Most people agree that trust is the most important part of any relationship, including your company’s relationship with its clients. It makes a difference if your clients trust you or not. One of the main ways to build trust with your audience is by making your brand seem more human and that starts with your marketing. Regardless of the size of your brand, humanizing your marketing is important! Making your brand’s marketing more personalized can help build connections with your customers. The more individualized your brand is, the higher chance you have in connecting with your customers. There are many ways to humanize your brand and marketing tactics, you just need to find the right ones for your business.
1. Tell Your Story
Your “About Me” for your company is more important than you may realize. Your “About” page tells everyone who you are as a brand, what you stand for, and what you want to accomplish as a company. You should make this part of your website as personal as you can including:
- Where your company began: Showcasing where your company started, how you started, and what challenges you faced.
- Staff: Show off your staff! Feature your founders and current employees.
- Values and mission statement: Great way to show what your company stands for and what they value. This gives your customers the opportunity to connect with you on a more personal level.
- Future: Speak about what you want for the future. This can include new products/services, franchises, or promotions.
2. Articles and Blogs
Because your website is so important and can be viewed by anyone. It is important your digital content speaks to your audience. That can be achieved by producing original content that relates to your company, including writing blogs and articles. Writing blogs and articles for your brand can help you strengthen your relationship with your customers. And, by giving your audience the option to comment and share your articles, your company can increase brand awareness with new and existing customers.
In addition, articles and blogs can help boost search engine optimization (SEO). Google or any other search engines crawl the web for updated and new content regularly. Because of this, having articles and blogs relevant to your brand will help get more views on your content. Writing articles and blogs can also enhance SEO with engaging content that contains keywords that are regularly searched, and so improve your organic search ranking.
3. Utilizing Email and SMS Marketing
Another way to stay connected to your customers and humanize your marketing is to use email and SMS marketing. Most consumers are connected to their phones or devices a large part of the day, which is an opportunity for your company. In fact, studies show over 35% of phone users in the world are best reached by SMS text messaging. Through email and SMS marketing, you can personalize messages based on the customer’s likes and searches in order to make a better connection. Some ways to engage using email and SMS marketing are as follows:
- Contests: You can text or email your clients for entry to a contest your company created
- Surveys: what better way to find out what your customers want through a survey? They can easily be sent to your customers through text and email and help get your customers to engage with your brand.
- Customer Service: Offering customer service through email and SMS can help modernize your company. A lot of people prefer to communicate through technology, and by using this communication method, you give your company a competitive edge by communicating with your client and prospect in their preferred method of communicating.
4. Highlight Your Customers
One of the best ways to humanize your marketing is to feature real people in your marketing, including your customers. Putting a spotlight on your client stories about a product or service your company provides makes your brand look trustworthy and realistic to your audience by providing social proof. Ways you can feature your customers in your marketing include:
- Reviews: Sharing positive reviews your customer wrote about your company on your social media or other platforms.
- Social Media Tags: Whether its Facebook or Instagram, people love to post pictures of what they are doing, eating, or buying. Because of this, your customer can and will post about your brand on their own personal profiles. Reposting and featuring your customers with your company in the post can humanize your marketing strategy.
5. Highlight Your Staff
Featuring your customers in your marketing is important, but featuring your employees is also crucial! Showcasing your staff on your site, social media, and other forms of advertising can help humanize your marketing. People appreciate companies that care about their staff. Consumers also like to see real faces from brands, so they feel like they can connect with a person instead of a brand or company. Ways you can feature your staff include:
- Staff page: Having a page that features all your staff pictures and bios on your website show your clients the smiling faces behind your company.
- Social Media: You can showcase your staff in their offices, at events, and even working on projects via social media so prospects and clients can see real people working for your company.
- Videos: Making a video ad or even just a video for social media with your employees featured in them can also showcase your staff.
6. Get Your Customers Involved
Getting your customers involved in your marketing is another great way to humanize your marketing. As stated before, individuals like to see real people using your brand, so why not use your own customers! There are a few ways to get your customers involved in your marketing, including but not limited to:
- Contests: Hosting contests for your customers can get you more brand visibility. Having your contest entries shared, tagged, or commented on can boost your brand visibility while engaging your audience.
- Creating Hashtags: Hashtagging your brand name, or even a slogan, can start a trend of your customers also using those hashtags and ultimately increasing your brand’s visibility to more people.
- Resharing Customer Posts: When people begin using your hashtags and location tags it is easy to see posts of your customers using your product or service. Feature them on your advertising! Resharing and reposting customer content using your brand is social proof to others and an effective way to humanize your marketing.