Thank you to everyone who attended the Internet Domination Bootcamp in Las Vegas last month, it was great to see you! We had another successful event with a lot of thought-provoking ideas shared. For those who attended and those who couldn’t, this month’s article features a little summary of my presentation on how you can utilize Corporate Anthropology in your Marketing efforts.
Defining Corporate Anthropology
Corporate Anthropology is a subfield of Anthropology which focuses on the bigger picture of how culture interplays inside businesses and marketing funnels. Importantly, it delves into insights on human necessities and cultural patterns that influence market behaviors. Utilizing Corporate Anthropology in your Marketing funnels is thus a natural extension of this deeper understanding of your client base. After all, increasing your leads and case loads all stems from understanding, analyzing, and predicting human behavior. By crafting a marketing campaign that really seeks to connect to your ideal clients, you deepen your understanding with them and are able to then build a deeper and better trust — which is ultimately how leads convert.
One Dr. Michael Henderson explains the role of Corporate Anthropology well when he describes that:
“As a corporate anthropologist I spend thousands of hours each year educating my clients in the three motivating forces at work within human culture that drives all behaviors. Any and all human activity is driven by one or more of these three motivators:
Control: the primal need to be in charge of vital resources such as time, energy, money, health, information and destination
Relate: wanting to relate to and receive relating gestures from others to effectively and deeply connect and belong, and
Develop: the need or desire to change, grow, adapt, innovate, ideate and invent.”
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If we take these three key points into consideration on how you craft your marketing campaign to better line up with your clients on their journey of seeking an attorney, they are likely seeking your services because they feel a lack of control. By crafting your campaign in an empathetic way which seeks to really connect with them you are aligning on the second motivating factor- the desire to relate to others and feel understood. At the completion of their case, they again can focus on development in their life — that is, getting back to the pursuit of their core ideals. All of these concepts can be used when crafting your customer avatar — which should be where all of your marketing efforts stem from.
Using Culture in your Customer Avatars
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While most customer avatars include such information as demographic specifics such as age, gender, and jobs, they don’t often contain aspects of how the larger culture and these three forces of human motivation interplay. However, by incorporating these concepts, you can craft your customer avatar and marketing funnel in a way that will truly touch your clients and build the sufficient trust and understanding with them that you need for them to make a purchasing decision and choose you as their attorney.
You can utilize broader cultural studies in crafting your client avatars by looking at the region you are marketing to. In the United States, for example, often your potential clients are going to be inundated with advertising, legal and otherwise. The history of our advertising industry, and its expansion, over the last few decades has generally made the populace much more suspicious and prone to research before making decisions.
A new study by Lead Forensics even found that some leads will take a total of 32 touch points from your firm’s marketing efforts to convert. That’s a significant number! These statistics and mindsets illuminate the importance of developing a unique selling proposition for your firm and utilizing many different marketing strategies to connect with your ideal clients across multiple platforms.
Sales Calls — A Strategy of the Past?
Another marketing strategy that this general cultural behavior exemplifies is the need for human connection. Therefore, a sales call cannot be underestimated — it adds that human touch and relatability that we all seek.
By reaching out to your ideal clients in a way that makes them feel understood, your case load can increase significantly. Marketing isn’t necessarily all about selling a service or product, after all. It’s about humans connecting to other humans.
One way to utilize this strategy in your marketing funnel is by implementing a 2-step form. These forms can range from ‘Contact Us’ forms on your website to product page and order forms. The first one should contain very simplified fields, such as just a name and e-mail. After leads enter this information, they should be sent to a second form that contains more in-depth information, such as all the data you need to reach out and set up a potential intake call. The reason for splitting these forms up is because research studies have shown that some consumers will click-through to your forms and then abandon them when it comes time to fill out more extensive information, especially an address or credit card information. By capturing their other information first, before they even click-through to the detailed fields, you can capture a unique and very targeted list of potential clients.
At this point, the targeted list will give you a great and more manageable starting point to make a few sales calls. Remember that these should not be aimed solely with the mindset of trying to sell, but rather understanding your potential clients’ situation. Asking informational questions such as “Do you need any more information on what legal services you might need?” allows you to develop more of an education-based marketing style that will convert more leads than a cold-call asking right out of the gate whether they are interested in hiring you. While education-based marketing like this may take a little more time, research has shown that in the United States it converts far more than other methods. This can also be traced back to the cultural components at work here, which show that the United States populace tends to be very research-intensive and suspicious of marketing and advertising.
In Conclusion… Corporate Anthropology can offer you tools to help develop a better understanding of your ideal clients. By crafting your customer avatars and sales funnels in a way which utilizes these bigger, cultural ideations — you can truly be more successful in growing your case load and firm. As a Corporate Anthropologist and Marketer, myself, I have seen first-hand how much these strategies and deeper understandings can really improve sales and lead conversions. If you have any questions or would like to read any further research on the studies mentioned here (they are extremely interesting!), feel free to contact me at courtney@pilmma.org.
