How to Humanize Your Marketing

Humanizing your business is a must to gain trust and stay competitive. And using media to market your business can be enjoyable and effective if done right.

Here are some tips on how to humanize your marketing:

1. Unlink Your Social Media Accounts

Some businesses link their social media accounts to save time or easily distribute their content. It seems harmless. But linking your accounts is like showing up at a party, then loudly repeating the same story in an endless cycle. The other people at the party can overhear your story. And even though everyone is smiling politely, they don’t really want to hear it for the fifth time.

Here’s how to distribute your story in a fun way, without repeating yourself:

a)     Make your content special. Your audience will more easily consume your content if you make it special. You can make it special by avoiding Twitter terminology on Facebook. If you’ve shared something on Twitter, remove any unnecessary hashtags or @ signs before you repost to Facebook. Your audience will appreciate your content more when you show a little care.

b)     Use visuals. One exception to unlinking of social media accounts is with Instagram and Twitter. Twitter is a very text-heavy platform, and visuals can spice things up. Plus Twitter is much faster paced compared to most other platforms, that the chances of telling the same story to the same people is much lower. I like to use IFTT to automatically share Instagram photos to Twitter.

c)     Reword your tweets. You don’t always have to use the headline of your blog post as a tweet. If you say something interesting within the post, use that sentence in a tweet or an update instead.

2. Humanize your website

When you humanize your website, you often simultaneously optimize it. This means that your business is easier to find online, especially if you publish quality content. You can do this by:

a.     Creating a content-rich blog. The more colorful and unique your content, the more valuable you become – not only to search engines, but to your customers! Creating thought provoking content makes you stand out from your competitors. Plus it shows that you care enough about your business to want to stand out.

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b.     Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. Doing this can allow for the most optimal keywords. The backbone of SEO is how you word and structure your site. When you create solid meta-tags and make sure each blog post uses keywords that tie into your industry, your customer’s needs are more easily met.

c.     Get on Google +. A strong Google Plus presence directly ties into your content by enhancing your SEO efforts, especially if you claim google authorshipof your original content. This platform is the best of all worlds: You can share long-form thoughts and content, link to others, all while reaping the SEO benefits.

3. Be vivacious, not vain

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It’s great for a business to come across as animated by exuding a personality. But make sure to respect your audience by not over-sharing. Finding the right balance between being vivacious vs. vain is not always easy. Here are some tips:

a.     Try a new angle. Think of your business from another perspective. Would sharing that detail rub your audience the wrong way? If so, try rewording from a different angle.

b.     Stop the selfies. Posting personal photos of yourself is a great way to put a face to the name of your business. Just don’t go overboard with selfies. Instead post scenery photos or shots that represent the state where your business is based. This works well if you’re a local business.

c.     Don’t rant. While it may be tempting to take to social media to rant, save it for a private conversation. Your customer’s probably don’t care about your issues. They want to know how your business can help them. Will ranting do this? Probably not.

Humanizing your business is a way to share your company’s unique insights. When you enjoy the human elements of marketing and running a business, you give your brand the opportunity to grow.

What is your business doing to become more human? 

a version of this article originally appeared on the Vocus blog.

photo credits:

Hartwig HKD

elpatajo

beginasyouare

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