Good Marketing Should Make People Smile

People like to engage and interact with others, they don’t like being constantly bombarded with sales propositions from a faceless corporation. Users don’t care about you or how brilliant your business is. If you offer the same products or services at the same price as your competitors, what will make potential customers choose you over your competitors? Personality. Making people smile and laugh at the right times will create a lasting impression and associate that feeling of happiness directly with your brand.

Coca-Cola are a prime example of a business that sells their products through emotions rather than the features of the actual products. Take a look at our blog about selling with emotion to see how effective Coca-Cola’s marketing campaign has been over the years. Before using humour to engage your audience it’s important to keep a few things in mind.

1. Know Them

If you don’t know who your ideal customers are then you won’t know how to make them smile and laugh. By establishing user personas you will have enough information at hand to be able to create an effective marketing campaign that will allows users to associate feelings of happiness with your brand.

2. Use Appropriate Humour

The only thing worse than not having a sense of humour is using the wrong kind of humour at the wrong time and place. Using humour that your users may consider offensive could alienate or offend them and you could lose out on potential sales.

3. Right Message – Right Medium

People use different mediums for different purposes. E.G. John may use LinkedIn frequently to connect and network with business professionals but he may use Facebook to catch up and socialise with his friends and family. Knowing how best to communicate on these different mediums will allow you to better engage your audience and will encourage a greater level of interaction with your business.

4. Draw The Line

Knowing when to stop can make all the difference between a successful marketing campaign and having egg all over your face. J.C. Penney drew lots of attention to themselves, earlier this year, by pretending to drunk Tweet during a Superbowl game. They got plenty of attention, but for all the wrong reasons. You can see the replies on J.C. Penny’s Twitter page.

Make your audience smile today

If your business hasn’t any luck on a particular social network it may be time to change your marketing strategy for that network. Try this methodology for 30 days and see if it works for your business. Monitor the changes using analytics software and set yourself a goal of sharing 1 – 2 articles per day that will make your target audience smile and see the impact it will have on your brand. Come back and tell us how you got on.