This digital age has given rise to empowered consumers looking to support brands that they can relate to and connect with on a deeper level. Today, success in business involves a real effort to build your brand around a genuine personality. Indeed, the best way to amass a loyal patronage these days is to build and maintain an authentic presence that your target audience can trust. The most effective way to gain that trust is to humanize your brand.

What does it mean to humanize your brand?

Humanizing your brand literally means making your brand more human. It involves an effort to shift away from cold, faceless presences and canned marketing strategies. In doing so, you’re able to connect with your audiences on a more personal level.

To fully appreciate the value of humanizing your brand, think about the success that influencer marketing has achieved in the past decade. Influencers gain value by forging genuine relationships with their followers. They build an emotional connection with their audience, which inevitably leads to trust and loyalty. Indeed, today’s consumers respond better to “friendships” rather than business-to-customer relationships.

Humanizing your business, then, means building a brand identity and giving it a human voice. It involves portraying a certain personality that your audiences can relate to and upholding values that they also share. When you use this approach for your marketing campaigns, you’ll find that you’re better able to capture the interest of your target audiences, build a community around your brand, and keep your customers loyal.

How to Humanize Your Marketing

Humanizing your business needs to involve your entire marketing strategy. It should be consistent across all channels and every customer interaction. In particular, here are the five most critical marketing assets you should pay most attention to:

1) Social Media Content

Social networks are the perfect platform for developing personal connections with your audience. Hire a social media and community manager who can post content and respond to your audience as a person but remain consistent with your brand’s identity and personality. You can also use various content curation tools to find relevant content or content ideas.

Don’t be afraid to be humorous and silly. You can do so while still remaining professional. What’s important is that you’re timely, relevant, and personable.

Additionally, use this platform to feature faces behind your company. Allow your audiences a peek into what goes on behind the scenes, what it takes to provide the quality of products and services like you do, as well as the people that make your business a family. This will give your customers a better appreciation for who you are and what you have to offer.

2) Email Marketing

Nowadays, the most successful email strategy involves a high level of personalization. However, marketers place so much emphasis on personalizing email content for their recipients that they often overlook the value of humanizing who those emails are from.

Targeting your audiences in great detail and preparing your email content accordingly will allow your recipients to feel a connection with your brand. However, giving your sender an identity will give your audience someone to feel a personal connection to.

In most cases, simply appending a human name to your company name (ex., Whitney from Omnisend) improves your campaign results. Think about it: it feels rude to delete an email from a person straight away, but it’s pretty easy to do for company newsletters.

It also helps to pay attention to the language you use. Don’t be too stiff or formal. Instead, write your content as if you’re conversing with a friend. Doing so will enable the recipient to feel closer to you and, consequently, will be more likely to patronize your brand.

Also, you can use triggered email

Also, you can send email campaigns that are based on specific triggers. For example, use pre-written messages that will be automatically sent based on user action or behaviour. Drip email campaigns are usually sent out  after people subscribe to your newsletter, make a purchase, download ebook and much more.

3) Sales Pages

Your sales pages are most likely where your visitors will make the all-important decision to purchase your product, avail of your service, or support your business. As such, it is the most critical place to establish a genuine, personal connection. Using human photos with friendly faces is a good place to start, but humanizing your sales pages shouldn’t stop there.

Pay attention to the voice you use in your text. Write your copy as if a knowledgeable friend is making a recommendation. Instead of just highlighting the features of your product, dive into how a person can benefit from each of those features. Tell stories about how it has enhanced the lives of your other customers. Even better: publish testimonials from previous clients and include photos of their faces. The more genuine reviews you have, the more involved your visitors will feel. Additionally, it helps your brand seem more credible and trustworthy.

4) Blog Content

Company-served articles establish your expertise and leadership in your niche. However, that could also make you seem more unreachable. Thankfully, there are ways for you to emphasize your company’s superiority and thought leadership without becoming unapproachable or even snobbish.

Develop a collaborative blog with several contributors from your team. Encourage them to share their own stories in your blog and opinions related to your industry. Uphold a certain level of editorial standards and direct the blog such that it contributes to the fulfillment of your business objectives. But, give every contributor the freedom to use their own voice as well as their own name.

Source: Cart Insiders blog

5) The ‘About Us’ Page

Many businesses don’t realize it, but the About Us page is actually one of the most critical pages on a company’s website. This is where your visitors go to learn more about who you are and hopefully feel a personal connection, so use it wisely.

When preparing your About Us page, don’t make the mistake of using it to sing your own praises. Instead, use it to tell stories about how your brand came to be. Talk about the challenges it has survived and even the failures it has endured. Make sure you highlight the principles you value most and use it as an opportunity to share your mission. Additionally, use some space to feature your key personnel and why their presence makes your company unique.

Engaging Your Team to Humanize Your Brand

The best way to humanize your brand is to involve the actual humans that make up your business. Use photos of real people that work for you and show what everyday life is like in the office. Additionally, empower your employees to speak for your brand and find ways to give them a voice. For example, allow them to participate as themselves in your online communities. Or, allow them to contribute to your company blog and make sure you highlight their authorship.

Engaging your team in your campaign to humanize your brand won’t just lead to better customer relationships, but also better employee satisfaction. Employees take pride in being part of something as unique individuals, rather than being mere cogs in the wheel. Enabling them to speak for your company gives them a sense of importance that no compensation package can replace.

In a world where businesses constantly strive for differentiation, it pays to realize that who you are is what makes you different. Use your individuality and unique brand identity as a marketing asset. Humanizing your marketing campaigns enables you to develop deeper connections with your customers. That leads to better brand affinity and, ultimately, better sales. These days, you don’t necessarily need to be the biggest player in your niche to dominate your industry. You just need to be the most human.