Humanize Your Brand
Do you find this relatable?
I, for one, find this meme super relatable. I wish there were more manuals for extroverts explaining the inner workings of an introverted mind. It would make the world a better place, don’t you think?
I genuinely believe that there are a bunch of really smart introverts behind the invention of concepts like online food ordering, grocery shopping or booking a cab online. What motivated them, you ask? I imagine their strongest motivation would be avoiding phone calls or avoiding going out and interacting with other people at any cost. You have no idea how grateful I am for applications like Uber Eats, which saves me an awkward phone call every time I order some food.
Even though I love these contactless processes, when it comes to brands, I like people-centric brands. Brands that have more humanised energy, the ones that have a story to tell! Thankfully, it’s not just me; in general, people respond to people. And what are brands, if not a bunch of people working towards the same goal? So why do we sometimes feel like the marketing messages being delivered are robotic? The difference between marketing that we listen to and easily forgettable marketing is creating a relatable and humanised brand to spark a connection between our audiences.
Brands that see the human behind the purchases are the ones that succeed in creating memorable, emotional campaigns across modern channels. Unfortunately, in business, we often interpret the act of purchasing products as a purely transactional experience – one that is solely between a business and its consumer. As a result, a brand rarely superimposes its ability to sell you a human experience past why its product is made for us. Too often, their marketing ensures how the offering will ultimately give us a better lifestyle experience, yet few rarely provide a narrative experience for the human in us.
The humanisation of brands is crucial in every way. But most importantly, it will help you gain traffic, generate qualified leads, nurture those leads into customers, retain those customers, and grow revenue.
Now that you know why you should be humanising your brand, here are some steps you can take to show off your brand’s personality -
Show Off Your Staff - Showing the real people behind the work helps build trust with potential customers and helps extend the longevity of a client’s likelihood of staying on. In addition, physically seeing a team behind the brand is impactful in itself. Follow these tips to get started. However, please remember to use real photos of real people who work with you. Stock photos will just not do the trick. You can even show your staff members’ funny and relatable side. Here is an example, Rock Kitchen Harris, a full-service agency, decided to skip the photos altogether and showcase the cartoon versions of their employees instead. The choice to make renderings of each employee brings a lot of character and personality to this agency’s website. Plus, it gives a chance for employees to have a bit of extra fun as well.
Employees as brand promoters - Most of your employees likely have active LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and perhaps even Periscope accounts. This means they have connections, whether friends, family, or strangers. You should be leveraging your employee’s networks to spread the word about your brand and show that your employees are proud to represent and serve as the faces of your company.
(c) Write with Personality - All of your site content should be infused with personality – wit, humour, emotion - these are all added pluses. These personality-infused posts will vary depending on each writing style of your content producers and contributors, and that’s ok! Your brand doesn’t need to stick to one voice. Ensure that the copy on your homepage is not generic – if another company could quickly think of the sage tagline, then ditch it. Be unique with your composition.
(d) Tell stories of failure - Often, your audience is going to relate far more when you share your failures over your successes. That doesn’t mean revealing all of the bugs in your software or about the storefront manager’s weekly delay and lack of motivation. Don’t air out your dirty laundry, but rather share personal stories or life lessons learned. For example, share with your blog readers stories of overcoming failure or share stories of how your business helper a customer overcome failure.
Remember, as marketers; we are now selling to the “experiential consumer” – the person who buys the product experience rather than just the product itself.