In this day and age, B2B marketing has become a monotonous drone of an industry. With so much technology and opportunity at our fingertips, B2B marketing has become kind of a burden to both the salesperson and the person being sold to.

Automation has brought a world of opportunity to the B2B industry, but it’s also been detrimental to some companies as they’ve chosen to go the robotic route versus the human one. 

In this blog, I’m talking about why it’s so important to keep the human aspects of B2B sales alive, how we do it here at HyperSocial, and how you can take away some of our tips and tricks to create a more human-focused process in your own B2B business.

Let’s dive in!

Why focus on the human aspects of B2B marketing?

The era of technology, no matter how we see it, has taken away the human aspects in almost every industry. Whether it’s B2B marketing, sales, or manufacturing, tech has been both a blessing and curse for many, but there’s not a clear cut line between what is good and what is bad, which is why it’s so important to set those standards for your business yourself.

At our company, being human is in every aspect of what we do. From writing our messaging campaigns to our clients, to sending personalized weekly check-ins for every campaign, to writing content that sounds like real people on our website…we try to add as much human in as possible to scale our growing business and yours, too. 

Focusing on the human aspects of B2B marketing is the new trend and it should be because:

  • It shows your audience that you’re a real person doing real things.
  • It creates trust that a robot can’t.
  • It sounds like a real person, not a bot that’s spam calling or emailing, which enables you to be seen in a better light and have better open rates, closing rates, and more.
  • It allows you to put more of yourself out there for your business which is exactly what your customers want more than ever.

It all sounds like common sense. You don’t like being sold to like a robot. You hate spam calls as much as the next person and you want your business to succeed, so why would you participate in any of this, right?

Well it’s easy to fall into the trap that you’re not when really you are. That’s why we have a process here at HyperSocial that helps us stay out of that trap when we think things are going right, when they really might be going wrong.

How We Keep It Human at HyperSocial

At HyperSocial, we have a loose process that helps us stay the course when we want to ensure that our human is showing. From our writing to our automation processes, we want to ensure that we’re delivering a human-focused campaign, and not an automated-focused campaign. 

We use a ton of software at our company to ensure we’re keeping everything in line, but we also know that having a human touch to every part of the process is crucial. So, whether you’re an SaaS company or someone who has never touched automation before, you have to have a strategy (that’s scalable) to ensure you still have some human through every step of the process.

Here’s how we do it:

  • A human writes every single messaging campaign, every single blog post, every single email.
  • Another human (usually two or more) reviews each campaign, blog post, and email.
  • Each campaign is set up in our automation software by a human and at least one person every day is inside our customer accounts looking at messaging, analytics, and making notes about what was seen and done.
  • At the end of every week, a human sends out analytics, reviews specific metrics, and shares wins with every customer.

Boy, it sounds like a lot of time, right? And it is, but it’s important. Even though we do all of this for every single campaign and every single client, we have created a system that works for our team to ensure that a human is touching every account every. single. day.

But you may be wondering, how do they get it all done? How do they have time in the day to do this? Is there a way that I can scale this type of model for my business?

And yes, there is!!

How You Can Create Human-Focused B2B Marketing Processes (Without Pulling Your Hair Out)

So you know that you need to keep a human focus inside your business, but where do you get started? Here are a few tips that may be helpful to you when you start out on the path to a more human-centric business.

  1. Read everything you write out loud: Take a few extra minutes to ensure that what you’re sending out to your customers sounds like it was written by a human. Taking this step allows you to hear what it sounds like when your audience is reading it and (spoiler alert!) it shouldn’t sound like a robot.
  2. Ask yourself questions from your customer’s point of view (or better yet, ask your customers for feedback!): It’s easy to get caught up in your own business, so it’s imperative that you get feedback and take feedback from your customers to make your processes more human focused. What part of your process seems like it’s automated? What are some areas that could be improved? These questions and more will give you the answers you need to start implementing human-centric actions.
  3. Think about a time when you felt really seen as a customer: Write down all the examples you can come up with. See if you can implement one of these ideas or at least create a step in your process that could yield the same results: feeling seen, heard, understood, inspired, etc.,.
  4. Look at what your competitors do: If I had to guess, as with all industries in the B2B sector, your competitors could be doing something differently and much, much better. Be that different, much better business and add a human touch to it. What can you put into place that will outdo your competitors by bringing the human into what you do.
  5. Use video and content: Creating content, especially video, with real people in it shows your customers exactly who you are, what you do, and why you do it. The emotion is felt ten times over in a video than in an email. Here’s an example from our team that went out to our customers!

Be a Human.

At the end of the day, the best advice we can give you is to be yourself. Be the human that you are and everything else will fall into place. B2B businesses fall to the wayside now more than ever because they’ve lost sight of what really matters.

The fact that we’re all humans who make mistakes, who care about people in our lives, and who want to succeed, makes it easy for us to forget that what we’re looking for in our personal and professional lives is connection and relationships.

When we can connect and develop a relationship with someone, we are always better off than we were before. And that’s exactly how we feel at HyperSocial and the way we hope you feel, too.

If you’re willing to give it a shot, adding human-centric processes to your business can make all the difference in the world. We’ll be back with more actionable tips on how to create human-focused processes to show you exactly what we mean, but for now, soak this all in and start brainstorming on the ways you can get started on being human again in your B2B business!