Humor in Marketing: The Whys and Hows

Do you want to attract more of your target audience with an effective marketing strategy? Start incorporating humor in your campaigns and you will enjoy the results.

Humor is regarded as a great tactic in marketing, simply because it is fun and surprising. Even without humor, you do get your point across, but adding it makes your content more relatable and sharable, thereby increasing your leads.

So instead of being the boring and dull marketer whom you have been up till now, start enticing your potential clients with traces of humor. We’ll tell you how to do it, but before that, let us talk about the whys in detail.

Why use humor for marketing?

Because humor helps people remember you. By using it for promotional purposes, you make your audience laugh and make yourself memorable. Which ads can you remember right now? They are the ones with a great music in the background or ones that made you laugh. Get the point now? Your job is done once you can force people to remember you.

Humor also helps make your target audience feel better, which makes it more likely that they will conduct business with you. Take plumbing as an example and think of someone dealing with a major leak. Now if you use humor, you can somewhat reduce their stress. According to studies, people’s emotions tend to affect their buying decisions. So if you can make them laugh and feel happy, they will probably reach out to you.

Want more reasons to use humor? It helps you stand out among your competitors and gives you an edge over them. Not every small business owner out there is implementing funny marketing strategies. If you can do it, you will differentiate yourself from them and might enjoy more sales.

How to use humor for marketing your business?

Attract with a funny tag line

We know a real estate broker who created a funny video about real estate design. He poked fun at the business while sharing some secrets and tips of the industry. The video, titled ‘Habitat for Hermanity’, served the purpose pretty well and made him stand out as a memorable realtor.

So have a funny tagline for your business, but make sure it is a good one so that your target audience remembers you too.

Use pop culture to get the word out

A website which sells Halloween costumes published a tutorial about PSY’s Gangnam Style costume, helping their readers create one of the most popular costumes this year in a really economical way. Thus, they played the BAL when the time was perfect and used something that was considered ‘in’ to get their word out. What was the effect? Their sales increased and they gained a significant amount of exposure.

Showcase your product in a humorous manner

You can breathe life into the dullest of things if you spin in some humor. A company utilized this approach for promoting their mouse pad. In order to generate attention, they used the mouse pad as a grill. The image was sent to all the reporters and gave them a spot on the front page of many reputed technological sites.

Another way you can do this is through a video. A company which offered enterprise storage published a video by the name of ‘You Know You Want Flash’. The entire video was produced by the in-house team so that costs could be minimized. The video generated over 25,000 views on YouTube and provided the company plenty of leads to follow.

According to the Products VP of the company, the video was created in an attempt to achieve two primary objectives: to show the world that storage is not so boring and to challenge the status quo which has been established by traditional storage vendors.

Have fun with cartoons

A software company created a cartoon based video on software testing so that they could reach out to developers in their social network. The video has been shared on numerous blogs and generated a significant number of views.

There are many online services which will create a cartoon for your business or you can assign the job to your graphic designers. Utilize them to create some for your business. You can then use these cartoons in several of your advertising campaigns, and if you are smart, go a step ahead and use them in a story.

Use animations

Lately, animations have generated a lot of buzz and can be used for enticing your target audience. Just keep one thing in mind: target keywords when publishing these videos so that you can create more backlinks for your website and increase your Google rank.

Animation videos can be created by assigning the task to another company which offers these services. Or you could use online tools and create the videos yourself.

Use your logo for some fun

Do you ever notice Google’s logo? They keep modifying it every few days.  As of right now, their logo incorporates a sleigh because it is Christmas. You can also use this tactic and keep adding funny elements to your logo every now and then. Your potential customers will take more notice of you then.

Be funny on social media

You can use social media to portray yourself as a lively business. Either post some interesting and funny posts or share a set of videos you have created. Your followers will probably comment; be sure to respond with another humorous reply.

What to keep in mind

·         While being funny, you should still offer value to your clients.

·         There is a thin line between being sarcastic and funny, and you should not cross it in any way.

·         Your humor should be consistent with your brand.

·         Using humor too often or too much may backfire.

So use our advice and inject some humor and fun into your marketing campaigns. Separate your company from the dull ones out there and get the attention you deserve!