Humanizing Your Brand – 8 Secrets To Change Your Branding Game
How you talk to your customers matters. How you project your brand to them matters. Good branding is about establishing your brand’s personality. It is about familiarizing your customers with what makes your brand special. And a crucial part of this will be humanizing marketing. Humanizing your brand!
To try your brand, people should know about it. To choose your brand over others, they should learn to trust it. And for this, your brand should appear approachable. It should be easy to connect with. How can this happen without humanizing your brand? After all, people like to talk to people not a faceless brand with no personality.
So, if you have not already thought about humanizing your brand, now is a good time to start. In this blog, we’ll tell you why it matters and how you can do it.
- Why Humanizing a Brand is a Critical Part of Branding a Business
- 8 Easy Ideas For Humanizing Marketing
- 1. Use images that make a connection
- 2. Talk about your team
- 3. Create designs that evoke emotions
- 4. Leverage the strength of storytelling in marketing
- 5. Use user-generated content to your advantage
- 6. Focus on conversations not just promotions
- 7. The universal emotion of humor to your rescue
- 8. Use webinars and live sessions to connect with your customers
- The Design Aspect of Humanizing Your Brand Simplified With Kimp
Why Humanizing a Brand is a Critical Part of Branding a Business
- Today, it is all about sharing stories through social media. And building conversations over these stories. With these conversations, new relationships are born. Establishing a relationship between a brand and a customer is no different. You need to start meaningful conversations with your customers. And telling your brand story is one way to do it. People will be keener to listen to your brand’s story when you strive to humanize your brand. When you use all of your branding and marketing designs to show how human your brand is.
- By humanizing your brand you are showing customers that you understand them. 56% of customers are known to stay loyal to a brand that understands them.
- We call it “doing business”. But every transaction, every purchase your customer makes is an interaction the customer has with your brand. And each of these interactions shapes the way they perceive your brand. Their perceptions affect their long-term relationships with your brand. So, by humanizing your brand you boost customer retention. And even a 5% increase in customer retention can increase your profits by 25% to 95%.
8 Easy Ideas For Humanizing Marketing
1. Use images that make a connection
One of the very first areas to work on when you wish to humanize your brand will be your marketing designs. From print ads to digital ads and social media posts, there are many designs that silently keep talking for your brand.
And in most of your marketing designs, there are two main elements – the copy and the photos or illustrations you use.
The photos or illustrations in your design need to be relevant to what your brand does and what it stands for. But more than that, there should be a strong human factor in these images that make it easy for people to connect with them.
Using headshots is one way to do it. Using a product photo is pretty straightforward. But using a photo of a person using the product makes a connection.
You don’t need any random image to fill the space. There should be a deeper meaning to the image and why you use it. This is where you need to exercise your creativity to come up with unique ideas.
Here is an example.
In the above design, the copy is on-point. But what really makes this design unique is the choice of images in this one. While talking about health checkup, most designs use a hospital or clinic setup or some medical equipment. But this one focuses on the brighter side of things. It shows a happy family picture of people from three generations all healthy and fit.
By stepping away from cliched images and choosing something that will genuinely connect with people, designs like these are crucial in humanizing your brand.
2. Talk about your team
We spoke about using human faces in marketing. What better faces to use than the actual humans behind your brand! Yes, we are talking about your employees. Regularly talking about your employees, the progress they make, and the value they add to your brand can create a strong brand image for your business.
By talking about the people behind your brand you are reminding customers that they are transacting with actual people and not just a faceless company. And this contributes to developing trust.
As an added advantage, when you showcase your employees’ expertise, you are also showing that you have the best team and how this gives you a competitive edge.
Endorsing your employees is therefore an effective way to humanize your brand. That’s why many big brands do this. Starbucks is a trendsetter in this area. It regularly shares employee stories and their ideas and how these ideas helped the brand.
Here is one such video on the Starbucks Instagram page. It not just focuses on the employee but also flaunts the rich employee experience the company offers. With content like this, you earn the respect of existing and potential customers as well as investors and business partners.
Kimp Tip: It’s a good idea to share content that focuses on your employees regularly. And when you plan your posts, you know that there will be a set of posts focusing on your employees, a set that talks about new products, and some that talk about your brand in general. When you have such categories in your content plan, use templates to distinguish these categories.
Want to create customizable social media templates for your brand? Get in touch with the Kimp team.
3. Create designs that evoke emotions
Ads that deliver a message are good ads. But ads that evoke emotions are great ads. Do you want good ads or great ads?
When you come up with concepts for your ads, include emotions in the copy, the photos or images, the colors, and the overall design. When people look at your ad it should not just stimulate their brain but also make them happy, sad, nostalgic, or empathetic. In other words, your ads should move them.
