h2h marketing

If you’re in the online marketing world, there are literally hundreds of acronyms to remember. SEO, PPC, B2B, B2C, YMYL, and EAT, just to name a few. One newer acronym, however, is standing out these days: H2H, or human-to-human, used to represent a type of marketing much like B2B, B2C. It’s sometimes also called P2P (person-to-person) marketing. I just heard of H2H a few weeks ago from members of our #ContentWritingChat Twitter chat. (Thanks, @alberMoire and @Renoe!) And I love what H2H represents so much, I had to take it to the blog, research it and write about it. H2H marketing is a herald term for amazing things. Quite possibly, the future of how marketing is done. As web marketing changes to focus less on pushy sales strategies and more on providing customers with real, genuine value and relevance, the importance of human-to-human marketing is quickly becoming even more pronounced. Could H2H soon usurp the more traditional, colder B2B and B2C marketing, and take over the world of marketing forever? Here’s what you need to know about why and how H2H marketing tactics will affect the future of marketing as we know it. Why H2H Marketing Is Golden If you’re the owner of a business, chances are you don’t walk around introducing yourself as your business. There’s likely no, “Hi, I’m Mountain SEO & Marketing, Inc. Nice to meet you!” While you may claim your business as an entity for which you’re responsible, nobody is their business. At least not literally. While this may sound obvious, it’s actually really important. While businesses are big, powerful entities, we need to remember that a business is only the public-facing facade of a group of actual people who are doing a specific type of work together. While it’s tempting to regard businesses as entities in and of themselves, we need to remember that behind every business is people, and it’s the people who are actually making the decisions that drive the company. This, my friends is where H2H marketing enters the picture. Just like nobody introduces themselves as their companies, companies aren’t ultimately the ones making purchasing or marketing decisions. While businesses may utilize products, people within the business are the ones who are actually purchasing them. In light of this, H2H seeks to focus on catering to individual people rather than big corporations, and it’s the foundation for much of what’s going on in today’s inbound marketing world. The Connection Between Inbound Marketing and H2H: 6 Key Similarities There’s an argument to be made that the rise of H2H came about at the same exact time as the death of outbound marketing. Because inbound marketing has been designed so deliberately to focus on creating human interactions and relationships, it feeds perfectly into the foundation. In fact, inbound marketing is one of the main reasons that H2H is currently enjoying the prominence that it is. There are six important places where inbound marketing and H2H intersect. Check them out: 1. Inbound marketing focuses on finding pain points One of the most effective marketing tactics of all time is to find a person’s pain points. Pain points are real or perceived areas of difficulty that drive customers to purchase a product, good, or service. For example, if a person is sick of constantly looking for important receipts or losing critical paperwork, the pain point is likely a disastrous lack of organization. Once that pain point becomes unbearable for the person in question, they’ll likely head out into the market and search for a problem to help them relieve the pain point. In this case, the makers of a virtual organizational platform like Evernote would have a good chance of making a sale. By identifying pain points, companies succeed not only in making more sales, they also succeed in getting to know their customers on a deeper level. 2. Inbound marketing seeks to build knowledge about customers Gone are the days when companies just marketed to whoever would listen. Today’s successfully businesses are focused on identifying target personas and creating an increasingly more personalized marketing experience for clients. In order to do this, however, companies must get to know their clients, which forges exactly the type of relationship upon which the H2H philosophy is based. 3. Inbound marketing focuses heavily on optimizing website for people While search remains an important marketing tactic, the trajectory of inbound marketing has demanded that companies focus first on optimizing their content for people and second on optimizing it for search engine crawlers. This creates more valuable sites and a better user experience. It also places the customer at the front of of the marketing experience, which is critical if a company is to market successfully to its consumers. 4. Inbound marketing wants users to have a good time In the world of inbound marketing, user experience is a hugely important metric. This means that companies who arrange their web pages in order to provide a positive human experience are likely to draw more users and succeed more at H2H marketing than those who don’t. When users have a great experience with a company either through emotionally evocative advertising or outstanding service, they’re more likely to come back thanks to the human connection that’s just been formed. 5. Inbound marketing drives social media connections In today’s world, people head to social media to connect with other people and inbound and H2H marketing are right there to meet them. When brands build relationships with customers via various social media outlets, they provide more positive experiences and start more conversations. This, in turn, leads to a deeper relationship between company and consumer and encourages brand loyalty in customers. 6. Inbound marketing focuses on guiding sales decisions While outbound marketing of days past focused on cold sales and all but forcing people to purchase a product, inbound marketing focuses more on guiding people toward sales decisions in a valuable and informative way. Today, people want to start with information (in the form of valuable content marketing material) and work their way eventually into making purchasing decisions, which is a tenant straight out of … Read more