If there was a single way to define the attitude of the transition to inbound marketing, it would be one of humanisation. Before this very recent focus on the needs, interests, and thought processes of the customers, marketing was about grabbing attention and practically forcing action. Commercials yelled at you and telemarketers relentlessly called your personal numbers but once customers were ‘in the funnel’, they were handed a number and treated more like a package than a person.
Inbound marketing, in many ways, is the other side of the pendulum swing from the pushy, impersonal, and distinctly corporate-centred tactics of the past.
In other words, it’s time to think about your brand and how you want to humanise your company in the eyes of your customers and community. The world of the 80s is now far behind us.
People don’t want to see a company as an endless glass tower or ‘the Great and Powerful Oz’. They want the man behind the curtain and to interact with the very real people inside the glass tower. If you want to capture the hearts, curiosity, and loyalty of modern online community, it’s time to humanise your company and we’ve got three great ways to get started.
Share Human Interest Stories About the Company
No doubt at this point you either have a social media presence or are preparing your first big introduction. Social media posts for a business can serve a lot of functions from announcing sales to creating lively discussion topics to simply entertaining the public with interesting industry facts. However, every now and then make sure to throw in something with a human interest twist, preferably from inside the company itself.
When you’re looking to humanise your brand, remember that your company is full of very relatable humans known as employees. Their lives, challenges, and victories are things that your online community can relate to as many are humans and employees themselves.
Social media is the perfect place to share your fun company culture events, your financial officer’s new puppy, or the hiring of a new marketing artist. Announce, share, and create discussion. Invite your audience to share their own work experience in response.
Make Your Community Manager a Public Personality
There are two different ways to handle a company’s online image, either allowing several community managers to speak ‘as the company’ or to have individual and unique community managers who are building a bit of a personal brand side by side with building your company’s online brand popularity.
Let your community get to know your community manager(s) and allow their personalities to become public personas. This not only means that you can encourage more personal connections, but if a community manager moves on your brand can be honest about the change-over and if posts take on a new voice, your community will know why.
Include Real Employees In Your Social Videos
Finally, no matter how much of a hassle it may seem like to start a video series, social video is an incredibly powerful and useful tool that can be cross-posted to multiple platforms because video is popular everywhere right now. A single social video can be posted to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, and on your own website. But how to personalise your videos?
First and foremost, do not hire actors. The general population is dead tired of fakey actors saying technical phrases they don’t understand while smiling with their perfect teeth facing the camera. Instead, get real employees, technicians, engineers, and managers on screen explaining their jobs, guiding the audience through their experiences, and offering their personal industry insights and tips. For human interest, introduce the puppy on film or interview your new hires. Just get real faces on camera and encourage every host to be themselves.
Modern consumers are tired of commercials, tired of cold calls, and are completely tired of big impersonal corporations. They want real human connection in their customer service, in their social media, and even in your videos. The more you can humanise your company, brand, and the way you interact with the online community, the more success in digital marketing you will experience. For more inbound marketing tips, tricks, and trends contact us today!