We’ll give you an example. What kind of images do you often see on a real estate ad? Buildings – the interiors or exteriors, right? But you are not just selling a building. You are selling a home, a safe and happy space for families. When you focus on the emotional value of what you offer, your conversations with your customers are so much better. That’s exactly what the below ad does.
When you focus on the walls and windows, people only think of the building. But they might find it hard to put themselves in that building. However, when you show a happy family, your customers easily put themselves in their place. And that’s how they start connecting with your brand stronger. That’s how they start looking at the human side of your brand.
Kimp Tip: Images are quite effective in conveying emotions. But for an even stronger effect use video campaigns. Like the rush of adrenaline, and motivation the below video from Nike gives.
Want to create strong and emotional promotional videos for your brand? Or even edit your existing footage to create crisp marketing videos? Choose a Kimp video subscription.
4. Leverage the strength of storytelling in marketing
Who does not love a good story, right? We, humans, are hardwired to stop and listen to stories. We end up empathizing with the people in the story. And we start connecting with them even without realizing it. Don’t you agree? That’s why storytelling is one of the most effective ways to humanize your brand.
There are two kinds of ads you can create – ads that show your product and how it is used and ads that build a story around your product. Which of these ads do you think people will remember more easily? Of course, the one with a story.
Airbnb has a knack for emotional advertising. It regularly shares content that engages customers through strong emotions. Here is one such ad.
As you can see, it does not fuss about the service the brand offers. It tells a story. A story of the kind of experience that Airbnb creates. And with beautiful stories like these your customers remember your brand better.
5. Use user-generated content to your advantage
We spoke about the power of sharing employee stories earlier. The other trick that works in humanizing a brand is sharing customer stories. The simplest way to do it is to include screenshots of the best reviews from customers on your Instagram posts and Stories.
Another option is to encourage customers to add videos or photos on their social media pages and tag your account. Do remember to share these experiences on your page and give a shout-out to customers who take the time to talk about your brand. These are ways to show that you are continuously engaging with the people doing business with you. And thus, a productive way to humanize your brand.
6. Focus on conversations not just promotions
Social media is a great channel for promoting your brand. But do not forget the “social” aspect of it. It is about having conversations and building relationships more than just promoting your brand.
So, if you wish for people to look at the human side of your brand, keep your page more conversational. Post-and-forget will not work. You need to come up with post ideas that nurture healthy conversations. We are not just talking about the number of comments you get on your posts but also the kind of comments you get. Quality matters here more than quantity. For example, ten meaningful comments and shares are much more valuable than a thousand likes.
To encourage such conversations on your brand page, you need to keep your post copy friendly and interactive. Here is a snapshot of the Dunkin’ Twitter page. With Tweets like these customers get into conversations with the brand more easily.
7. The universal emotion of humor to your rescue
Humor is an emotion that works universally. Humor is one way in which you can humanize your brand.
How many times have you emerged as the life of the party due to a good joke you shared? It works for brands too. And the best part is that a light-hearted joke looks good on all brands. Your brand’s tone of messaging does not matter here. Sharing good humor occasionally keeps reminding people how approachable and warm your brand is.
Even big brands like Amazon do it all the time. Amazon had a set of funny Tweets on its Twitter page just before Amazon Prime Day. Here is one such Tweet.
Kimp Tip: One of the easiest ways to add humor to your social media marketing will be through memes. Meme marketing is quite the topic these days. And the best part is that they are easily shareable. Adding your brand’s flavor to these memes will get you better reach as your meme gets shared across social media.
Looking for memes that skyrocket your social media engagement? The Kimp team can create them for you.
8. Use webinars and live sessions to connect with your customers
Webinars and live sessions on social media are some of the most practical ways to humanize a brand. Branding a business involves introducing your brand’s personality to your customers. And what better way to do this than to virtually connect with your customers and showcase what your brand does?
Live sessions that create value for your customers are the best kinds that work. This could be a live question and answer session where you address customer queries or an informative session where an industry expert joins the discussion.
Like all other events, your live sessions need creative campaigns for promotion as well. Through sponsored ads and social media posts, you should keep your customers informed about all the details of the live session. Email marketing can be of great help too. One email with details like the event schedule, another that talks about the hosts, and one more with the actual registration link can be a good mix of marketing designs to help your live events gain traction.
With one Kimp subscription, you can tackle all types of designs like marketing emails, social media posts, Story ads, website sliders, and a whole lot more to promote your live session.
The Design Aspect of Humanizing Your Brand Simplified With Kimp
As you can see, whatever strategies you adopt to humanize your brand, you need the best designs to support your efforts. And these designs should be well aligned with your brand personality and be able to make memorable conversations with your customers too. For consistent on-brand designs to promote your brand and execute your creative ideas for engagement choose a Kimp subscription.
Register now and try our subscriptions free for 7 days.