I’ve had clients classify marketing as “selling;” but if you want to actually generate sales, there’s a mindset shift that needs to happen. To effectively sell, you must first connect.

Rather, marketing should be treated as a form of relationship building. We take something we love and connect that interest, in the form of a product or service, to another person. It’s a passion transfer. It’s sharing your story with people whose needs or desires align with your own. You’re not selling, you’re connecting. We connect to what makes us human so incorporate that into your marketing. That is what makes marketing interesting and powerful.

While this process is no different from building connections in your personal life, for some reason, connecting with people on a mass scale feels messy. Within this post, I give you a basic, three-step mindset shift that enables you to create the same types of connections you build in your personal life when communicating on a mass scale.

Step One: Imagine One Person

A persona is an imaginary individual who represents an audience segment. These are “people descriptions” and one of my favorite marketing tools to humanize an otherwise unapproachable group of customers. Personas allow us to dig into the nuances between different types of customers, making your listener, reader or viewer tangible.

As you start to build a persona, you want to use as much research as possible to paint a picture of this individual (start by digging into the data on your owned platforms; e.g. website, social media, email marketing, etc.). You can grab demographic information, but also behavioral data. You may have a persona for the customer type who interacts with you once a week, and one who comes once a year. How do their needs differ? How do their behaviors differ when they interact with you?

I like to start this exercise by exploring motivation. I can jump down a deep rabbit hole discussing Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs, but it’s one tool that can be incredibly useful when exploring human motivation. If you’re not familiar with this psychological tool, Maslow’s hierarchy includes five tiers of human needs:

1. Physiological needs

2. Safety needs

3. Love and belonging needs

4. Esteem needs

5. Self actualization

The theory states that when the lower levels of the pyramid are satisfied (physiological and safety), our primary motivation is driven by higher level needs. So first, think about whether your product is creating a convenience, meeting a basic need, or whether you’re closer to the top of that pyramid, and in a way, contributing to your audiences’ identities.

Since our actions are driven by our motivation, this activity is a great resource to create a realistic, well rounded persona, that digs deeply into the mind of your consumer.

Step Two: Humanize Your Brand

Our goal is always connection. You can’t sell until you connect and we don’t connect with the intangible. We connect with other people; so within this step, I challenge you to explore the human qualities of your brand.

Personify your brand. If your brand was a person, how would you describe him or her? What does he or she look like? What drives this person? What’s his or her passion? This is a great opportunity to revisit Maslow’s Hierarchy and explore where your brand lies, but take this exercise seriously and dig into the details.

As you did with your persona, paint a picture of a real person and explore the parts of your brand personality that attract others.

Step Three: Consumer + Brand Alignment

The last step becomes finding the overlap between each persona and the humanized version of your brand.

Just like we have different friends in our life who fulfill us in different areas, there may be certain components of your brand personality that appeals to different audience members. Your goal within this step is to find the intersections between your brand and each of the consumer personas you’ve created.

You should finish the first two exercises with people outlines. Within the last step, you’re essentially defining their friendship. Why do they connect? What unites them? How and when do they connect? Identify those intersections and use them to craft your messaging and build meaningful consumer relationships.

Want to get specific? Shoot me a note to chat through how these steps can be applied to your brand.