It’s one thing to open a business and another thing to get people to notice your brand. We get it. The competition is stiff, and brands must find a way to stand out.
The good news is that there are many ways you can make your company stand out. Creating great content, for instance, is a sure-fire way to boost brand engagement. But how can you create engaging content in the first place?
That’s where brand humor comes in.
Don’t worry. It’s not that hard to incorporate humor into your content strategy to generate leads and conversions. In this article, we’ll discuss simple steps you can follow.
Why You Need Brand Humor
A lot of effort goes into building your brand image online. Depending on the business you run, you can take measured steps to keep your brand image and identity stellar.
That aside, people love a good laugh, and more than five out of ten customers will remember your business if it has a funny brand voice. Just take a look at this graph:
Source: Clutch
Okay, that graph was for advertisements, but you get the drift. Here are some more reasons to inject humor into your brand voice:
- Humor humanizes your brand.
- It opens up more room for creativity.
- Humor makes your company more approachable.
Humor also improves the customer experience. Who doesn’t want a good laugh every now and then?
When you improve the customer experience, you increase your chances of getting people to try your products and services. Creating that impetus to try your products or services is critical for a company that wants to grow.
How to Use Humor to Transform Your Brand
Now that you know why incorporating humor in your brand voice is crucial, here are five simple ways to transform your brand with humor. Complement these tips with a great product or service, and your brand will be on its way to success.
1. Identify your brand voice.
Before you can inject humor into your brand, you need to identify your brand voice. Your brand voice is an essential part of your brand image or personality that lets you communicate with your customers.
It encompasses the words you use to project your brand ideas to your audience’s feelings and experiences when they come in contact with your brand.
We’ll put this into perspective with an example using Apple. Apple’s brand voice is assertive and confident. They’ve mastered the art of sharing important concepts in a limited number of words.
Source: Apple
Like Apple, you should try to create slogans that pack a punch. Most importantly, they should be and feel authentic to connect with your customers emotionally.
But how exactly can you identify your brand voice? Here are some steps to follow:
Build a buyer persona.
A buyer’s persona is a semi-fictional profile of your ideal customer. Having this profile information of your customer is crucial for a successful marketing strategy. Just look at the statistics: 82% of companies created an improved value proposition using the buyer’s persona.
Source: Itsma
So, it’s helpful to know your ideal customers so you can tailor your brand voice to them. Certain questions such as the ones below can help.
- What do they like?
- Where are their pain points?
- What do they care about?
- How do they like to have fun?
- What do they or should they want from your brand?
These questions allow you to understand your customers and help you design a content strategy you and your team will use to generate leads and conversions.
But how exactly can you get that kind of information? Just go straight to your customers and ask them. Maybe send an email survey to your subscribers. Or ask them over the phone. The more you know about your audience, the easier it will be to identify a brand voice that caters to them.
Review your brand’s value.
Brand values are a crucial component of a strong brand. Your brand’s core values are what it stands for and believes in. These values help to boost brand loyalty and employee morale.
On the flip side is your brand’s personality. The brand’s personality is a qualitative value that your customers can relate to. It reflects your business’ values and mission statement.
Ultimately, to review your brand’s value, you should describe your brand’s personality, the competition, and what sets you apart in your industry.
The answers to these will enable you to fine-tune your brand voice to stand out from similar businesses in your field.
2. Select the type of humor.
Once you identify your brand’s voice, the next step is to find the type of humor that fits to give your brand a facelift.
Remember, “humor” is a broad term, albeit relative. It might come across to some people as corny or offensive.
To avoid this, you should stick to your brand voice and find that sweet spot between passing a relatable message and making your audience smile. KFC did an excellent job of it with this Col. Sanders ad.
Source: Chicago Tribune
In the ad above, KFC employed an unusual type of humor — an impersonation of Col. Sanders, the company’s founder, to celebrate their 75th anniversary.
While this type of humor might be extreme for many brands, KFC could pull it off because it related to their brand image and resonated with their target audience.
Once you know your audience and what makes them smile, tie it to your brand’s value, and you’re golden.
3. Find where your brand is lacking.
Sometimes, laughing at your mistakes is all the humor you’ll ever need. Apart from the fact that it shows you acknowledge you can make mistakes — that’s a plus with consumers, believe me — it also leaves a solid and long-lasting impression on your audience and humanizes your brand.
It’s easy to find where your brand is lacking. Social media listening tools, for instance, can help you see what consumers are saying about your brand. You can also assess for yourself how your brand is doing. By this, I don’t just mean looking at your products and seeing how they fare in the market. Check out your marketing touchpoints, too. You can, for example, access your website and navigate it yourself to see if you’re doing your audience an injustice.
That’s what Emailcenter did. When they found out that their homepage was displaying an error, they poked fun at their mistake and effortlessly sprinkled a bit of personality on their error page instead:
Source: Elementor
The 404 Error page does two things: provide a quick way to return to the homepage and make visitors laugh.
By giving the visitor “the option” to fire a member of their development team, they acknowledge their “unacceptable failure” while weirdly making people feel good about it.
4. Look for what’s trending.
If you’re looking for the next inspiration for humor, try viral trends. The best part about this method is that viral trends can be found on any social media platform. You just need to find what’s trending among your target audience and make a joke of it.
Remember when Fortnite was such a hit? Well, Wendy’s didn’t just sit and watch as people talked about the online game. Instead, they used humor to hitch a ride on the game’s popularity, focusing on Fortnite’s game mode Food Fight, the battle between two fictional restaurants, Pizza Pit and Durr Burger:
Source: Wendy’s Twitter
Funny, right? Wendy’s even got its character — yes, the red-haired girl — to play the game in its fight for the always fresh and never frozen beef Wendy’s is known for.
The result? The Twitch stream was viewed more than a quarter-million times, and mentions of the brand went up on social media by a whopping 119%!
5. Make it interactive.
The whole point of telling a joke is to get people to laugh, right? Well, yes. But that’s not all. You want people to engage with your brand, too. The more engagement you get, after all, the higher your chances are for conversions.
That’s why it’s important to make your jokes interactive. That means creating something humorous that will get people to laugh out loud and respond to you simultaneously.
Don’t worry. That’s not so difficult to do. You can humorously interact with your audience by asking a funny question that they’d relate to on social media, for instance. Or you can create a poll or a humorous quiz.
Check out this fun quiz from Old Spice:
Source: Old Spice Twitter
Old Spice got a lot of engagement from the quiz…a whopping 9,724 votes. Genius!
Bottom Line
You don’t need to be a pro to use brand humor in your strategy. First, consider the type of humor you want to use and what type of jokes are appropriate. The humor should be consistent with your brand. When it is, you can poke fun at your own mistakes, create jokes based on what’s trending, and create content that engages your audience.
Don’t forget, however, to be mindful of what’s appropriate for your audience.
With a bit of creativity, you’ll be surprised at how much impact you can make. You’ll see those engagement levels rising and, with them, your leads and conversions.
