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The Digital Marketing Podcast
Human First Marketing - Why Trust, Purpose and People Matter More Than Ever
00:29:22
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- [00:00]
A
Welcome back to the Digital Marketing Podcast brought to you by targetinternet.com My name is Daniel Rolls and in this episode we're talking Human First Marketing. Before we get going, just a quick message to say if you fancy spending half a day with me every month, Target Internet membership is currently half price at just £30amonth. And you get access to our live half day masterclasses. So those are run by me. You get access to loads of other stuff as well. We are covering latest trends in digital marketing, the latest AI updates, optimizing for AI overviews, and loads of other stuff. So I hope to meet you on a masterclass at some point very soon. Get over to targetinternet.com and you can see the special offer over there. So in this episode we have an interview with Phil Tregus Evans and Phil has written a book called Human First Marketing. And we get a lot of emails from people reaching out and saying, I've got a book to promote. Can we come on the podcast? And sadly, very often the answer is no. For one reason or another that we can't fit into the schedule. We've had too much content of a particular type, whatever it might be. And I said to Phil, we were absolutely kind of back to back for the end of the year, we'd have to kind of put a pin in it and come back to next year. And he said, well, I'll send you a copy of the book anyway. And he very kindly sent me a copy of the book and I picked it up and started reading it and was kind of hooked and it just seemed to resonate. So then I got back in contact with actually come on the podcast. That will be great. So Phil was very patient and very kindly still came on the podcast. And I think it's a really important read at the moment because we've spoken about this a little bit previously, where everything is AI, where we can differentiate is with the human aspect of what we do. And I've mentioned that quote before. So it's Professor Celia Moore at Imperial College that said to me, when everything's AI and deep fake, we need to lean into our humanity. And I think it's never been more true because if everyone's got this functionality, everyone's got these tools, then how do we really stand out in the crowd? And that's what the book's all about. So I thought it was really great timing. Phil's obviously been thinking about this for a while because there's lots of people talk about it now, but obviously the book was written a little while ago. So I think there's some really good insights, really good way of thinking about things and it might give you a nice way to structure your thinking about where you use AI, but also where you don't use AI. So over to the interview. Right. I am here with Phil. Let's get straight into it and let's get into the bold kind of opening statement. So marketing's not working. So you open the book up by talking about it not working. What's the shift? And you know, how do we respond to that? What does it mean?
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B
Yeah, typically I'm a glass half full kind of guy, but it's quite a negative way to open the book.
- [02:50]
A
I think it's a really valid one because we were just talking before we started this. And to say I don't remember a more fast changing time in marketing and actually taking a step back becomes really important. So to talk us through it.
- [03:02]
B
Yes. There's a few things that I've noticed in running the agency that I run and working with lots of brands and the three sort of main factors for why marketing isn't working like it used to. One is ad saturation. Just the sheer amount of advertising that we are sort of presented with every single day.
- [03:20]
A
Right.
- [03:21]
B
It's a crazy amount. I think one study put it about 360something adverts a day. And our ability to remember them, apparently we can only record 12. So you think how much money is being spent on ads that you wouldn't even remember? The second is trust. And I think there's a we're in a trust deficit now rather than starting from a place of trust. Is there to be lost? It's something we have to earn. And the third thing is that with AI and we were talking about this before we came on how fast it's evolving, it's creating even more distrust because people are questioning what's real, what's not, what's authentic. And I think that as more people use AI for their marketing, we're seeing a homogenization of marketing content where everything is starting to sound and look the same. And as a result, things aren't working as well as they were. Human first. Marketing is my antidote that we've used at Giraffe and seen good results. And yeah, I wanted to put it in a book so that people could use it for themselves.
- [04:25]
A
So let's talk about that then. So what is human first? Marketing. How would you kind of define it and then how is that different from kind of traditional approaches to marketing? Of having a particular tone or something else.
