"Speak Human" and Change the Game.

AuthorKern, Merilee
PositionBUSINESS & FINANCE - Marketing tips

NOBODY automatically starts out caring about your products or services. They care about how you can make a difference in their lives. No matter the context, all relationships begin with a "handshake moment"--whether literally or figuratively--those first few introductory seconds that reveal a great deal about the character of the person standing before you. Why should company interactions with current and prospective customers or clients be any different?

Sure, "content marketing" has been a crucial ingredient impelling the evolution of traditional marketing into today's more-personalized approach, bridging the gap between cookie-cutter TV, radio, and print mass marketing to highly customized digital and social media-driven communications. Even so, today's digital communications have plenty of challenges, all too often falling on "deaf ears" and "blind eyes" amid a marketplace becoming highly desensitized to the glut of advertising and marketing messages it is exposed to at any given hour of any given day.

So, how can brands make and maintain meaningful connections and create a lifetime value with customers in ways that will set them apart in a "noisy," increasingly jaded, and discriminating marketplace? How can businesses tell an authentic story so as to foster maximized marketplace engagement and breed brand loyalty? According to Kevin Lund, author of Conversation Marketing: How to be Relevant and Engage Your Customer by Speaking Human, the proverbial key to the kingdom is for companies--no matter their size and scope--simply to "speak human."

Lund, CEO of T3 Custom--a content marketing firm--provides analysis of what is required to succeed in today's modern marketing era, which he aptly has coined the "Conversation Age." He details key principles critical for driving the more-evolved conversation marketing approach, which can help companies amplify results on multiple fronts.

"Those who are wildly successful at conversation marketing understand the strategy is not simply about propagating online content and sharing through social media accounts. Rather, it's a disciplined approach to communicating with a target audience in a way that tells a simple, human story that will educate, inform, entertain, and, most importantly, compel customers in a way that fully captures mind-and-market share through messaging that truly resonates.

"Companies must stop talking 'at' their customers and, instead, connect with them by simply speaking human--and...

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