Humanizing your brand, means giving your brand human traits that can make it easy for target consumers to relate with you.
Photo credit: Ketut
In a rapidly evolving world, where society is witnessing social disintegration with the upscale use of technology, keeping human connections might be challenging. This is true especially for business brands striving to win the trust of consumers through digital marketing. Consumers are more likely to trust the brand, which they can relate to on a deeper level. In as much as marketing strategies takes place in a virtual world, to win over customers, there is need to keep basic aspects of traditional human interactions.
The bridge between your employer brand and your consumers lies the art of storytelling. Storytelling is how you creatively employ narratives to humanize your brand. In this regard, humanizing your brand, means giving your brand human traits that can make it easy for target consumers to relate with you. The art of storytelling has transcended generations with the key aspects of sharing knowledge and maintaining human connections.
The main reasons why you should put storytelling at the core of your marketing strategy is because:
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Storytelling creates an engaging environment between your consumers and your brand. It gives the consumers the confidence to share their own stories, and also to express their ideas and opinions.
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The art of storytelling sparks conversation between your brand and its audience. The customers feels that they are interacting with a human being, thus developing a sense of trust.
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The art of storytelling gives your team the opportunity to be seen on a broader scale. Sometimes, seeing the faces behind a brand rather than a brand logo, makes your brand appear more human and less robotic.
Your brand should not over-sell itself for the sake of making profits and generating traffic, rather it should aim at achieving long-term growth. To do that, below are five tips to humanize your brand.
1. Find your unique voice and maintain it.
Does your brand have its own personality? To find your brand’s personality, start by giving it a face and a character. How your brand speaks to the consumers determines whether they can read your blog post, listen to your podcasts and watch your videos. Your brand’s character helps in finding its unique voice, such that in every post, adverts or comments you make, will resemble that personality. Finding your voice also means, communicating with the target consumers in a simple language that they can understand without using jargon words.
2. Put the spotlight on your employees.
Customers are interested in knowing who the behind-the-scenes guys are. Showing off your staff and whatever goes on behind the scenes, gives the customers the impression that your brand is not plastic, but have people just like them working hard to meet their demands. This should be done by sharing real photos of real people employed in your company. The photos could be shared on your company’s social media pages. In addition, you can as well show the funny and relatable side of your staff members.
"Brands should not shy away from sharing their stories of failure as that only proves their human nature."
3. Sign your posts & focus on building relationships on social media.
In the digital age, fake news is easy to come by. The only way to protect your brand and your customers from such, is by having a digital signature at the end of every post. This digital signature will enable your audience to distinguish a post that comes from your brand, and the fake posts. However slow your site may seem to generate traffic, you should focus more on building relationships.
4. Acknowledge issues and mistakes.
It is human to make mistakes. Before attaining success, we fail couple of times. Brands should not shy away from sharing their stories of failure as that only proves their human nature. In sharing your stories, be transparent as you can. You could also share the story behind your company’s name, mission and vision. And during your conduct of business, when you encounter complaints from your customers, be kind enough to acknowledge it, in order to resolve it.
5. Share valuable content and engage with your audience.
In every post that you share, emphasis should be placed on how relevant the content is to your audience, and whether the content can inspire and encourage your audience to ask questions and start conversations. This will show the audience that you care for them and value their needs. In simple terms, educate, do not sell.
In conclusion, there are several aspects of humanity that you could employ as well. For instance, showing gratitude to your staff and customers, sharing your user-generated content, employing the use of visual content, and above all staying true to yourself.