- [04:36]
B
Sure. I think you could argue that human first marketing is quite traditional in the sense that I'm almost sort of advocating for going back a little bit, but really it's about putting people at the heart of the strategy. So starting with people. And there's kind of two sides to that. So one side of that is your customers and deeply understanding your customers and involving them in your marketing so that they can develop into advocates. The other side of it is your team and yourself and your executives and putting your team more to the front with your marketing strategy so that people can see them through methods like employee advocacy or, you know, exec comms or these sorts of things. And that's a lot of the work that we do at Draft now is actually working with large organizations and helping their executive teams have a social presence and helping them install employee advocacy programs that allow their teams to promote the business in a way that feels authentic, really. The whole framework that I put together is built on four main principles. One of those is people. So as I just mentioned, including people and sort of building around that. The second is authenticity. It's the word we all love to hate. Sort of lost its meaning slightly, which I'm sure we'll talk about at some point. Connection, focusing on interactions over transactions. A bit more purpose with that. And the final one is purpose. And when I say purpose, I sort of mean there's two sides to this. One is purpose in the sense of being a business that's trying to do good for people and for planet. And then the other side is purpose in terms of being intentional. And I've lost track of the amount of businesses that I speak to when I say, you know, why are you looking for some support? And they say, because we're just sort of posting to social media. We're just putting marketing content out because we know we're supposed to. But there's not really a strategy or any purpose behind what they're doing. And that's obviously really key. So those are the four principles that is built upon.
- [06:45]
A
Yeah, that last one is a. It's been a constant kind of song for marketing for a long time. It's like. And social media has been the bane of this, I think, just because we know we have to be there, but we're not sure what to do and therefore it doesn't get any traction, but just keep doing more of the same stuff.
- [06:57]
B
So, yeah, there's certain characters in the world of marketing who are always preaching the post more. You've got to be posting more like hustle culture and these sorts of things. And people feel like they need to be posting every hour if they're going to have a chance, you know, and it's. It's just rubbish. I just don't think it's true. We're always big fans of quality over quantity and if you're posting just nonsense and for no reason, it doesn't matter how many times you put it out there, right, it's still going to be the same. So I think it's important to start with strategy and actually have a reason for, like, what are we actually doing here and what are we trying to provide our audience? Where's the value for them? How are we measuring this? So, yeah, that's always something that we come back to.
- [07:41]
A
Just when I was doing some research, this interview, there's one of the points you just made there was interesting because there was a stat from work with World Advertising Research Council and they're saying you're now 12 times more likely to engage with a person than you are with a brand. So that whole piece of actually internal advocacy, our team speaking on our behalf, our team representing the brand, suddenly makes more sense. And the. The reality of, you know, social media is supposed to be social, not the brand broadcasting.
- [08:07]
B
Exactly. And this is kind of what, when I say we're. We're almost going back, is that I think we do need to get back to the basics of reminding ourselves that a business is just a group of people, right, and customers are another group of people. So we kind of lost that, I think things like data and branding, and we've kind of lost that mentality and we sort of hide behind corporate facades on one side and then sort of use our customers as data points in a spreadsheet on the other. And because of that, we've lost the humanity a little bit. And when you then put the humanity back in, you see the results, you see how people engage with it and react and you're spot on. You only have to look at LinkedIn, right? So open LinkedIn and see what percentage of the posts you're seeing are from people and what percentage are from company pages. And it's very clear what the algorithm is wanting us to see. And it's people, and it's because people trust people over logos and brands.
- [09:05]
A
I think there's also a natural little kind of just quick segue with that as well, in that generative engine optimization. Suddenly the large language model is looking at content. Well, one of the things we've immediately seen is Actually, they don't have all that data that Google's got. So what they're looking at is what are people saying about you? How many people are saying, are they saying nice things about you as well? Well, suddenly this human first marketing approach leans into that really nicely as well, because you're building that advocacy as well. So I thought it was quite interesting. Yeah, yeah.
- [09:32]
B
The word that I just kept coming back to in the book is trust. And I think when the world around us is becoming more and more artificial, you know, and based on data, it's. I think the trust element is going to be more important than it's ever been.
