In today’s digital era, brands are rushing to data and different social media platforms to connect better with customers. Conventional wisdom is that by going through social media. By doing so, brands engage in a one-way conversation with customers as a way to predict trends. The danger of that system is that the conversation does not allow for growth and deeper interactions. Brands are human creations, thus must be able to connect in a humanely way with the audience. 

On the latest edition of the Braze Magazine, Kelsey Cottingham, editor and content marketer at the Braze, penned a great piece about the need for brands to keep a human voice as a way to interact with their audience. She starts off her article with the premise that today’s market is centered around the customer. “It’s in nearly every headline, every industry talk, every webinar. We’re in the age of the consumer. Brands need to be customer-first. Customer-centric. Customer-obsessed.” 

“We’re humans, too, after all. We experience customer engagement marketing as consumers every single day. We know what kinds of messages are resonating .... because they resonate with us when we take off our work hats and go home.” Marketing and advertising allowed for brands to talk to audiences. These talks usually worked around the local culture and how the brand fits within the culture. Today’s society, and ultimately market, revolves around personal needs. Brands have to figure out how to connect to those needs. By adopting a human voice and attitude, companies have a chance at holding that conversation. “To be effective as brands, we need to converse with people in a manner that stimulates their emotions. We need to be more human. But we’re also in the midst of a digital revolution, a time when there are more devices than human beings on the planet. So we have to be more human, but achieving that end means leveraging technology…. The Brand Humanity Index helps us to understand how and why we do that. And with results like a 1.6x increase in likelihood to purchase and 1.8x increase in likelihood to recommend for brands seen as more human, smart marketers are going to want to pay attention.” 

Traditional marketing has taken brands to a high level degree of interaction with the market. With the rise of the Internet and technology, marketers must never forget that they are serving humans first, and thus, have to speak in a humanely way. If they fail to do so, audiences will turn away and engage with the better ones.