Quick And Easy Ways To Humanize Your Brand
It's 2015, if you're not humanizing your brand, you're missing out on leads and sales.
Humanizing your brand is a huge inbound marketing trend for 2015 and for good reason.
The days of using complicated industry jargon are over. People want to relate to your brand, to feel moved and connected by what you do and how you do it. Now, let’s get down to how to implement these strategies into your marketing efforts to achieve higher brand loyalty and increased conversions.
1. Social Media
This is your bread and butter for creating a valuable relationship with your audience. There are three components to successful social media usage:
Monitoring- See what people in your industry are talking about. Even though you want your company to have its own, unique point-of-view, you also want to make sure you’re on target with industry news.
Posting- Frequently post on your company’s Twitter (3-4x a day), LinkedIn (2-3x a day) and Facebook (1-2x a day) to make sure you’re engaged with your audience.
Responding- Commenting back in a timely manner is critical for your company’s image. It can be detrimental to your image If someone feels or looks ignored after they’ve asked your company a question. Make your visitors feel appreciated and always comment back to direct messages, comments, tweets and mentions.
Being humorous on social media is a great attitude for your company to take; it can easily create interest to an industry or product that might otherwise seem a little dry. It’s okay to make fun of yourself, just like what we did here:
2. Blog & Respond to Comments
By now, everyone knows the benefits of business blogging (increase SEO, thought leadership, inbound links, etc.). However, a blog can also help humanize your brand and allow you to connect with your prospects and customers. You can make dry topics fun by taking a unique point-of-view to a topic. For example, check out one of our recent blog posts below:
We want Bluleadz employees personalities to shine through our website, so our clients can get a better feel for who we are and what kind of work we do. Every Bluleadz team member is encouraged to blog about any topic they feel passionately enough to write about. You can see here, that this blog has good information which displays thought leadership and credibility but also shows that we’re a fun, hip company. A blog posted by an actual person, rather than just posted under your brand’s name, will resonate and be more relatable with your readers. We attach every author’s picture to blog articles so you can learn more about us. It can be a big differentiator between your company and other companies in the same industry.
3. Video
If you’re not using video marketing, start now! A recent Forbes article stressed the importance of this marketing tactic for 2015, check it out here. If you’re not using video to get your message across,there’s a good chance your competitor is. This is giving them a huge advantage. Here at Bluleadz, we host a weekly YouTube series called #askinbound. Through this channel, we get to engage with our visitors; weekly, they ask us inbound marketing related questions and we fire back at them. Our CEO and founder, Eric Baum, enjoys hosting these shows because it gives our listeners a chance to see that we’re approachable and want to help. Videos literally puts a face to your brand, instead of a wall of text.
4. “About Us” Section of Your Site
We need to take a moment to mention the video marketing giant, Wistia. They do an awesome job of giving their company a unique and personal feel in saturated market. A potential customer is definitely going to view of your “About Us” section; this is your chance to show them who you are, how you got started and why you’re different.
Take for example, their “Wistia Class Photos” or employee photos. This section of their website shows off their personality and creates engagement with the company. Visitors get the sense that this is a fun company to work for with happy employees. You can also see who does what, making it easier to put a face to the name when you work with them.
5. Being Available
Genuine consideration for your prospects and customers is a great way to further humanize your brand. Conveying that you care can prove to be tough online. One company that does a stellar job at this is HubSpot’s customer support. No one likes waiting in line for support, having to listen to cheesy playback music (or worse, an automated product promotion recording). HubSpot gives you the ability to get help on your own time with their callback feature. You can briefly give them details about the problem you’re having online and then support will give you a call back when they have the answers. This really demonstrates to HubSpot’s customers and prospects that the company values your time.
6. Use Your Name
Don’t hide behind your company’s name on your email signatures. It comes across as robotic and fake; both negatives for humanizing your brand. Also, use this rule in your emails. If you can use personalization tokens to your sender, always use them. Personalized emails deliver six times higher transaction rates, but 70% of brands fail to use them (CMO.com). Use this fact to your advantage and start adding this personal touch to your emails to increase your click-through-rates.~
Leverage your employees personalities through blogging and social media to get your brand’s image come across to visitors. Building strong relationships with your prospects is key to making a sale. If you let them in, they’ll be sure to do the same with you. Not only does this connect you to your prospects, it also creates a sense of trust. Trust is a significant factor to why a client may go with you verses your competitor and ensuring long term repeat business.
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