[SPEAKER_00]: time to fuel your business success.
[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome to Harmonious and Lunch.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're bringing you bite-sized advice and expert conversations to drive clarity in growth five days a week.
[SPEAKER_00]: Make sure you join our Facebook group at humanop.com slash lunch where it rescues like you and our guests hanging out so we can find fun.
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[SPEAKER_00]: If you're building a business, you're in the right place.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's dive in.
[SPEAKER_02]: Welcome back in.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's a more bite-sized business advice.
[SPEAKER_02]: Today's episode, we're talking about human first marketing.
[SPEAKER_02]: It sounds like a lot of fun.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, I'm a fan of humans.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's in the name of our company.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's in the name of our other podcast.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I can't wait to dive in.
[SPEAKER_02]: And today's guest has, I think, the coolest company name yet on the show, Dr. Raff, Social.
[SPEAKER_02]: So Phil, Triggas Evans.
[SPEAKER_02]: Welcome to the show.
[SPEAKER_02]: And thank you for being here.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks, Brandon, I'll take the accolade as well for the coolest business name ever.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, we give absolutely no prizes.
[SPEAKER_02]: There's no money.
[SPEAKER_02]: There's no awards.
[SPEAKER_02]: So it's really just a verbal compliment, but I'm curious.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's good to have those every now and then, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: Where's giraffe come from?
[SPEAKER_02]: I have to know giraffe social.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's not two things you'd necessarily put together.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's um, so giraffe social we we started around thirteen years ago.
[SPEAKER_01]: So you're asking me to really go back in time here.
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, but when we started the agency, we looked around and every agency had the most boring name for business ever.
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, so we thought, well, what can we do that would be different interesting, perhaps something that we can brand around.
[SPEAKER_01]: So we decided to pick an animal and I remember my co-founder and I
[SPEAKER_01]: Sitting down, working our way through the animal kingdom, sort of discussing the pros and cons of different animals.
[SPEAKER_01]: And we settled on giraffe because at the time our tagline was got reach.
[SPEAKER_01]: I got milk that got reach.
[SPEAKER_01]: really, really smart from me as a twenty-two-year-old there.
[SPEAKER_01]: And drafts obviously have a long neck, so it kind of fitted.
[SPEAKER_01]: And we also like the colors as well.
[SPEAKER_01]: We could kind of brand around.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, yeah, we were called Giraffe.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I've, you know, I've answered this question.
[SPEAKER_01]: To basically every interview candidate we've ever had in the job, it would have been an interview for new people.
[SPEAKER_01]: They always want to know how did you come up with Giraffe.
[SPEAKER_01]: And yeah, that's the story.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, it's interesting.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like you said, every marketing agency's got some sort of boring name.
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's like, all right, we'll stand out a little bit, practice what you pre-try.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, exactly.
[SPEAKER_02]: The next company name is a blue-footed booby marketing.
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't know.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'll give you that one, Phil.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's my new song, you know.
[SPEAKER_02]: All right, let's dive in here.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, we're really supposed to talk about today.
[SPEAKER_02]: Human first marketing.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's one of those things where when you first hear it, it's like duh.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then at the same time, but do we really do that?
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's kind of this double-edged sword, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: So tell me from your perspective first, what is human first marketing and then we'll dive into how you accomplish that?
[SPEAKER_01]: Sure.
[SPEAKER_01]: So human first marketing is
[SPEAKER_01]: any marketing strategy where you are putting people at the heart of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: So typically the people involve there are two sides of the business relationship.
[SPEAKER_01]: So one side is your team or yourself and the other side is your customers and your target audience.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's really founded on the belief and not really so much of belief but just the reminder to ourselves that
[SPEAKER_01]: Businesses are just one group of humans, trying to provide value to another group of humans.
[SPEAKER_01]: We talk about BTAB and BTAC.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's people working in companies and there's people buying products and services.
[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, it's about getting back to thinking about the humans involved.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, which I love and I'm curious how this plays out in this new world of AI where we're replacing humans with robots and computers.
[SPEAKER_02]: I think there's a sense of craving human connection in the marketplace right now.
