How to Humanize Your Brand and Connect with Your Publics
No one wants to purchase products or services from a stuffy, pretentious or unrelatable organization. Even when companies think they are effectively reaching their publics, they could actually be alienating them by using jargon-filled and industry-specific language. It can be challenging to connect with your target publics, especially in B2B and technical industries. However, by humanizing your brand, you can create and maintain connections with your audience. Below are a few ways to humanize your brand and connect with your publics.
Write Like a Person
While this may seem like obvious advice, making sure you are writing as a person is crucial to connecting with your publics. All too often companies emphasize maintaining a professional tone over a human one. It is possible to balance having a professional brand voice with a human voice. However, if you talk like a corporation more than a person, you will fail to make quality connections to your brand.
To make sure you are communicating effectively as a brand, consider what your audience wants and looks for in your company. Also, by understanding your industry and customer needs, you will be able to figure out what tone is the most effective. Try writing in a humorous tone. Or, use an educational tone for more complicated topics.
The main takeaway is to write like a person instead of a corporation. In doing so, you will make more quality connections with your publics.
Use Your Publics’ Language
Similarly, you need to use your public’s language. Danielle Irigoyen recommends this tactic in her article, “How to Humanize a Brand: 15 Best Tips for Humanizing Your Voice,” at HubSpot. She suggests a simple way to humanize your brand–speak clearly. While this may seem too simple, using clear and specific language will get you further than you realize in connecting with your publics. By not only understanding how your audience communicates but by also using the same language and tone, your brand will appear more human overall, says Irigoyen.
Provide Resources
If you only promote your company and its products and services, your relationship with your publics may not be as strong as it could be. To strengthen these relationships, Irigoyen recommends offering information that is valuable to your audience without any sales pitch. This will boost your company’s credibility because providing relevant information will create a foundation of trust between you and your publics, says Irigoyen.
Blogs, videos or links to other articles are a few examples of resources you could provide your audience to help humanize your brand.
Utilize Social Media
Social media has created another avenue of communication between companies and consumers. Businesses need to take advantage of social media platforms as they provide direct access to their target audience.
Jenna Guarneri agrees with this as she discusses the importance of social media in public relations in her article, “How To Humanize The Public Relations Experience,” at Forbes. Guarneri suggests emphasizing your company’s humanity by sharing information about your employees. Consider showcasing a company event or telling an engaging story about your team, says Guarneri. In doing so, you will show the people behind the company and more easily connect with your audience.
Social media is also useful for direct engagement with your publics. To make the most of this ability, you should respond to comments and interact with your followers. If someone likes a product or says something funny in a comment on your post, send a reply! Having fun with your followers and letting them know you hear them will help to further humanize your brand.
Humanizing brands is challenging, but not impossible. By writing like a person, using your public’s language, providing resources and utilizing social media you can make your brand more appealing to your target audience.
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