On today’s podcast, I covered a number of ways to add fun and humor to your marketing. Being funny is great – and there is no denying it. Even fun can be a huge benefit because it circumvents your audience’s logic filter and allows your messages to get through. Tweet: When you make someone smile or laugh, the intellectual shield is lowered and you’ve created a space for connecting.
Be sure to download my ebook on this topic – it’s filled with lots of examples and ideas!
I was also a on a a funny business panel a few weeks back along with my colleague and friend of the show, Tim Washer, and host Brian Carter where we discussed adding humor to marketing and business, so be sure to watch this for great ideas as well (as well as some pretty fun banter!).
A Few Great Ways to Add Humor to Your Marketing
1. Focus on the truth for your audience. Forget viral. What does YOUR audience care about? If you’re selling to CIOs, what frustrations do they have? If you sell to sell to consultants, what are their challenges? When you poke fun at challenges – truths – your audience recognizes, you signal to them that you get them and their issues. Great examples of this are Kinaxis and ScoField Edit’s Vendor Relationships video.
2. Surprise – turn expectations upside down. If your audience is expecting sweet, give ’em an unraveled ending. If your audience is men, make women the heroines. And vice-versa. Flip expectations. IBM did this with its “Art of the Sale” video series.
4. Celebrate your audience (like Intel does). Make your audience look good. Cisco’s Tim Washer and the Voice of the Customer team does this really well with fun stoytelling with CIOs in a series of videos, called “Fast Innovation and the Slow Waiter.”
5. Aim for FUN (you can’t spell funny without it!). Lightening up means adding a bit of wit and levity in headlines, cartoons, visuals, and other things. Marketo has a fabulous “Big Activities Book” replete with pages you can color in. Kapost has comic books. There are so many ways to have fun. Go with it!
Enough talk! Get to the podcast!
Leave a comment: how do you add humor? Learn something new? Let us know.
Loved this one Kathy! I especially like the idea of adding fun as a precursor to “funny”. I checked out the Intel examples too…awesome. And brilliant ideas about adding improv to draw in customers…like ikea did.