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A
You know, it's interesting that aligns with the. We have a professor of ethics at Imperial College, a lovely lady called Professor Celia Moore, and she has this lovely expression she used when she does training sessions, which is, when everything's AI and deep fake, we need to lean into our humanity. And I think this leads into this perfectly.
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B
So it warms my heart whenever I see anyone saying something like that because it's like, yes, that's exactly what we need to be doing.
- [10:09]
A
So, so on that note, how do we, with our audiences, how do we kind of go beyond demographics? So if we really want to understand our audiences a bit more, go beyond that surface level data, what does that look like?
- [10:18]
B
Yeah. So this is one of the things that I think people find a little bit controversial, that I detest customer avatars. Whether that's just because I've had to make hundreds of them over my career, or I think, to be honest with you, I find them a little bit insulting. I think when you just focus on demographics, you're lacking any depth. You know, you tend to do the research in terms of age, location, job title maybe, and then you make the assumptions on things like emotions and pain points and these sorts of things. And I'm fighting the fight for the. To rethink how we do customer research. And so introduced in the book a new framework for doing it. And it's something we use at Giraffe, and I've called it the Empath framework. And each of the letters stands for something because, you know, if you can turn something into an acronym, why wouldn't you? And the E is for emotional understanding. And this is about understanding what your customers are feeling. And one of the easiest ways and quickest ways to do this is to copy and paste all of your reviews from every platform into one word document and then do the same for your competitor reviews. And then, you know, I know I'm the Human first guy here, but then put it into ChatGPT and say, Pick out the emotions. Do some analysis on what emotion, emotional words are appearing, how often they're appearing, and create almost like a word map of what comes up the most. And this is going to give you a really quick idea of how your customers are feeling. The M is market and trend research. So what is actually shaping their world at the moment? Culturally, economically, socially? The P is patterns of behavior. So how do they actually act? You know, looking at your website data, for example, or your social media analytics, what are they actually doing? What are they clicking? What are they buying? What are they avoiding? Think about these things. Then it's audience feedback. And this is a pretty revolutionary idea, but it's about actually speaking to your customers and sort of asking them about what they're feeling. Why did they choose you? Why did they not? Were there any red flags in the sales process? Who else were they considering? The final one. T is team feedback. And again, this is, I think, a bit of an oversight that there's no one in your business really who understands your customers more than salespeople and customer service people, because they're speaking to them all day and we often don't really include them in marketing decisions or marketing research. And they're just an absolute wealth of knowledge. So including that as well, and then the H is the outcome. So you combine all of those things and create what I call a human understanding map, where we're not trying to put people into a neat box and say, this is this segment. We're instead understanding our audience as the messy, complicated, but beautiful humans that they are.
- [13:10]
A
I love it. And you talked about that. The kind of two sides of the human equation. You've got your customers, but you've got your team as well. So it brings us nice into that. So that team, the culture, the values. Let's come back to that authenticity word as well. So how do the company values and the team dynamics kind of shape that? And how does it shape what your target audience end up seeing and feeling?
