Humanizing Your Brand (With Marketing)
How To Humanize Your Brand Through Marketing Efforts
First, here is how to NOT humanize your brand through marketing: use the following.
Bots. Recordings. Hacks. Scams. Fake. Hoax.
All of these words are commonly used to describe thousands of “digital marketing services” and “social media growth experts” that all try to reel you into their scam-ish traps. When a brand falls into the trap, thinking they will easily be able to gain rapid digital growth by simply just paying for it, they are being scammed.
Most of them won’t realize this until AFTER the work is over, when all the followers are unfollowing, no changes have been made to sales or website traffic, and engagement on each post doesn’t change whatsoever. The only thing that changed was that number of followers at the top of their Instagram/Twitter/Facebook profiles.
THIS IS NOT HOW SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING WORKS.
Of course, marketing and social media is meant for exactly that; to be social and market to the people that matter to your brand, AKA your customers. There is no way for your brand to achieve social trust, social brand awareness, and customer loyalty without a humanized approach to marketing and social media.
People don’t want emails coming from a bot, an info@example.com email, or even worse, the dreaded DO NOT REPLY emails. People don’t care about these emails, they aren’t genuine! They aren’t REALLY meant for them or written for them. For example: here is an email from girlboss.com. They send out a few weekly emails and some of them come from and are written by an actual person to a person.
However, brands are desperately in need of the humanized brand awareness. Here are a few ways to introduce a more humanized approach to your brand’s social media and marketing efforts:
- Write handwritten notes/emails/comments to customers.
- Take reviews to heart. Find out the reason for a bad review and highlight the reason for a good review.
- Share customer and employee testimonials on your website.
- Include employee interaction in your social media.
- Recognize customers, influencers, employees, and other brands on social media.
- Change email newsletters around weekly: make one focused on coming from a specific person directly to a customer and make it personable.
- Share videos often!
- Get customers involved on your posts. When someone leaves a comment, leave them a reply! If you want to be even more humanized with comments and replies, leave a “- yourname” at the end of the comment.
- Post and share lifestyle photos often. Don’t just post graphics and edited photos. Share real life experiences and photos with your customers for your brand.
- Look for relationships and partnerships with influencers and micro-influencers for your brand.
- Remember this: human to human, people to people!