Humor in marketing can be a powerful tool for relating to your audience in a way that creates positive associations with your brand. However, it’s not always easy to use humor that actually works for you and achieves your goal. If you use it wrong, you could end up damaging your brand. So here are a few tips for using effective humor in your campaign.
#1 Use Humor Strategically
If you need to deliver a lot of data or bland facts with your content, humor can be a great way to get the information out without boring your reader to death. This not only keeps your readers interested but helps you reinforce the voice and personality of your brand.
You need to be careful, however, to make sure that humor doesn’t override your authority. You want to present yourself as an expert in your field, not just an amusing clown. So make sure the humor you apply matches the tone of the rest of your voice.
That is, don’t adopt a sense of humor that doesn’t match your brand’s personality. If your brand is otherwise pretty wholesome and homey, a racy joke is going to seem really out of place in your content. But a lighthearted and friendly presentation of the facts would match well.
#2 Be Relevant
Topical humor is generally more successful because it plays on ideas and events that are fresh in people’s minds and that are a shared experience. Moreover, it breaks from the usual habit of companies trying to remain neutral. It’s alright to express an opinion on current events as long as it aligns with your overall brand image.
You also want to bear in mind who your target audience is. No matter what happens, you’ll never be able to make everyone happy all of the time. This is especially true with humor which is very subjective and personal. The important thing is to focus on making your target audience happy.
If your target audience isn’t very political, avoid political references. Stick to pop culture. If they watch sports, use humorous references to the most recent football game. In short, use humor that reflects your brand’s personality as well as your audience’s interests.
#3 Use Cartoons & Animation
No matter how funny it is, blocks of text will never be as appealing to your audience as images, especially animation and cartoon strips. This can add a much needed lightheartedness to your content. It can also take the burden off of the text itself by allowing you to support the actual words with images, both of which use humor.
However, keep your brand identity and the purpose of your content in mind. If you are attempting to present yourself as a serious authority, you might want to stay away from cartoons and animation that could add a certain childishness to your identity that contradicts the rest of your overall message.
Keep in mind, though, that a serious brand identity can still use humor without contradicting their identity. It just needs to be done in a way that matches their seriousness.
#4 Be Consistent
If you use humor in the content on your website, sprinkle it into your social media as well—and vice versa. Just as your brand identity should be consistent across all platforms, so should your use of humor.
Not only do you need to make sure you are evenly applying humor across all platforms, you need to make sure it’s the same sense of humor. If the kind of humor you are using in your on page content doesn’t really sound like the humor you use in social media, the mismatch will make it feel manufactured and forced.
It’s a good idea to create a sort of profile of your brand identity, a description of who your brand is and what characterizes its personality. In this profile, you should include the kind of humor your brand uses. This profile can be distributed to all of your writers and marketers—anybody who represents your brand to the public.
#5 Get Your Audience in on the Joke
Some of the most fun and creative campaigns are the ones that get your audience actively involved. These can also be an immensely useful source of data. You can increase brand awareness and brand loyalty through funny contests, playful challenges, or amusing hashtag campaigns.
Basically, all you have to do is provide a prompt and then let your audience get creative. Start a photo contest where customers submit funny pictures that incorporate your product or your brand. Start a hashtag to solicit humorous anecdotes that relate in some way to your brand.
As mentioned earlier, this is a great tool for engagement and awareness. But audience generated content is also a great source of data. You can gain greater insights into the personality and humor of your audience by sifting through their responses. This is great data to use in the development of future campaigns.