[SPEAKER_02]: Have you seen that play out, especially over the last couple of months?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so that was really one of the driving factors was the over the last couple of years.
[SPEAKER_01]: We have seen
[SPEAKER_01]: more and more sort of human focus strategies work more effectively than anything else and I think you hit the nail on the head is sort of a craving for humanity and you know
[SPEAKER_01]: I always brilliant.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, we all use it every day.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's no, there's no question about it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think we do have to embrace it.
[SPEAKER_01]: But one of the downfalls of AI is that we're seeing a lot of lazy marketing and a lot of, you know, I call it like the great homogenization of content.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, everything is starting to sound the same, book the same, and
[SPEAKER_01]: The ultimate way to differentiate yourselves is to lean on the human side because no one out there can copy the people within your business and your culture and that's what makes you unique.
[SPEAKER_01]: So we're finding the strategies like
[SPEAKER_01]: influence of marketing is not this one, but employee advocacy, executive social media presence is another one we do a lot and and and even stuff with customers like user generated content and you know getting to collaborate on your marketing with you.
[SPEAKER_01]: We're finding they're getting the best results and I think that's only going to be more the case as we get more and more saturated with very high-pied marketing.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I mean, it's so easy to put out content.
[SPEAKER_02]: And there's no, there's no threshold of the quality anywhere.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like a couple of years ago, I remember if you were putting out raw.
[SPEAKER_02]: authentic content.
[SPEAKER_02]: And for me, that's full of typos and grammatical errors.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, that would have been like, what are you doing?
[SPEAKER_02]: Why are you on LinkedIn with this content?
[SPEAKER_02]: You look like an idiot.
[SPEAKER_02]: And now the script has flips back into my court because that means that I did it and not a robot did it and people want that.
[SPEAKER_02]: So how do you help your clients really put out content that's worth watching reading, consuming whatever that is?
[SPEAKER_02]: but not feeling like this sort of boxed in AI produced content.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think I heard someone recently say to me that they deliberately put a spelling error in their LinkedIn posts on every post, just one little one.
[SPEAKER_01]: Just so people know that it's not AI, which is crazy, but it's the world we live in now.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think
[SPEAKER_01]: The best thing to do to avoid it is to understand your audience, to take the time to get to know them.
[SPEAKER_01]: I always say, pick up the phone and speak to them.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you run a podcast like this, speak to your listeners, see what they like.
[SPEAKER_01]: What do they love about the podcast?
[SPEAKER_01]: What do they find useful?
[SPEAKER_01]: What's valuable?
[SPEAKER_01]: What are they experiencing in their life that
[SPEAKER_01]: is creating issue or they're worrying about or they're trying to figure out if you can do that as a business and then focus your marketing content on providing value rather than focusing a marketing on like what can I get from my audience what can make them do focus more on what you can provide and you'll end up seeing you know far better results so we always talk about
[SPEAKER_01]: not focusing so much on the conversion stage and focusing a little bit more on the advocacy stage, like shoot for advocacy.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's, you know, yeah, you can generate a quick sale or a quick lead, but ultimately try and build a business where people are so happy with what you do and how you market that they want to tell people about it and they want to buy the next thing that you do.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's really where I think things are heading, especially as it's so easy now to start business and AI again is making that even easier.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's really about building advocates.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I agree.
[SPEAKER_02]: You think, you're, you look at the biggest brands in the world who have done this really well.
[SPEAKER_02]: Apple comes to mind, obviously.
[SPEAKER_02]: They have people lining up every year for essentially the same thing they already have in their pocket, but they have rabid fans.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's not a knock on Apple.
[SPEAKER_02]: I will knock Apple.
[SPEAKER_02]: Believe me, I'm not a fan, but that was not a knock.
[SPEAKER_02]: That was actually a compliment that they do something really, really well.
[SPEAKER_02]: But you know, you look at these brands that do that and they're one of the bigger examples.
[SPEAKER_02]: There's tons of smaller and even local examples who have this sort of rabid fan base.
[SPEAKER_02]: But it comes from like you're saying, putting the human first having human-centric marketing.
[SPEAKER_02]: So if someone's listening to this and they're wondering,
[SPEAKER_02]: Am I being human first?