- [13:30]
B
Yeah, so when I was writing the book, I started writing a lot about the techniques that, you know, I would advise people to use. But I had this nagging voice in the back of my head that a lot of them, because they're so human focused, if you don't have good company culture and values and, yeah, like a level of authenticity, some of them won't work. You know, you take something like employee advocacy. We were doing a panel not that long ago and talking about the benefits of Employee advocacy. And someone put their hand up and said, yeah, but how do we control what our employees say? And how do we know they'll say anything good? They might say negative things. And I thought, if that's the worry, I think you have bigger problems than marketing. You know, you should be focused on building a brand and a culture internally where people want to post to social media, they want to talk about their job and the company they work for. And I think that's the starting point and it's the foundation that all of this is built on. You know, we talk a lot at Giraffe about turning great culture into great content. And a lot of what we do is based on that, understanding the culture of our clients, what makes them unique, what makes them special, and building content around that. So, yeah, it was sort of a. It wasn't in the plan. And then when I was writing the book, I thought, I think I need to touch on how to develop a better culture and better values in terms of authenticity, which, yeah, is one of those words that you, if you work in marketing, you kind of hear it every 30 seconds. And as a result, I think people have sort of stopped taking it seriously. But authenticity is everything. And I really think that during the pandemic especially, we kind of saw that we were stuck at home. People were using social media more than ever because everyone was bored at home scrolling their phones. But making content was harder than ever because again, we were at home. We weren't in a studio with lighting and, you know, all of the equipment we need and other people. So we were forced as marketers to adapt. And the way we adapted was, let's make slightly lower quality content. But as a result, it felt far more real and authentic. And it wasn't polished and it wasn't perfect. And the weirdest thing happened. People loved it. The engagement levels went up. And we've seen since the pandemic that people are still producing this style of content. You know, it's even called lo fi content now. It has its own name. And to me, that's authenticity in practice. Another great example is the book itself. So, you know, naturally, writing a book about human first marketing, I would be the world's biggest hypocrite if I didn't use human first marketing to. To promote it. Right. So what I did along the way was just completely share the journey. It's the first book I've ever written. I had no idea what I was doing. And I shared the whole thing on LinkedIn. Just kept updating everyone on how many Words I'd written, what I was working on, what I was struggling with, being sort of quite vulnerable about the process, asking for help where I needed it, even things like sharing the COVID designs to get people to vote on it, or helping me nail down a title. And what happened was because of the authenticity of me being completely transparent about this process, people felt like they were on the journey with me. So by the time the book came out, there was this sort of community of people who were rallying behind it that I personally believe is the reason it became a bestseller on day one, was that there were so many people who'd followed along, they felt ownership over it, they wanted to see it do well. And, yeah, to me, that's authenticity in practice.
- [17:15]
A
I love that because that idea, a thousand true fans, that idea that if you can have. I don't need to be a thousand either. If you've got a group full of people that really do love your stuff, are passionate, will share it and so on, that amplifies everything that you're doing massively as well. And I think for this podcast, one of the things that at the beginning, I mean, we're talking many years ago, like 15 years ago when we started.
- [17:38]
B
Was that it wasn't how you going.
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A
To make your first million, it was kind of more. I did that. That was disaster. That didn't work. But that, yeah, that was all right. That did work. Why did it work? And it was more those discussions about, you know, honest about it that really made it resonate with people like, oh, I'm struggling as well. Right. I can connect to this. I think it's really interesting. So how do you think, you know, trust is a big theme throughout the book. How do we earn trust now and what some practical ways that we can do that?
- [18:04]
B
Yeah, I think the first thing is to acknowledge and accept for as I mentioned earlier, we are starting from a trust deficit. That trust in organizations, trust in executives, media, government is at a low as a result of that. It isn't enough to just show up. We need to be thinking more about proactively building trust. And one of the best ways to do that is to be visible. And I think the executive teams in brands, I think it's getting better. And I know it's getting better from the fact that we get asked more and more about a giraffe, that people are wanting to do this, but the leadership teams of businesses should be visible. People should be able to see what they're up to, what they're working on, and there needs to be A level of transparency as well. So for me, when it comes to building trust, the first thing I think of is visibility. Be seen, be open, talk about what you're working on, what's not working. If mistakes are made, own them. And actually be really transparent about, hey, look, we're trying to do this and it hasn't worked. One of the examples I always think of is one of my favorite brands of all time, Lego. You know, they are working very hard to try and become more sustainable. And when you boil it down, they're a company that sells plastic bricks, like Ideal, right? I mean, you know, plastics, we're told repeatedly are bad. And they tried something a few years back where they were going to start making their bricks from recycled. I think it was like bottles. And essentially it just didn't work. It. They, the durability of it just didn't work. But because they were completely transparent the whole way through and said, look, we're trialing this, and then they were just as transparent, say it didn't work, but we're going to have to go back to the drawing board, people respected it because, you know, you're not just publishing the wins, you're actually saying, look, this is the journey we're on. It's not going to be all up, so it's going to be some downs. And because they had a track record of transparently trying to be more sustainable, there was a story there that people could buy into and believe. And I think as a result of that, you see more trust in the brand. And when you have more trust, you have more license to make mistakes. And, you know, when there's a crisis, people are more forgiving. Sort of behind you on that.
