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As creative people and marketers, we spend a lot of time thinking about the relationship between people and brand. Hours of sorting through data trying to determine if a particular ad, campaign, color, or headline was a huge success or a massive flop (or worse—totally neutral, revealing very little of value). 
We can get really obsessed, trying to get in the mind of the customer and understand them on a deeper psychological level that they don’t even understand.
I spend a lot of time reading blogs and books, or attending webinars, trying to understand why this and not that.
“Why did this button copy have a better click rate than this one?”
“Why did people seem to prefer this background color so much more than the other?”
Often, authors or webinar hosts will reference Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs when explaining the relationship between psychology and marketing.
If you’re not familiar, the Hierarchy of Needs is a framework by Abraham Maslow which theorizes that people are motivated by five basic categories of needs: physiological, safety, love, esteem, and self-actualization. It’s also, conveniently, represented in a rainbow.

The framework is simple, but the ideas here are complex. While much time has been spent diving into each of these categories, today, I’m going to spend time on that middle piece — love and belonging.
Cultivating a sense of belonging
Ever shown up to a party by yourself? It’s terrifying. If you are like me, your first move is to make a beeline towards the bar. After that, I usually find myself scanning the room for someone I know or someone who looks familiar to me. I feel instantly more comfortable in situations when I see representation. It moves me from safety needs to belonging needs. So what does this relationship look like between brands and their customers?
You have probably noticed the recent trend for brands changing their logos to the various LQBTQIA flags for pride month. LinkedIn, Spotify, Airbnb, and loads of others have jumped in on this trend.

Other brands have released rainbow limited edition products like Vans, Apple, Skittles, and Adidas. Some brands are even sponsoring pride content on streaming services like Hulu.

Don’t get me wrong, the more representation the better. But, inclusion is more than throwing up a rainbow flag for a month. Inclusion requires empathy, and empathy requires understanding.
I am welcoming of all types of inclusion, but if you are looking to create lasting relationships with certain communities, you must tap into the psychological need we all have as humans to belong and feel like equals. This level of representation is still very rare for most brands.
Watch these two commercials and tell me what is different.
Campbells:

This ad, while cute and representative, still has the punchline around being gay.
Wells Fargo:

This ad is not about being gay. It’s about being a family. You could easily swap the couple out for any gender or orientation. It was written with a couple in mind, not a gay couple. Why not just write a great script and cast people, of any kind? Why limit yourself by saying these have to be a specific way? I have always found it interesting that, as marketers, we feel like we have to write specific things for specific people rather than focusing on a great story or punchline. That’s hard enough on its own.
You need visibility and representation, but in a way that doesn’t frame the queer community as outsiders, but as people. Just like everyone else.
This is important from a human-to-human level — trying to see past stereotypes and misconceived notions of what you think a person is like, and actually getting to know them for who they are, and what is important to them. 
Belonging and love needs (from Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs) are only met when we take the extra step as marketers to see and understand that all people just want to be seen and shown as equals — not as props or checkboxes.
Small steps toward inclusivity
If you are a marketer looking for more ways to ensure you are being inclusive, here are a few things you can do:

Audit your sites and other marketing materials to ensure the photography or illustrations represent an equal balance of all people in authentic situations.
Include pronouns in profiles and signatures (if you aren’t already).

Push back on clients, managers, co-workers if there is feedback around inclusion and diversity.Tip: If you are dealing with people who want to talk numbers have them google “pink money” and the rise of LQBTQIA buying power.

Share your platform with members of the LQBTQIA community throughout the year rather than just seeking them out in the month of June. Collaborate with them on things other than LGBTQIA content, and allow them the space to speak about areas of passion or expertise. There is nothing more inspiring for a young professional than to see someone who is a badass in their career, and just happens to be out.

Above all else, check your own bias as a leader to make sure you are leading and inspiring the team around you to care about these issues.Extra Credit: Visit your local HRC branch and spend some time with people who work there. Understand what the LGBTQIA is still fighting for and what they need from local businesses in terms of support.

The post What Inclusion Really Means: Pride Month Edition appeared first on Campaign Monitor.

Next time you open Netflix, I want you to try something.
When you see your tailored suggestions, as the platform starts the video right where you left off on your iPad, stop and take note of that experience.
How do these experiences actually make you feel?
Does the device handoff give you a rush of excitement and gratitude?
Probably not.
Start over. Imagine opening Netflix again.
Your recommendations are gone, replaced with an unfiltered list of content. The list feels random, but then you’d expect at least a couple of shows to be of random interest. They’re not. That episode you’re halfway through on your iPad? You’ll have to scroll back and forth to find your place. Ultimately, you’ll probably just rewatch parts of the episode “just to be safe”.  

If you’re like me (my apologies if you are), you’ll react more to this moment of friction than the moment of seamless performance. The seamless experience is largely invisible — it’s unfelt — while the bad experience is impossible to ignore. Based on how bad it is, it’ll haunt you and sometimes make you question your life choices.
It may even push you toward Hulu or Disney +, or another platform that you trust more.