[SPEAKER_02]: Am I putting the humans first in in my marketing and what I'm putting out into the world?
[SPEAKER_02]: Is there some sort of audit that they could do or is there are their telltale signs of what's going on with their marketing with their lead flow where they can really analyze where they are on the strategy?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think, you know, the book is full of frameworks and is a really kind of, it's a good litmus tester to work through.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I think some top line questions that you can ask yourself is,
[SPEAKER_01]: How many faces are they in my marketing?
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's a really easy starting point.
[SPEAKER_01]: And are they real faces?
[SPEAKER_01]: Are they stock images?
[SPEAKER_01]: Are they they are generated?
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, how many real people can people see in your marketing content?
[SPEAKER_01]: That's one question.
[SPEAKER_01]: The second is do I understand my audience?
[SPEAKER_01]: Or do I just think I understand them?
[SPEAKER_01]: Like,
[SPEAKER_01]: is it demographics and you're thinking, yeah, well, I know my audience is on average between twenty five and fifty in their mail and they, you know, like golf and whatever it is, but
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a whole bunch of people in that demographic and they're all pretty different.
[SPEAKER_01]: My favorite example of that is there's like a list of demographics of two different people who have the exact same age.
[SPEAKER_01]: They are born in the same area.
[SPEAKER_01]: They live in the same sort of area.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're interested in the same sort of things.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then you find out that it's actually King Charles and Ozzy Osborne.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's like, OK, so these are two very different people, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: They're not going to play the same sorts of stuff.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's where demographics kind of fall down.
[SPEAKER_01]: So you know, taking the time to understand your customers.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's another one is really asking us to do you understand your customer or do you just think you're making assumptions about who they are and what they what their pain points are.
[SPEAKER_01]: Those would be the two best places to start.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think if you're just looking for a really easy kind of litmus test of how she'd been faster being with your marketing.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, great advice.
[SPEAKER_02]: And again, it's back to basics, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: Like this is not necessarily new content.
[SPEAKER_02]: We should have mentioned you have written a book and it was a bestseller in Amazon.
[SPEAKER_02]: So remind me of the name and where people can go find it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so the book is human first marketing.
[SPEAKER_01]: The art of being seen trusted and remembered and you can find it on Amazon as a hardback paperback and Kindle.
[SPEAKER_01]: I am going to be doing an audio book at some point when I can
[SPEAKER_01]: build up the motivation to sit down and read out loud for a couple of days.
[SPEAKER_01]: I keep putting it off and I think the problem with having a book or human first marketing is I can't really get anyone else to do it.
[SPEAKER_01]: I kind of need to do it myself.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I'll sort of back myself into a corner there and be yeah it's available on Amazon.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, you've really got to think through the strategy of that one before you name it.
[SPEAKER_02]: But that's okay.
[SPEAKER_02]: Listen, feel you have a great voice.
[SPEAKER_02]: I think I'm going to hold out until the audiobooks there because I like your voice so much.
[SPEAKER_02]: But we're not going to give away the whole book.
[SPEAKER_02]: But tell me about the next step before I let you go because getting back to basics like we just said, then what?
[SPEAKER_02]: Do we have to dramatically change our content is it really just stop doing what everybody else is doing and do what what feels right for us in line with that demographic like what's what's sort of the next step for a business.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think trying to be as authentic as possible.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's probably once you've now down at who your customer is and including faces and being personable and being authentic and building relationships.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's probably the next big thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, stuff like this.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it sounds silly that jumping on calls with people and getting to know people and learning about their stories and all of this stuff can really inform you of marketing and help you kind of get your message across in a way that feels more authentic.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think we saw this really happening during the pandemic, the COVID-nineteen pandemic.
[SPEAKER_01]: So many people were trapped at home and
[SPEAKER_01]: I remember the exact statistic, but here in the UK, I think we were spending like three times as much time on social media because everyone was just bored and at home.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so you had this real supply and demand problem where there was never a bigger demand for content on social, but because we were all stuck at home, it was quite hard to create good quality high polished video.
[SPEAKER_01]: So what we found was that people just started to create lower quality content.
[SPEAKER_01]: and weirdly, it outperforms.