- [20:17]
A
So, yeah, you mentioned it earlier on. And just to jump off again, a tangent slightly for a second, you mentioned Hustle cup to earlier on. Do you think there is a. We've developed this thing in digital marketing startups in tech world about, you know, the hustle culture. Post every 20 seconds, sleep, you know, one hour a day, all this kind of, you know, stuff. And everyone portrays it, but everyone is. Maybe it's not realistic. It's not really, you know, it's not possible for most people. Is that a complete counter to human first marketing or do you think the two things can coexist?
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B
I don't know if it's a complete counter, but it's. I think it's dangerous. And I'm saying that from someone who definitely was susceptible to that in my sort of early days as an entrepreneur working ridiculous hours because it felt like that was the only way to be successful or to be deemed a success. To be completely frank Daniel it drove me to anxiety. I struggled with my mental health. And I think a lot of that was this external pressure of people were, and they still are in some corners of the Internet, just posting success. This has happened. Oh, we've signed 10 clients this week. We've done that. And I think the reality as you get older is you realize that no one really knows what they're doing. It's just really pretending how well you are doing. Everyone's still figuring it out. And I think that's why being a little bit more vulnerable and honest just drives up the engagement because people are just craving something real that doesn't make them feel bad about themselves.
- [21:50]
A
Yeah, there's a couple of nice examples we'll put into the show. Notes. So targetinternet.com forward/podcast. But from if you look at the stuff that Rand Fishkin's done where he tried to kind of oppose that culture and say, actually we can work hard, but we can work effectively and we don't need two ridiculous hours. And then if you look at stuff that Jay Shreddleson does on the do this not that podcast where he is just completely authentic and just talks about and he's just written a book which is actually on a similar kind of topic. And I've seen him speak so many times. I just think the human aspect of that is what connects you to him completely. So I think it's lovely. Kind of segue into some of those people as well. The whole piece about leadership then. So if you want to make a strong case for leaders being visible online, why is it so important? And how does that strengthen the brand? How does that strengthen the culture?
- [22:32]
B
I think leadership has an opportunity because their voices are listen to. Right. So it's. They have an opportunity. And I think social media is the ultimate platform for especially a platform like LinkedIn for the leaders of a company to be open about what they're working on and what's been going well internally. I don't have the stats to hand but that there's research done into people wanting to work for companies where the leadership are visible, trusting the brand, wanting to do employee advocacy. If they can see that the leadership team are being really active on social media and celebrating the culture and the work that they're doing. And even things like shouting out team members and saying, I just want to draw attention to this person on our team who did something amazing this week, these things are they build trust, but they also build culture in the company itself. And it's almost like social proof at scale, because, you know, a leadership's voice can attract talent, it can open doors, it can elevate brand perception. And I think too many executives hide behind not doing things on social media, and they're missing a trick. They're really missing a trick. And it's something that we're always encouraging our clients to do more of.
- [23:52]
A
Yeah, I think from that, particularly from that talent acquisition point of view as well. If you look at, you know, if we're competing for talent and those people want to see what the brand stands for and really, does it stand for anything yet? What is the value of the brand? Yeah, I think it's a huge opportunity for kind of doing that.
- [24:06]
B
So it's something that we looked at at Giraffe because I'm naturally quite introverted, and it was only about four or five years ago that we thought we. We really need to be more visible. And so I spent a lot more time on my own LinkedIn presence and being on podcasts and obviously eventually writing the book, because, yeah, it's. And we've seen the results. We've seen people who want to work for Giraffe because they're aware of this human first marketing movement that we're trying to sort of initiate, and they believe in it, and they know what we're about and they want to be involved. It's been really exciting, actually, to see that.
- [24:40]
A
So I think you've written the book at a very interesting time, because obviously AI was well underway, kind of the generative AI was well underway, but it's obviously just ramped up, even since you published as well. So with AI playing that bigger role, how do we make sure the human element isn't lost and what opportunities open up? And I've seen from your stuff already, it's not that we're saying AI is bad, it's just that we need to be careful. Yeah.
