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Tuesday 2¢ – A New 3 H’s

Ian TruscottT2c

This week’s thought: What we can learn from the psychology of a good conversation in our marketing, and it involves a hug.

You may be familiar with the 3 H’s often used in content marketing; we create Hero, Hub, and Hygiene content.

Summarizing wildly, “Hero” is the big message, “Hub” is the content that connects the big idea to our proposition, features, and functions, and “Hygiene” is the stuff we have to publish, table stakes content, or regulatory stuff.

Well, I have a different 3 H’s for you this week.

I recently learned that the secret of a great conversation and a good relationship involves figuring out what the conversation is for—what does the person you are talking to want or need from it?

One theory goes that the desired outcome in all conversations is one of three things: to be heard, hugged, or helped.

Which I took to mean:

  • To be heard, they want to provide you with information, give feedback, or express their thoughts and ideas.
  • To be hugged, they want empathy and understanding of their situation.
  • To be helped, they want guidance on solving their problem.

Of course, not all conversations stay in one place; maybe once we get through being heard and hugged, we want to be helped.

This resonated with me, as I can’t count how many times my loved ones have come to me, and I have jumped to assuming they wanted help and tried to solve or diagnose a problem when they just wanted to share something or chat about it.

I’ve been told it‘s “a man thing” (I have a house full of girls) – maybe….?

We do the same thing in B2B marketing content; we assume that every marketing conversation is the third option and that everyone who has stumbled upon us wants to be helped.

Of course, to be helped could be exactly what our content consumer is looking for.

But rather than expressing how we can help in a personal or business sense with content about outcomes and opportunities, we express how we can help practically with features and functions and how our doohickey differs from the rest.

And that might be missing the mark, so I contend that we need content to cover all 3 H’s:

  • We heard. We show that not all of our ideas are our own. Through thought leadership, we demonstrate how we listened and understood the market, the buyer, and the industry challenges. And product messaging that’s not all features and functions but why they exist and how this listening shaped our product or solution. We see you.
  • We hugged. Share content that says everything will be OK. It should show the difference our product or solution made for the people we help through success stories and anecdotes. It’s going to be alright.
  • We helped. Create case studies focused on how we helped people with problems like theirs —not just on the benefits of an innovative, leading, easy-to-use, AI-powered, and data-driven flipper that flaps 17% faster than the next flipper and is 100% TLA compliant. We’ve done it before.

That’s my thought for the week. I will try to apply this “heard, hugged, helped” thing to my everyday conversations, but I also think we can learn something from it as B2B marketers.

A new 3 H’s.

I heard about these 3 H’s in a podcast, and I found this idea referred to in many articles. However, it apparently originated from a New York Times article written by Jancee Dunn titled “When Someone You Love Is Upset, Ask This One Question,” which is tucked behind a paywall.

Fancy more of this?

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