[SPEAKER_01]: all of the high quality content because it felt real, it felt authentic.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think it was refreshing.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's one of the things that has remained after the pandemic, is that even huge brands now will, yeah, they'll put out a Polish TV ad, but they'll also do a shot on a phone behind the scenes, kind of, you know, quick cut footage of what was happening when they were filming it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And often that's the content that does the best.
[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, look for ways to include some more authenticity in your marketing.
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't think that demand has decreased since the pandemic.
[SPEAKER_02]: Anything I think it's still increasing.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, I think so.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think the whole sort of everything seeming really polished and airbrushed.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think we all just grew tired of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think it was so refreshing to just see real people creating real content.
[SPEAKER_01]: And yeah, it's, I agree with you.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think the demand is as high as ever has been.
[SPEAKER_02]: All right, last question.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'll let you get out of here because that word you use is such a buzzword and I want to hear you define it authentic or authenticity.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, we've had we've had guests on the show recently who have even broken down authenticity.
[SPEAKER_02]: But for you, how do you balance that?
[SPEAKER_02]: Because some people's authentic is just off-putting to other people.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I don't know if that's a problem of you having a line with the right demographic, or you're just kind of being an a-hole, but how do you balance authentic with consumable at the same time?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so I think in the book, I have a little bit in there's a whole chapter on authenticity and I have a disclaimer in there for jerks and I basically say like being authentic isn't you know a free pass for just being an a whole bit everything you know like I my least favorite thing is when songs is oh I just tell it how it is that's just who I am and it's like
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know if that's something you should just name own like that.
[SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, I think this is a deep philosophical question.
[SPEAKER_01]: being authentic, I think is slightly different for everyone, but it's doing what is natural to you.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I agree with you, I think sometimes when you're being really authentic, there might be some people who say, you know what, not for me, but that's probably a good thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think finding your
[SPEAKER_01]: your tribe and really sort of own it is important because I think if you spend any time sort of pretending to be something or to wear a mask of you know all I like this or I'm like this it's only gonna come back to bite you I think you know because you're gonna attract the wrong customers or you're gonna go on a podcast and you're gonna think I've got pretend to be this person for a while like everything becomes so much easier when you're just you
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think sometimes this goes beyond marketing, but sometimes we will think we need to be something else or try to be a different version of ourselves.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I think just be yourself.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think people will appreciate it, especially when it is sincere and genuine.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I love that answer and that's our philosophy at human op.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's why our technology works and it's so powerful because we can help you understand who you are authentically.
[SPEAKER_02]: How you were naturally designed and live into that authentically.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's the only problem when you realize you have a tribe of one, then you've been far too authentic and off-played.
[SPEAKER_02]: So don't go that far.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think if you're a true self and you have a tribe of one, it might be time to have a little look in the mirror and debate what your authentic self should be.
[SPEAKER_01]: We've got to work on a few things.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's all that means.
[SPEAKER_02]: Do you think of problems, I think, and target audiences?
[SPEAKER_02]: I love it.
[SPEAKER_02]: Phil, this was way too much fun.
[SPEAKER_02]: We should never do this again.
[SPEAKER_02]: Where can the listeners go and learn more about you and and pick up a copy of the book as well?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, I had to Amazon to pick up the book.
[SPEAKER_01]: The best place for finding out what I'm up to is probably LinkedIn and you can just search my name and you'll be able to find me on there.
[SPEAKER_02]: All right, for those of you watching listening, we got websites, Amazon links linked in all that fun stuff down below in the show notes.
[SPEAKER_02]: Phil, thanks for being here and for those of you watching.
[SPEAKER_02]: I hope you join us again on tomorrow's episode of this ridiculous podcast called Harmony said lunch.
[SPEAKER_02]: We want to help you build a more harmonious business and life.
[SPEAKER_02]: We'll see you there.
[SPEAKER_00]: Another episode of harmonious at lunch in the books.
[SPEAKER_00]: I hope this episode made you think, and you grab some actionable ideas to prepare your business.
[SPEAKER_00]: Don't forget to like, comment your takeaways, and subscribe wherever you're listening, so we can help more entrepreneurs just like you to keep your friends alive and look at this.
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