marketing uses data and real-time results to market products and services to the right customers.  To understand this kind of marketing, here is a simple case scenario: How many ads do you see in a day? Are most of the ads relevant to your needs? Do they promise to solve your problems?  Do the ads engage with or make you angry with the advertisers for sending it your way? Most often, we snub our nose at a poorly placed ad. These kinds of ads do not appeal to our needs and desires, they are rather offensive. They degrade the brand reputation in our mind. That’s what most traditional marketers do without a real understanding of their consumers and data.  People-based marketing uses real-time data. People-based marketing is the approach of targeting the right consumers with the proper context, the right channel, and product or services is the best form of marketing that has a high return on investment.  However, how do you ensure you’re targeting the right people? You need to collect real-time data from them and save them. You take your offline individual customer data in your CRM and upload it to a secure platform where the offline data is matched with the online data of each consumer.  The online data such as device IDs, browsing habits and social interaction details alongside the offline individual data help to create an accurate persistence consumer ID. This consumer insight helps to target and improve marketing campaigns. 

You don’t want to waste your money on marketing and get low ROI. Most brands, which don’t use this form of marketing, spend a lot of time and money marketing their product and services to the wrong people.

What does successful people-based marketing work?

Most marketers have embraced this concept of marketing since its introduction in 2014. However, not all marketers have succeeded in it. Some didn’t have the big picture and threw in the towel.  It’s because prospects want to buy from brands that show a deep understanding of their preferences and priorities. For people-based marketing to deliver results, here is what marketers must do.   

1. Have the right marketing psychology

As a marketer who wants to see terrific ROI, you need good marketing psychology. An excellent place to start is reading and understanding Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which states that people want to feel valued.  Marketing that’s skillful, honest, and smart, wins trust from the customer.  You build trust by creating a valuable relationship with a customer. It’s the trust your customer has on your product or service that drives revenue for you. You don’t want to push things on customers; you want to add value to their life.  You’re not trying to sell them something, but helping them get what they really want. And this is the basis of people-based marketing. It makes people feel valued because it leverages the knowledge of who they are and what they need to give them what they want.  The key is to use your marketing skills respectfully and ethically, engaging and compelling your prospects to buy what they already want and need. 

2. Have a customer’s persistent ID

Having a unique customer ID works wonders in any marketing strategy. It would seem to enjoy talking to the real person and compelling them to buy what you’re selling.  To create your customer’s persistent ID, you need to collect real-time data about the customer. You must collect first-hand information and combine it with third-party data. And finally, use the information gathered to create a customer’s profile. 

In the profile, you need to include information collected about the customers such as their age, interests, a position they hold in a company or their source of income, their demographics, and the devices they use.  Reliance on cookies for marketing is ending soon. The only form of marketing that can enable you to be in the game and the competition is people-based marketing. It will allow a marketer to send a personalized message, to the right customer, at the right time.  You need to have data from your customer: Not just data, but useful and real-time data. Having it will help you develop a marketing strategy that will skyrocket sales.  As a marketer, you need to have the following data about your customer:

1. Are they using a laptop, a mac, a desktop, or a phone to browse?
2. You should know the phrases they input in search: to enable you to understand what interest them. 
3. You should know their age and products that they most like. 

Having this data will go a long way in helping you create a real-time customer ID. 

3. Automation 

The typical automation, which most marketers use, might not collect useful real-time data because of its limitations. If a new customer logs into a site and shops for something before abandoning the cart, you can identify the device or the user and hence keep data unless the customer signs up using an email. 

However, with people-based marketing automation, it is like a fish to the barrel. You can collect first-hand information from the customers because it doesn’t rely on cookie-based data.

4. Identify individual customer on across multiple devices and channels

In 2016, digital customers owned 3.64 connected devices. It’s a daunting task to track the user over these connected devices unless you use a people-based marketing approach. Most brands have a customer’s email lists. However, these brands can’t marry the customers to the connected devices they are using.  This makes their marketing campaigns inefficient. The key in any form of marketing is to get a high ROI, which can’t be a tussle if you sent relevant marketing messages to the right audience has a clear insight about the device and channels the consumer is using. 

Conclusion

Marketing is becoming competitive every day. Companies are paying hefty prices for marketing campaigns. While it’s good to spend a considerable amount to get sales, it’s a noble idea to consider carrying out effective marketing that has a high ROI. The future of marketing is people-based marketing.  Wouldn’t you want this kind of marketing for your business, one that has a high ROI and low cost per accusation?  We can carry out a highly targeted people-based marketing campaign for you. Contact our people-based marketing consultants at Fieldtrip for a free 30-minute consultation on how to increase the marketing ROI in your business, e-commerce site or startup. We’ll set the pace to get more sales in your business.