Part 3 in a series on Landing Page Optimization and Buying Modalities, today I’ll talk a little more about the Humanistic buyer behavior and how you can optimize your landing pages to target the Humanistic audience.

In Part 2, I talked about the Competitive Buyer Modality, and showed an example of a page targeted to that group. Now, it’s time to talk about the Humanistic buyer. While the true Humanistic buyer modality, like the competitive, is one of the smaller segment types, a lot of the humanistic elements can be carried over to the other buying modalities and so it is still very important. Humanistic buyers tend to be family oriented, and care about personal growth for themselves and others. They tend to be slow-buyers, but are very open-minded when looking for a solution. They can also be very loyal to product, and look for a strong relationship with the seller. When they are happy with a product, they like to share and recommend it, but, on the flip side, they can be just as vocal when they are disappointed. Customer service is important to them, sometimes just as much as the product itself.

Imagery of families, or pets, or cute animals draws their attention, even moreso than product imagery. Messaging of value, trust, strength and longevity are key. They also like community and environmental aspects, so “green” products tend to do well with humanistic messaging. Good examples of humanistic advertising tend to be found in cleaning products, bathroom items (soaps, toilet paper) and groceries. Because women (moms) typically do the shopping for these items, some advertisers might think humanistic should primarily appeal to female buyers, this isn’t always the case, and it should be based on your target market.

Once again, I’ll reference the Market Sense Blog on appliedmarketing.com as a good place to find tips on marketing to Humanistic Buying Modality:

Appeal: Drawn to authentic relationships.

Website: Present your product from the human perspective. Tell stories about how others selected, implemented, used, and solved their problems with your product.

Information Needs: Answer questions on who you are and who has used your product to solve his/her problems. Will want to explore the possibilities your product presents with you.

Understand: The big picture – how choosing you will affect their relationships. They will want the best people solution.

Process: They will want to explore the possibilities, understand the big picture, evaluate the human aspect of your product. The most important part of their process is the relationship.

Time: They will be relatively slow paced. You will have to spend more time than usual building and nurturing the relationship.

Risk: They are willing to take leaps of faith based on their intuition. Yet, they will steer away from decisions that create conflict and confrontation.

Decision: Will want the emotional confirmation that this is the right choice for the people.

The creative team I worked with also did a page focused on the humanistic buying behaviour, which is the example shown below (click to enlarge).

The product offering is the same product as the comeptitive example in Part 2, a credit report monitoring service, and had the same challenges – Appeal to the humanistic buyer modality without alienating the spontaneous buyer. So, while this project isn’t a true example of a 100% humanistic approach, it does contain elements geared to the humanistic buyer modality in order to appeal to a broader market.

1. Use “parent/child” imagery.
2. Bold, bright color palette.
3. “Trust” element placed very prominently in the header
4. Messaging about “financial future”, coupled with the family imagery alludes to the fact that your finances can effect your family/children.
5. Prominently placed customer testimonial.

Again, this isn’t a fully focused humanistic landing page, and they are several other ways we could more directly target the humanistic buying behaviour, but the purpose of this was to repurpose the existing product and make it appeal to a different buying behaviour. The product itself, along with it’s benefits, use, delivery and purchase are exactly the same as the competitive example (and, as you’ll see, the same as the methodical and spontaneous examples in parts 4 and 5 of this series as well). The idea is to make changes in order to target a broader audience, or possibly target a direct segment. If this were a true “humanistic campaign”, there are other changes we would make not only to this lp, but also the “drivers” (banner, search listing, etc) to truly focus on the humanistic buying modality.

As with all the buyer modalities, it’s important to know your customer/audience, and choose which focus might work best for you. However, I hope this post gives you a little more insight on how to target a broader audience, and I hope you return to read the next part in the series.

Be Sociable, Share!

• 
•