What is Humanized Marketing?

Humanized Marketing is a way of increasing organic growth by building better connections with customers using marketing that’s memorable, relatable, easy-to-understand, and differentiates you from others.

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Why Do I Need Humanized Marketing?

Build a Customer Referral Community

With a human-centered marketing approach, you can connect with your core audience of people that buy into why you exist as a company. In turn, creating a community of die-hard customers who love to refer your products.

Stand Out in a Sea of Robotic-Sounding Humans

Building a human brand allows you to stand out, in the sea of robotic-sounding humans and gives you a better fighting chance especially if you have a newer product or are a smaller business.

Helps Your Audience Relate to You

When your marketing is relatable, people can easily envision how your product will enhance their lives.

Makes You Easier to Understand

A human touch to marketing helps you simplify your messages. In most cases, you don’t get a do-over if a customer finds it difficult to understand why your product is needed. They just move on to the next provider.

Become a Living-Breathing Entity

Being human in your marketing transforms your company from a distant entity to a living breathing company with people. People prefer to connect with other people and not companies.

Become a Must-Have Instead of a Nice-to-Have

When customers find a brand that they connect with, who sells a product that they love, it makes the purchasing decision a no-brainer.

What are the Characteristics of a
Humanized Marketing Strategy?

Marketing that's differentiated

Showcase your brand’s unique identity by your style of delivery and highlight what makes your company special.

Marketing that's easy to understand

Your marketing messages are easy to understand without the need for further explanation.

Marketing that's memorable

You won’t get every sale but with humanized marketing, we shouldn’t forget you.

Marketing that's relatable

Your audience gets a sense that you understand them and can easily relate to your message.

Also, you don’t have to be funny.

Although we’d love that.

So, how do I humanize my brand?

Here are the three pillars of humanized marketing (LED)

Listen

Do you understand the everyday challenges that your customer faces?

Empathize

Can you describe the effects of your customer’s pain and do you sound like them?

Dream

Can you use storytelling to help customers envision a better future?

I'd like to learn how to connect better with my target customers.

8 Steps to humanizing your brand

1. Identify your unfair advantage

What does your brand bring to the table that’s hard to find elsewhere?

2. Analyze your brand perception vs. reality

Get employee and customer feedback on what makes your company unique. Does this align with what you thought was your unfair advantage?

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3. Categorize your brand identifier

Once you’ve gathered your research categorize your brand identifier into three main areas; knowledge, quality, service. Is there one heavily weighted area?

4. Determine your unique brand identifier

From your data, which brand identifier category does your brand fall under? Quality, knowledge, or service? Within that brand category, what’s the common thread? Is there something that customers mention a lot about your brand? That’s your unfair advantage and the essence of your unique brand identifier.

5. Show off your unique brand identifier

Select the channels that you’d like to use to amplify your marketing message. Which channels are your target customers using?

6. Use the LED (Listen, Empathize, Dream) humanized marketing message concept

Ensure that your new marketing messages have the LED marketing message elements. Sound like you understand the pain (listen), describe the effects of the problem (empathize), create a sense of a better experience with your solution (dream).

human side of marketing

Humanized Marketing Messaging Tips:

Use our marketing message storytelling format as a reminder:
“If you don’t tell me [who] why, then I won’t care how, and I won’t want to do what you want me to.”

  • Use simple language – No MBA papers or Ph.D. thesis, please!
  • Avoid industry jargons and technical language
  • Show off your brand’s personality – choose to use humor or not, but be relatable
  • Share stories whenever possible
  • Showcase the people in your organization
human branding in marketing - human psychology in marketing

7. Create a customer interaction and feedback plan

To ensure that your marketing is continuously connecting with customers. Create a plan for interacting and gathering feedback.

8. Track your brand perception

How is your brand doing? How many people are identifying the company with your unique brand identifier?

Download Brand Perception Template

What’s the Difference Between Personalization in Marketing and Humanized Marketing?

Personalization without humanization may not create a connected experience.

Personalization involves creating a tailored marketing experience for each person. It can be general or it can be specific to each user. For example, if you visit a website and the website greets you by name, that’s a form of personalization.

Humanization can create a connected experience, even without personalization

Humanization, on the other hand, focuses on the type of emotion or reaction that you’d like to receive from a person once they see your personalized message. Essentially, personalization and humanization can work together to deliver a more connected experience effectively.

Personalization and humanization can work together to deliver a more connected experience.

Here are answers to some of the questions that you might have about humanized marketing.

Every industry is only as boring as the people that say it’s boring. Even if you are from an industry that doesn’t allow for informality, you can still aim to sound more relatable and easier to understand, while showcasing what’s unique about your business. Remember humanized marketing is about creating better connections.

How funny a joke is, lies in the humor of the listener (see what we did there?) Yes, humor is great, but being relatable is what’s important. Even if you are not funny, but your audience can easily relate to your messages, you’ve done your job! You create relatable marketing by focusing on your target customer’s challenges.

That’s because humanized marketing is more than marketing message simplification. First, you have to identify what you want to be known for and then use the simplified messages to communicate that. Additionally, to connect, your audience has to feel like you relate to their pain.

Cha-ching! If no one is trying to humanize their brand, then you are bound to stand out and be memorable.

Humanized brand building is only for Business to Consumer (B2C) companies if you are selling to robots as a Business to Business (B2B) company. If yes, press-on captain! Seriously, humanized marketing is for everyone.

Ready to Give Your Marketing a Human Touch?