— Why it works

88%

of people trust recommendations from people they know more than any other channel.

73%

of social users say they’ll buy from a competitor if a brand doesn’t respond on social.

— Human-first social / area 3 of 3

Your
Audience

Your customers are real people, not a set of data points.

Human-first social starts in three places: your leaders, your team and your audience. Together, they form the method behind Human-First Marketing, the book our CEO and co-founder wrote. This page covers the third.

Most marketing is built on a persona with a made-up name and a list of assumptions. We build on what your customers actually say, do and care about, then create content and conversations that make them feel understood, alongside the voices they already trust.

— Why your audience matters

Customer avatars are made up. Your customers are real people.

Most marketing starts with a persona: a made-up name, a stock photo and a list of assumptions nobody checked. It's better than nothing, but it's still a guess, and customers can feel it when content is written for a guess.

Meanwhile, they're seeing more ads than ever and trusting fewer of them. What gets through is content that sounds like it came from someone who gets them, conversations that go both ways, and recommendations from people they already trust.

And your audience is rarely one type of person. A B2B sale involves a whole committee, and a consumer brand serves groups who want very different things. Understanding each of them is where good social starts.

— From, HUMAN-FIRST Marketing, Phil Treagus-Evans

"The customer avatar is dead. Long live the human."

— What we believe

How we think about your audience on social.

Ask, don't assume

We talk to real customers and the people who serve them, instead of guessing from a persona.

Give to get

The quickest route to more engagement is giving it. We join the conversations your customers are already having, not just start our own.

They're the hero

Your customer is the hero of the story and your brand is the guide. Content works harder when it's about them.

Don't script creators

Creators know their audience better than any brand does. We give a clear brief, then let them be themselves.

— How do we get to know your audience?

We use the EMPATH framework to find out what your customers actually think.

Our EMPATH framework draws on five sources: what customers say in reviews and forums, what's shifting in your market, how they behave across your site and channels, what they tell us when we ask them directly, and what your own team hears from them every week. No single source tells the whole truth, so we check them against each other.

The result is a map of who your customers really are: their day-to-day, what drives them, what they value, how they make decisions and what they're working towards. Every post, reply and creator partnership is built from it.

— get your free personalised report

How human is your social, really?

The Assessment

Five areas: personality, content, trust, your team, your audience; twenty questions, eight minutes. It's the exact framework we run through in our heads every time we look at a brand's social and ask what's stopping it from feeling human.

The Report

This is where it actually pays off. Once you're done, we send over a full report built entirely from your own answers, every section broken down, three things to fix first, examples of brands doing this well and additional resources. Free, and yours in minutes.

Show me my score

— Where this shows up in our services

How we connect with your audience.

What we learn about your customers shapes everything. These are the three places it does the most work.

See how it fits your wider strategy →

Community Management

Replies in hours, not days, from a named person who knows your followers, plus joining the conversations your customers are already having.

COMMUNITY MANAGEMENT →

Influencer Strategy

Creators chosen because their audience genuinely overlaps with yours, not for their follower count, then briefed properly and left to be themselves.

INFLUENCER STRATEGY →

UGC Content

Content made by real customers and creators, the kind audiences trust more than anything a brand says about itself.

UGC CONTENT →

— FAQ

Ask us
anything

The questions brands ask before they rethink how they understand their audience.

We already have personas. Why do we need this?

Keep them if they’re useful. We test them against real evidence, and the gaps between the persona and what customers actually say are usually where the best content is hiding.

Do you speak to our customers directly?

Where you’re happy for us to, yes. A short conversation with a handful of customers often tells us more than months of data. We’ll also talk to your sales and service teams, because they hear from customers every day.

Where does the EMPATH framework come from?

EMPATH was created by our CEO and co-founder, Phil Treagus-Evans, and published in his book Human-First Marketing. It came from years of drafting customer avatars and feeling they never told us enough. The name spells out how it works: Emotional understanding, Market and trend research, Patterns of behaviour, Audience feedback and Team feedback, which together build a Human understanding map. It’s the framework we use to understand every client’s audience.

Does this work if our customers are other businesses?

Yes. B2B buyers are still people, and they’re often more cautious than consumers because their reputation is on the line. We look at how they behave on LinkedIn, what they ask your sales team and what worries them before they sign.

What happens when people say negative things?

We reply quickly, calmly and like a person, and move anything personal into private messages. A named community manager handles day-to-day replies, with a senior lead for anything sensitive. Criticism handled well often builds more trust than praise.

Do we need influencers?

Not always. It depends on where your audience listens. In B2B, LinkedIn creators often do better than consumer platforms. When it does make sense, we test with one real partnership before scaling up.

Will creators say what we need them to?

They’ll say it in their own way. They get a proper brief with key messages, disclosure rules and anything off-limits, and we sign off content before it goes out. What they don’t get is a script, because audiences can tell.

How do you know it's working?

We look past likes to the engagement that means something: comments, shares, messages and how quickly you respond. Then we connect that to the numbers your business cares about, like enquiries and sales.