- [25:01]
B
I always say that. I'm not anti AI, I'm anti lazy AI. And I think. I mean, everyone's using it, right? I think even people who are pretending that they don't are. And I think the reason people are pretending is because there's no nuance in AI anymore. I think it's. People seem to either think it's the best thing ever and you should be embracing it, or it's evil, and if you use it, you know, you're not doing it properly. I personally think we need more nuance, and I think that comes with having discussions and having policies in place where you say, hey, like, this is where we're going to draw the line. This is everything this side we're happy to use AI for, and everything this side we don't look to. At this point, I'm just keen for AI, not to replace humanity. If you want AI to analyze data or, you know, organize things or summarize articles or at least those things, amazing. I think it's brilliant for that. And actually one of the most interesting and effective ways I've used it is essentially as a sparring partner. I used it a lot when I was writing the book to say, like, I'd upload a chapter and be like, why am I wrong? Like, tell me why I'm wrong. To make it challenge me and sort of give me a contradictory opinion to what I was thinking. And that to me is like, that's amazing. I mean, that's the most valuable way I've used it so far. But in terms of what we're seeing with marketing, as I mentioned earlier, everything is starting to look and sound the same. And when that is the case, I believe that the competitive edge now is humanity. No one can replicate the people in your team, your experiences. I used Rick Rubin. He's an absolute hero of mine, like one of the best music producers of all time.
- [26:42]
A
So the quote in chapter one. Yeah.
- [26:43]
B
I just love Rick Ruben. I wish he was my friend.
- [26:46]
A
Maybe we'll be after this.
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B
Yeah, maybe that's my goal. Yeah, eventually. But he talked about this idea that if you had a really good movie script and you gave it to five different AI tools and asked it to produce a film, you would end up with five films that are relatively similar. Whereas if you gave the Same script to 5 humans, you're going to get radically different films. Because all of those people have seen different movies, they've had different experiences, they interpret things differently. It comes back to sort of point of view, right? We all have a different point of view. And if we just outsource all of our marketing and ideas to AI, we're going to lose that. So for me, it's, as I say, it's the competitive edge now is being more human. I think.
- [27:33]
A
Yeah, I'm fascinated because if you look at Google's path of this, right, for content, so they come out four years ago and go, AI content. No, you must not have it. Then they come out and say, good content's good content. Don't get how you create it. And then they come out, oh, it's complex. And then eat comes along and it's like experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust. It's saying you have to put the human element in because if you don't, then it's just AI slop and it's just gonna. So I think it's interesting even the algorithms are trying to reward actually the human element. And this is what's important. It's your experience, it's your expertise is what unique you bring to table as well.
- [28:05]
B
Yeah, I think Google is thrashing around at the moment. Like I'm all trying to figure out how it's going to coexist all of this stuff.
- [28:13]
A
Yeah, it's very interesting. And I think actually as we're in this increasing kind of no click environment, people aren't clicking in search, they're not clicking in social media. That differentiation is really what's going to make brands kind of stand out. I think it's very interesting timing. So Phil, how can people get in contact? Tell us a little bit about the agency. People want to reach out and kind of see what you do as well.
- [28:33]
B
Yeah, sure. So the agency around is called Giraffe Social and we are a social media specialist agency that focuses on practicing what we preach and using human first marketing with all of our clients. The book is on Amazon and various other places, but Amazon's probably the easiest place to source it and I'm probably the best way for me is LinkedIn. So if you want to connect or ask me anything, LinkedIn is kind of where I'm spending probably too much time.
- [28:58]
A
At least we'll put all those links into the show notes. So targetinternet.com forward/podcast that will link through to the book, through to the agency and through to Phil's profile on LinkedIn. So Phil, thank you so much for joining us. Lots to think about and hopefully we'll see you again on the digital marketing podcast.
- [29:12]
B
Thanks, Daniel.
- [29:15]
A
For more episodes resources, to leave a review or to get in contact, go to targetinternet.com forward SLP podcast.