Because your customer is a human being, not a conversion event with a LinkedIn account.
Marketing has become extraordinarily sophisticated.
We have artificial intelligence, automation, predictive analytics, customer data platforms, attribution modelling, behavioural tracking, personalisation engines and dashboards capable of telling us precisely how far someone scrolled before deciding they’d had quite enough of us.
All of this is genuinely useful.
But somewhere underneath the technology, acronyms and mysteriously expensive monthly software subscriptions sits something marketing occasionally appears to forget.
People.
Because however sophisticated marketing becomes, the fundamental job hasn’t changed very much: understand people, understand their problems, create something they value and explain clearly why it might help them.
Customers Are Inconveniently Human
Marketers like categories. Segments. Personas. Demographics. Audiences. Leads. Prospects. Users. MQLs. SQLs.
Customers, however, stubbornly refuse to behave like any of them.
They hesitate.
They change their minds.
They buy something because a colleague recommended it.
They ignore the beautifully constructed email sequence and telephone you instead.
They spend three months researching something and then make the final decision because one company seemed easier to deal with.
Occasionally they leave your website after twelve seconds because the cat has been sick on the carpet.
Your analytics will record this as: Session duration: 12 seconds.
Which sounds much more strategic than: Emergency involving cat.
Data can tell us a lot about behaviour. But it doesn’t automatically tell us why people behave the way they do. Measurement can show what happened, while understanding the reason often requires something more human: observation, conversation, experience and judgement.
We Know More About Customers Than Ever Before
This is one of modern marketing’s stranger contradictions.
We’ve never had more customer data.
We know what people searched for.
What they clicked.
Which email they opened.
Which advert they saw.
Which page they visited.
How long they stayed.
What they bought.
Whether they returned.
We can determine what type of biscuit they were eating while doing it if somebody releases the correct SaaS platform.
And yet businesses still regularly struggle with surprisingly basic questions:
- What do our customers actually care about?
- Why do they choose us?
- Why don’t they choose us?
- What are they worried about?
- What makes them trust one business over another?
- What problem are they really trying to solve?
Those questions don’t always fit neatly into dashboards.
Unfortunately, they’re also the questions that make marketing work.
People Don’t Experience Your Marketing Department
One reason we’ve made marketing complicated is specialisation.
SEO wants traffic. PPC wants conversions. Social wants engagement. Content wants readers. Sales wants leads. Finance wants lower acquisition costs. The CEO would quite like growth.
Meanwhile, the customer would like somebody to answer their question.
Customers don’t experience your organisation chart. They don’t know which agency manages your advertising or whether your CRM is successfully communicating with your marketing automation platform.
They experience you.
One business. One brand. One overall impression.
If the advertising is brilliant but the website is incomprehensible, that’s their experience.
If the website is excellent but nobody answers their enquiry, that’s their experience.
If the sales process is wonderful but becoming a customer requires completing seventeen forms and sacrificing a goat beneath a full moon, that’s their experience too.
Marketing works as a system because people experience businesses as systems.
Technology Should Help Us Understand People
None of this means technology is the enemy. Far from it.
AI can help analyse research.
CRM systems can reveal customer patterns.
Analytics can show where people struggle.
Automation can make communication timely and relevant.
Search data can reveal the questions customers are asking.
Technology gives marketers extraordinary capabilities.
But these things are tools.
Their purpose is to help us understand and serve people better.
The trouble starts when the tool becomes the strategy.
If the marketing plan begins with “We’re implementing a new marketing automation platform” rather than “Here’s what our customers need from us,” something has gone slightly wrong.
It’s the marketing equivalent of buying an extremely sophisticated hammer and then wandering around the house looking for things that might benefit from being hit.
AI Makes Human Understanding More Important
AI makes this particularly interesting. We can now create more content, analyse more information, automate more processes and personalise more communication than ever before.
Which sounds wonderful and frequently is, but AI also lets us produce enormous quantities of marketing that nobody particularly wanted in the first place.
Faster.
At scale.
With excellent grammar.
As I explore in Episode 15 of our podcast, producing the wrong thing faster isn’t progress.
Sometimes it’s simply a more technologically advanced way of wasting Tuesday.
The competitive advantage isn’t simply having AI.
Everyone has AI.
The advantage comes from knowing what’s worth asking it to do, and that requires understanding people.
Start With People, Then Choose the Marketing
Instead of beginning with channels, start with customers.
- Understand what they’re trying to achieve.
- Understand what frustrates them.
- Understand the language they use.
- Understand the questions they ask.
- Understand where they look for information.
- Understand what makes them hesitate.
- Understand what makes them trust.
Then decide what marketing you actually need.
Perhaps that’s SEO.
Perhaps it’s LinkedIn.
Perhaps it’s advertising.
Perhaps it’s email, events, video, podcasts or direct mail.
Perhaps it’s something remarkably unfashionable like picking up the telephone and speaking to customers.
The channel comes after the understanding.
Because the smartest marketing technology in the world can’t compensate for not understanding the person you’re trying to reach.
Marketing Has Changed. People Haven’t Changed Quite as Much.
Marketing will continue evolving.
There will be new platforms. New technologies. New AI tools. New acronyms. And almost certainly a new dashboard designed to summarise all the other dashboards. But underneath all that complexity, the fundamentals remain surprisingly simple.
Understand people.
Understand the problem you’re solving.
Create something valuable.
Explain it clearly.
Make it easy for people to choose you.
Deliver what you promised.
Give them a reason to come back.
Everything else should help us do those things better. That’s the conclusion at the heart of Episode 15: sophistication isn’t the same as effectiveness, and complexity isn’t the same as strategy.
Because good marketing doesn’t begin with technology.
It doesn’t begin with a channel.
It doesn’t even begin with a campaign.
Good marketing still begins with understanding people.
Want to explore this further?
Listen to Episode 15 of The Overthinker’s Guide to Modern Marketing: Why Marketing Has Become So Complicated, where I look at how tools, platforms, data, dashboards and AI have made marketing extraordinarily sophisticated, while the fundamentals have remained remarkably human.
