Wait. What? H2H? P2P?
Yea, I can totally anticipate the internal groan of anyone reading this. Trust me, had it been me, I’d have rolled my eyes twice over the use of yet another jargon. But I can’t help it. I can only convey this message in the language that the industry understands, and that dear friends, compatriots (oh no, the Brutus in me awakes again) is not easy. However, I believe it’s time this needs to be said.
At the end of the machine, and of the business entity is a human being who makes the conscious decision to become your buyer.
Therein, lies the premise of my article.
Now throw in all the technical jargon you want… ‘supply chain,’ ‘e-commerce,’ ‘business to business,’ blah blah and the point is, unless there’s a bot making purchase decisions, you’re dealing with a human who has a high EQ and IQ and can easily detect your authenticity.
This is blatantly obvious. Why do I need to point this out?
Because unfortunately, marketers, entrepreneurs, businesses have all been clouded by the term, ‘business to business,’ which simply means a business making a commercial transaction with another.
In the digital world though, B2B has taken on a very different meaning — it is not just a business selling to another business.
Today, B2B means a business using every creative means possible to stand out from a crowd of other similar businesses, in a virtual setup, to sell to another business that enjoys a variety of sellers to choose from.
You literally have to market, advertise, pitch, network, sell, analyze data and maintain your reputation all at the same time just to win that one person making the purchase decision. You’re far off the mark if your strategy does not take that person into consideration.
Notice that I used the word creative. Digital business-to-business or business-to-customer selling is all about creativity, but how do you be creative if you’re not able to visualize the business as an entity being managed by humans.
Human to Human as Opposed to Business to Business
Thus, my logic is that we need to start seeing B2B as an H2H (human to human) and B2C as a P2P (people to people).
As a marketer and content specialist, I’ve come to the realization that we’re so focused on employing selling strategies, using numbers and data that we’re forgetting our essence as humans. Somewhere in all our strategies, we miss the mark when we let ourselves be bothered by rankings, SEO, marketing returns, ad returns etc. Not that these aren’t important, but they are the secondary elements.
Your primary element is the human you’re selling to and what ways you can employ to convince the human to not only buy from you but also remain your loyal customer.
This is the crux of all advertising and marketing. The googles, facebooks and apples are all run by humans and if you have to sell to them, you have to know how to win the people that run them. With all my experience, I can tell you that you can’t sell with just clever copy — it takes more than a creative tagline to get a business or a customer to buy.
What does it take to deliver H2H strategies?
The first step ask yourself this — if you are the business, what would make you buy from this vendor? Creating H2H content starts with reverse psychology and putting ourselves on the customer journey.
The problem is we never put ourselves on the customer journey.
We never see problems, bottlenecks or issues because we never sit back and travel on the journey. We only see the need to make profit, to earn ROI, to get that marketing campaign go bombastic, but we never want to dig deeper and evaluate our intent as well as the intent of our customers.
The second step is to stop trying to be pretentious. I’m saying this because I’ve seen it and experienced it. There are thousands of job posts out there that states, ‘need a world-class writer to write content for business leaders and the international market.’ My question is, what makes a world-class writer? What kind of language do business leaders use? What kind of language will they want to read to make them buy? Will it be academic English? Will it be research-journal English? Or will it be simple, day-to-day language that captures their need efficiently?
As a content expert, I can tell you there is no standard way to write copy.
There is, however, the need to understand your customer’s journey and at what point they need your services.
Good copy, therefore, captures this point of contact, identify the needs of your customers and delivers the solution.
Gone are the days when flamboyant language would impress.
The third step, stop going for ‘trends.’ A few years ago, story-telling was unheard of in digital media. Today, almost every other business wants story-telling in their strategy which is a good aspiration, but there has to be an objective, a purpose and most importantly a need for it. You can’t just create stories because it’s the latest trend.
You have to know the purpose for every strategy you employ and whether they are ultimately tied to the requirements, persona and need of your target human.
The fourth step, know what your target human wants. This is the entire purpose of H2H content. To know what your target human wants and delivering them that want to lead them into buying from you.
If your target human wants inspirational stories, give them stories. If your target human wants to read case-studies, give them case-studies. But don’t give case-studies if they are hardly going to read.
Imagine for a second, will the CEO of a company really click on the case study link of your website to read a case study? Or will he be more inclined to read an article that popped up on his Linkedin feed?
You can’t answer these questions if you don’t know your human. If you don’t know your human, you can’t create effective strategies. If you can’t create strategies, you can’t grow your business even if you spend a million dollars in advertising.
That, dear friends, is the entire case for human to human marketing. It’s time we drop the jargons and avoid cliche strategies. It’s time to stop being stigmatized by the endless need to capture the, ‘business,’ essence and instead try to capture the human essence. It’s time for these terms to become obsolete.
Like you, that CEO, that director, that purchase manager is probably looking for fresh, amusing, sensitive and empathetic content. They’re probably tired and unimpressed with reading the same old percentages, numbers and tall claims.
Like you, they need a break from cliches.
