9 Tips to Humanize Your Brand

Brands portraying and showing a flat, cold, and passion-less personality fail marketing because people cannot simply connect with or relate to them. They appear unapproachable.
It is the exact opposite for brands that focus on being relatable, approachable and human. They do things differently to win the trust of their target audience. They steer away from robotic tactics that do not infuse emotion into all aspects of branding.
If you want to be successful regardless of your industry, focus on humanizing your brand.
After all, your consumers are humans. They connect with, trust and interact with other humans. They want real connections, conversations and relationships.

Brand humanization is about openness and transparency – revealing who the people behind your brand are, admitting flaws, building relationships and simply being human.

If you want to humanize your brand, I suggest that you ditch the old marketing practices that focus more on selling rather than improving customer experience. Here are some tips on brand humanization that will help your customers easily understand and connect with you.

1. Be transparent

According to the PwC’s Global Consumer Insights Survey 2018, one in three respondents or 35% of 22,000 consumers revealed that brand trust is among the top three reasons that they buy a product or a service.
How can a brand earn their consumers’ trust? There are many ways to gain trust and one of those is the willingness to admit a mistake or address customer issues. It should also be ready to make up for those mistakes. Doing so, you can show that humans are behind your brand.

2. Admit flaws and mistakes

Following up to the point above, demonstrate human qualities if you want to humanize your brand. As a part of it, you must acknowledge your mistakes and be transparent about it.
By admitting a mistake, especially if customers are experiencing a problem, you can display a very important human trait; in the process, you can win your audience’s trust.
Don’t use an existing template that you or someone else from your team uses to respond to customer complaints. Instead, take the time to write a personalized message, showing you’re listen to their concerns.

3. Share stories of failure

Sharing failures, you can make your brand more relatable with people. However, I am not saying that you must share things like bugs and issues with your software; rather, share life lessons and ways you overcome a failure.
Being more human, your brand can gain more loyal customers since they can relate with its human side.

4. Personalize your strategy

Avoid catering to the mass market if you want to stand out and serve a narrower set of customers that you intend to reach.
You don’t need to be everything to everyone or a jack of all trades for that matter. Successful brands serve a distinct community. They know their audience’s language and needs.

5. Think customer success management

Ensure that your business fulfill your promises from the presale to the post-sale to avoid the post-sale transition gap.
Customer success is an effective methodology used by brands to ensure that their customers achieve their desired results with a product/service. This method focusses on relationship with clients, offering a win-win solution for both the them and the brand. Customer success also leads to more upsell opportunities and reduced customer loss.
The reason is that your customer’s success is your success. If they’re happy with your product/service, they’ll keep coming back for transactions.
But you can only achieve customer success through humanization that can help you gain insights on how your customer will succeed with your product and know ways and reasons they’re using it.

6. Start from the inside out

Do not fall into the trap that many brands are into; they believe that social media managers alone could build a brand.
While social media helps in developing a brand’s voice, not practicing what you’re preaching internally doesn’t.
Remember, humanization begins and spreads from your culture. Instead of using social media to transform your business, why not use it to reveal your culture?
Now, that is more human. Isn’t it? It is also why you should not stop your employees from letting their personality and creativity shine on social media.
Invest on your people to empower them. Instead of banning them from posting on Facebook, why not train them on the best practices? Doing it right, you can empower your people to be the brand ambassadors themselves.

7. Show the relatable side of your people

Part of humanizing your brand, you must show who the people behind it are. Doing so, you can show their relatable side like being funny and intelligent. In this way, you can gain your customers’ trust easier because you can show that you’re there to help them not just to do business with them.
Consider having a team page showing mini videos of your people, showing their funny and friendly facial expressions. With it, your customers will know that they’re transacting with real people not just with an establishment.

8. Show your brand’s personality in content

Infuse emotion, wit and/or humor in your blog, articles and web content.

Aside from a unique copy, writing with personality is a huge plus because it makes brands reachable for their audience rather than sounding corporate, boring and brand-centered.

Avoid using industry jargons just to sound relevant and smart. Otherwise, you’ll come off as inaccessible.

9. Show gratitude

Thank the people behind every success! Doing so, you can make your audience invested in your success because they know that they’re appreciated being a part of it.

Connecting with your audience on a human level should be one of your priorities if you want to stand out in this competitive world, no matter your industry.

To make your brand more human and build real connections, show its personality and give people the reasons to support and patronize your products/services. Show them that you want to grow with them rather than just sell to them. Speak in their language and offer them value.

What humanization practices are you implementing for your business?

Whatever you are using now, think and engage like a human to stay on the right track. And at the end of the day, focus on building genuine relationships with your customers.

May this serve as a message of hope that being human may very well be the best silver lining to all of our current vicissitudes.

In love and respect,
Hilary

Founder & CEO, Corna Partners

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Hilary Corna

Bestselling Author, Keynote Speaker, Podcast Host, Founder of the Human Way ™...

Hilary’s favorite title is HUMAN.

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I am starting a revolution. One business and one person at a time.

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