Digital marketing makes reaching your customers easier than ever. It also makes greater personalization and empathy easier, too, because you have more customer data to draw from. You know more about your customers. That’s a lot of power to wield, but it’s also a huge opportunity. It’s easier than you might think to infuse more authentic personality into your marketing, and a lot more fun!
Here are four smart tips you can start adding to your digital marketing to become more human to your audience.
Personalize Your Digital Marketing
Every data point is an opportunity to make your content more relatable. Start small, by including the name of your customer in the emails they receive. Marketing automation platforms use tokens that make it easy to insert a person’s name into your content.
From there, you can expand your personalization. If you know a small but loyal group of your customers visit for your Wednesday Special, segment them into their own “Wednesday” list and send them an exclusive coupon … that they can forward to a friend.
Catering to two distinct audiences? You can create smart content across an entire website, so that your Audience A sees content that reflects their pain points, while Audience B sees content tailored to them. This level of personalization requires quite a bit of backend work on your website. You’ll probably want to work with a contractor or agency to accomplish it.
Use Emojis for Lighthearted Content
An emoji is a digital image or icon used to express a response or emotion. You’ve seen an emoji before, even if you didn’t know what you were looking at. Emojis are now so ubiquitous, they have their own merchandise and even their own movie.
You’ll want to start adding emojis to marketing campaigns that could use a fun and light ? touch. A study on marketing campaigns found that messages with emojis were more memorable to people than campaigns without emojis. Even if it’s for a simple social post, adding emojis can increase engagement by nearly 57 percent depending on the platform.
Emojis don’t render the same way across every platform, so it’s important to test how one will look on the devices your audience prefers. Another important note on emojis is they interrupt screenreaders. Keep that in mind when considering the accessibility of your marketing.
Smart Tip: Emojis are like pepper in a dish — it’s all about balance. Add a dash here and there to bring your content to life, but be careful not to overpower your messaging with cuteness.
Stay Out of the Third Person
Not sure of the difference between third and first person? Here’s an illustrative example:
Third Person
ABC Pizza wants to offer you 20% off on your next pie!
First Person
We want to offer you 20% off on your next pie!
If you’re talking to someone face to face, you’d never speak in the third persono. So why do it in your marketing and risk losing that human element in your content? Most brands do this because they want name recognition or brand awareness. Don’t worry, there are plenty of places for your name and logo to appear.
Speaking in the third person creates a passive, formal voice. It also tends to sound promotional or salesy.
Staying in the first person (using I and We, rather than the brand’s name)helps you sound more direct and personal in your messaging. First person content allows readers to form a connection with the person on the other end of the screen, You.
Reference Pop Culture
Some of the most popular social media accounts are the ones that reference pop culture. Wendy’s Twitter account has made a name for itself by constantly referencing pop culture and using language that relates to a younger crowd. Just this past month, Wendy’s was sending out Tweets based around the NCAA’s March Madness basketball tournament.
This dream team always wins. Get the Made to Crave cheeseburgers delivered with DoorDash today. pic.twitter.com/dCNEmdktRV
— Wendy’s (@Wendys) March 21, 2019
The toy brand, Barbie uses its Instagram account to reference and spotlight women who are leaders of certain occupations one may not usually find a woman working in
Tying pop culture into your digital marketing content shows viewers that you’re keeping up with the times and creates a unique personality to your brand. Whatever popular trends/topics you do decide to integrate into your social posting, make sure it’s something edifying and fun at the same time for your audience.
Smart Tip: It only works if it’s real. Find the pop culture reference you and your audience have in common. If you try to fake it, your audience will eventually catch on and lose interest.
Make Your Audience a Part of the Digital Marketing Action
It’s normal for folks to want to fit in and be a part of something outside of themselves. Making your audience an actual part of your marketing efforts is a great way to make them feel like they are truly participating in a relationship with your brand. Here are some examples of ways you can start including your audience as part of your marketing:
- Encouraging guests to upload a snapshot of their visit to your location
- Sharing, liking, and commenting on posts that you’re tagged in from your followers
- Creating a ‘customer of the month’ type of program that showcases your best customers in certain marketing campaigns
What better way to add more personality into your marketing efforts then showing off the unique personality of others?
Ready to get started? It all starts with a marketing automation platform. Check out our free ebook to see how a guest WiFi marketing automation solution is the perfect place to start collecting customer data for your marketing.
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