3 Ways to Humanise Your Brand

Here’s some food for thought: how human is your brand? If you know the answer to this question, you’re likely to know what needs to be improved as well. However, if you find yourself confused, it’s probably time to talk about brand humanisation.

If someone doesn’t trust your brand, they are unlikely to purchase your product or service. And it is natural for humans to relate, connect and trust other humans. So, this is where brand humanisation comes in. It is giving a (sometimes metaphorical) face, name and voice to a business. It allows a brand to distance from being a faceless, cold money-making machine, and instead allows their customers to form a type of bond with the brand that allows for trust to develop.

We passionately believe and advocate for giving your businesses a human feel and creating real connections between you and your customers. In fact, we would emphasise it as one of the key benefits for using social media for a business. Years of experience have shown brands failing to succeed or grow because their messages come out robotic.

So here’s 3 ways to spark a connection between you and your audience:

Pull Back the Curtain

It is time to reveal who is behind your business and how you get things done! A great way to do this is to celebrate the people that work there. Your website should have an About Us/Team page with photos of your employees and little biographies, and your social media should take the time to talk about the people that make your brand what it is.

Whether it’s celebrating who they are and what they do, or even talking about their personal achievements, birthdays, hobbies, or anything you and they are comfortable sharing. It is essential to show your customers there are real people with real values that deliver those products or services.

It is also important to use real photography, and not just rely on stock photos. Show the faces! And more so, it doesn’t always have to be serious. People love to relate, and we all know life isn’t always serious. This will help your brand become more approachable.

Interact

When you go through the process of posting on social media religiously, you have only done half the work. The other half is to interact with your audience. If your brand literally talk its audience, it’s another way for customers to have a connection it.

Give your existing and potential customers a follow on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn, just do not mass follow as this might ban you off a platform as a spam account. Make sure to take the time to show appreciation with likes and comments on people your brand follows or/and the audience you are trying to target. Scroll down that Instagram and give some hearts out! When you comment, make sure to personalise it and don’t just copy and paste the same “love your content hun!” text to every other post on your feed, that is just another way to be labelled as a spam account and achieve the exact opposite of humanisation.

Give Your Brand a Personality

There is absolutely no reason to be afraid of giving your brand a personality. Take the time to sit down and really pin point what your brand would talk like if it suddenly became a human. Perhaps a bit of a crazy way to put it, but it works! For example, our sister brand BlueCoo Creative have chosen their mascot BlueCoo to become the voice of their brand. Often, you will find their posts ‘written’ by BlueCoo himself with little puns here and there. This makes the brand far more fun and relatable, thus attracting a new audience.

Do not shy from humour either. Humans often use humour in many ways, whether to connect with someone, or even as a defence mechanism. It is a fantastic way to let your business become that more approachable. So, don’t be afraid to be a little cheeky here and there, no matter how serious you may think your business is (well, maybe except funereal directors or something).

Allow yourself to not only celebrate success but failures too. Use that brand personality to face and share things that perhaps didn’t go so well. It doesn’t mean revealing all your business struggles or talking about how you had to fire someone because they were super lazy. But it is a good idea to share stories that you have grown and learned from or use it in a humorous way. Like a restaurant putting a poor TripAdvisor review to use for their new board: “Come and try the worst pizza one guy on TripAdvisor ever had in his life.”

We can help you find ways to make your brand more human! Don’t hesitate to reach out to us, we have so many more tips. We offer training and social media management and branding services. Visit our Interphase Social website for more information. Or contact us through email [email protected] or by mobile 01382 221777 and we will get back to you as soon as we can.