Some days, it feels that marketing is changing 1 degree every day.
One of the changes that has been unfolding over a good while now is people's rejection of faceless brands, and recognition of personal, sincere connections with the personal brands behind the brand. Enter MK Getler.
Me and MK go a few years back. I consider her an old friend and teacher, for she helped me get my start at Hubspot way back when we were both working there.
She now is the Director of Customer Marketing at Alyce, an AI-powered gifting platform that helps teams build higher quality relationships faster with customers and prospects.
As part of our expert community series at tribetactics, we're always on the lookout to balance our own research with the insights we learn from experts in our community.
It is not only ineffective to interrupt prospects with generic outreaches, it's also rude, let alone relatable. To that extent, Alyce practices PX, or personal experiences. In her own words,
MK:
"PX is an approach to creating personal bonds by transforming as many moments as possible from one-to-many to one-to-one throughout a customer’s journey."
We should always remind ourselves as marketers and salespeople how important one-to-one relationships really are. They are second-to-none, and people can tell the difference between generic and genuine.
The difference can be the delta between building a sincere connection or remaining an unknown; lost in all the other noise your prospects have to wrestle through.
MK:
In a world where prospects and customers are harder to engage than ever before, we believe those personal bonds are created through a personal experience that’s relatable, relevant and respectful."
Today brands truly are bands of individuals. We sell ourselves short when we don't make the time and effort to convey our genuine and unique interest in those we speak to who are individuals like us.
Video content is not something you should overthink, as long as you have your core values aligned around being relatable. Relating to your customers, and ensuring they can relate back to you.
MK:
"Video - like personal gifting - is one of those power modalities to deliver moments of personal experience. If considered thoughtfully, video content has the ability to influence every aspect of the customer lifecycle."
Whether or not a buyer is ready to purchase your product or service, all of your video collateral has the ability to create an affinity to your brand. After all, people don’t buy for logical reasons. They buy for emotional reasons.”
One of my favourite things about Alyce is something that I see them talking about online, and that MK has echoed in our conversation - focus on the 5-9 instead of the 9-5.
In other words, focus on the things that matter to the individual - well beyond their day job.
This is a prime way to recognize your interest in them as an individual, not as a job title. Episodic content is synonymous with focusing on the 9-5.
MK:
"Creating binge-worthy content also means stretching outside of the 9:00 am - 5:00 pm. We at Alyce believe that being personal inherently means tapping into the 5:00 pm - 9:00 am.
Brands now have a responsibility to create content with entertainment value and that means bringing more of the 5-9 into the mix."
One of the things I admired about her team's approach is their apparent "giver" mindset, which we obsess about over at tribetactics. The opposite of spray and pray, they spend time truly considering every video episode and content piece prior to publishing.
They anticipate how their customers and prospects may feel about them, and often scrap things that don't make the cut because they know it won't have lasting impact.
MK:
"For us at Alyce, we are very mindful to consider giving the right thing, at the right time, with the right follow-up. This consideration creates the right action in our prospects and customers.
With that consideration in mind, we constantly push ourselves to create video content - both episodic long-form and short-form - that has a purpose, is non-interruptive, and is always useful. If it's doesn't fit into those three buckets, we simply don't make it."
Looking to learn more about making episodic marketing personal? Check out our guide here.