The same dynamic is at play for the digital experiences you deliver to customers.

2020 and 2021 accelerated digital transformation across industries, creating a new set of expectations in your customers’ personal and professional lives.
For them, being delighted isn’t a capstone to their experience as your customer; it’s the cornerstone your relationship is built on. Today’s buyers have more options, and disruptors are acquiring — and retaining — new business through the experience they provide their customers.
These new expectations present huge opportunities for those who are willing to rethink their digital experiences and a huge risk for those who are not.
So, why are so many businesses failing to meet these expectations?
Is it because they just don’t care about the customers’ experience? Sometimes — but not usually. A vast majority of businesses would love to deliver a delightful experience.
The reason they don’t is mostly because cobbled-together point solutions can’t deliver a clear view of the customer.
After all, scaling companies are in a constant state of adaptation. As new needs and opportunities arise, companies introduce a network of individual solutions that solve discrete problems: a CRM to manage customer data, a CMS to build their website, and marketing automation to scale their efforts.
Over time, as you add more solutions, your company’s tech stack grows so unwieldy it becomes a barrier between you and your customers instead of a bridge. It keeps you from the agile reporting you need and makes automation way more complicated than it should be. It makes personalization unreliable and messaging fragmented.
Since the dawn of the digital age, the status quo has been to rely on a separate CRM, CMS and automation tool. It’s what many marketing leaders have accepted as a necessary evil — despite the friction it causes for customers.
So, how do today’s companies win?
By delivering a best-in-class, unified digital experience that exceeds customer expectations. Doing this requires two foundational elements.
1. Information
Any marketing based on assumptions is doomed to failure. To get the digital experience right for every individual customer at scale requires reliable, organized and actionable data.
Not just ‘who are your customers?’ but ‘who is this customer?’ How and where have they interacted with you digitally? What do they need from you right now, and more importantly, what will they need from you next?
At HubSpot, we built the Customer Code with this philosophy in mind: Use the data you have access to, don’t abuse it. But in order to leverage the data you gather to create better digital experiences, all of your customer-facing teams need a single source of truth for that data — a key ingredient that’s beyond the reach of companies that still use cobbled-together solutions. That’s where centralization comes in.
2. Centralization

Providing a seamless experience across touchpoints is really a matter of shifting from ad hoc point solutions to a crafted, unified platform that provides a single view of the customer. When a CMS sits alongside key sales, services, and marketing tools in a centralized system, every customer-facing team knows how customers are interacting with their business and — more importantly — how they can help.
And this is the key: if you want your marketing, sales and service teams to deliver a great experience, you have to give them a fighting chance. You do this by having the systems and data they use aligned and unified.
For example, consider a repeat visitor to your pricing page. If both marketing and sales can see this activity, the marketing team can send a discount code or helpful resources that contextualize your pricing while sales can reach out to offer guidance or a product demo.
With this centralized platform and toolset, you can see and anticipate customer needs and take action immediately. You can tailor digital experiences on an individual level, across touchpoints, using the most up-to-date insights on customer needs, questions or interests — just like they expect you to.
The CRM for Today’s Customer Expectations
The answer to these business challenges isn’t just to use a CRM. You probably already have one of those. If you’re really unlucky, maybe even two. It probably doesn’t allow you to easily do any of what I just described, and it likely can’t deliver the seamless experiences your customers expect.
Instead, you need a CRM platform that has been designed specifically to meet today’s sky-high customer expectations; one that you can adapt to changing customer expectations, align your teams around, and adopt without an uphill change management battle. (And no, there are no change management battles that are downhill).
To pull off this digital experience at scale, you need to rethink the underlying components of the experience itself.
The customer-facing pieces — your website, email content, advertising, member portals — are front and center. But only touchpoints that are powered by a modern, purpose-built CRM provide the personalization and timeliness that distinguish an average digital interaction from an elite one.
And whether it’s Netflix, HubSpot or your corner cafe, delivering elite customer experiences is the key to navigating uncertain times, thriving in the digital-first era, and ultimately, growing better.

A steady stream of leads is vital for any small business. It allows you to grow your email list, customer base, and increase revenue year over year. But without a lead generation strategy, you’ll lose valuable market share to those that have refined this process. The good news is there is more potential than ever…
The post 5 Best Lead Generation Techniques for Small Businesses appeared first on Benchmark Email.

I just started with a small-ish business recently. They’ve been around for 30+ years, but they were big on the “let’s send an email blast by manually entering our clients’ emails” approach. For reference, I was given a lead spreadsheet on Friday with 20,000+ names. I was asked to bring them into the 21st century, basically. The only issue is that, apparently, our monthly budget is pretty tight. I pitched some automation program options–I’m SharpSpring certified, so I tried to push it–and was told my budget was $50-100 a month. Yikes, right? My question is: is there any program that does automated lead tracking for an affordable price? I want to do as much as I can, just to prove that automation should be a part of the monthly budget in a big way.
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