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.
You, just like your customers and employees, are human. Despite the significant rise of automation in businesses, every aspect of a business comes into contact with a human at some point. Without humans, there would be no business. These things may seem obvious, but it is surprising how little humanity most companies have in their dealings with customers. How common is it to see companies run out-of-touch ads that a group of executives decided humans would like? These ads are just one example of how many companies assume what humans like as if they aren’t humans themselves. Customers are not looking for an overly focus grouped brand, they want genuine human interaction. It is not difficult to humanize your brand, here are 5 easy ways.
Think Like a Human
Times have changed. The days of email blasts and untargeted, traditional advertising are gone. If you think like a corporate machine, then you will have a hard time connecting to everyday people. Think about the conversations you have in your day to day life, the connections you have with other people. Those personal relationships should be the model for business relationships. Treat your customers like friends and talk to them like you would a new acquaintance.
Show Off Your Staff
Showing the real people that make your company run helps build trust with customers. Physically seeing that there is a team of fellow humans behind the business will help bring out the humanity in your company. Post pictures of actual employees, not just stock photos. You do not need to show off anyone who doesn’t want the spotlight, it will work better if you show off employees who want to be ambassadors. Show off the personalities of your employees, show customers that regular people like them work for your company. By reminding customers that normal humans work for you it brings a human element to the whole company.
Don’t be afraid to show off the personalities of your employees either. If you are going to show off employees, let them show their true colors. Rather than heavily editing what your employees say, let them use their own words. Customers will be able to tell when your employees are being genuine, so let them be.
Personalized Marketing
Marketing often comes off as cold and impersonal. We have all received the template marketing emails from companies, and they leave a negative impression, if they were noticed at all. It does not take much effort to make customers feel more appreciated on an individual level, even if it means adding just a few lines of code and small changes in wording. By adding a customer’s name on a marketing email or using “you” rather than “I”, you are making the customer experience more personal and human. Acknowledging your customer as an individual person makes your company feel more human, sounding more like the two of you are talking as friends instead of as a business asking for money.
Admit Failures
Something that unites all humans is failure. Due to this shared human error, companies make mistakes and fail just like average people do in their personal lives. Admitting when you fail is an act of bravery, maturity, and humanity. Maybe something went wrong and it will impact customers, rather than hiding the mistake, take ownership of it. Tell your customers what went wrong, what will happen now, and why it won’t happen again. Don’t air every bit of dirty laundry, but share the lessons learned from failure. A post on Medium shows that people engage when the content is honest, so be truthful with your customers even when things go wrong.
Share User Generated Content
Sharing user generated content helps to humanize your brand in two ways:
- It is flattering to the user to have their content featured by a business, and it reinforces the relationship between business and customer. User generated content is free advertising. Showing happy customers with your products to other potential customers is great marketing; it also shows customers you care about their positive experiences with your product.
- It is important to humanize your brand. No one wants to deal with a cold impersonal corporate entity. People want to work with other people. If you bring some humanity to your business, customers are more likely to engage. Show off your employees, and let them speak for the company in a genuine way. Do not be afraid to admit failure when it is pertinent to your customers. Proudly post user generated content and talk to your customers like you would any other humans – you are bound to see positive results.