Big Data, Humanized, and the Future of Marketing
Does the emphasis on data-driven marketing mean that human marketers can be more easily replaced? A quiz made the social media rounds a while back. It was just one question. It asked you what your job was and then determined the likelihood that you would be replaced by AI in the near future. My job in marketing and PR was solidly in the "Safe" realm. Why is this, while so many other jobs such as computer programmer, ironically enough, were not?
The answer can be found, at least in part, in the buzzy term, H2H Marketing. H2H posits that, armed with vast amounts of data, courtesy of AI and Machine Learning, marketing will become MORE human. Now, we've all heard of B2B and B2C, so what distinguishes H2H? H2H marketing is something that, I expect, good B2B and B2C marketers have been doing all along. It is listening to your customers, anticipating their needs, asking questions and connecting with them as another human being rather than Joe Corporate Cog. One of the earlier mentions of H2H can be found on Bryan Kramer's blog in 2013 and it sparked quite a discussion in the comments.
Human beings are varied and contradictory creatures. We are great at a lot of things: building relationships, empathy, cooperation, invention, survival. But we are also limited in how much data we can gather, retain and retrieve. As marketers, we rely on our soft, relationship building skills in tandem with technology that enables those skills to shine. CRM systems organize all that cold hard data so we can turn it into warm handshakes and, hopefully, meaningful, long-term business relationships. With so many products out there, unless you are a well-known brand, it can be difficult to cut through all the noise. That is where meaningful engagement becomes more and more important. Gone are the days when a slick email or even a personal phone call served as the gold standards. As marketers, we have so many more options available to us now, and it is up to us to determine the best route of engagement, whether it be social, in-person at events, via text message etc., for each and every customer.
Data and machine learning, rather than putting us out of a job, are enriching our interactions and making them more beneficial for everyone involved. They are supercharging the intangibles that make a good marketer. The curiosity that prompts us to tap into a potential new customer base is powered by information about what that group has supported in the past, and what is exciting them now. The empathy that leads a marketer to put themselves in their customer's shoes to suss out their wants can be primed by facts about actual customer needs and desires. Good marketing has always been H2H marketing but, in a world of vast data and machine learning-powered personalization, it seems that we need to call attention to it even more heartily. How human of us.
Bonus: A few additional articles to provide insight into this trend.
A Q Digital Studio blog post about how H2H centers around Knowing your customer.