Humor can open many doors… especially a well-timed knock, knock jokes. Erm, see what we did there :-)?
After all, a smile goes miles towards tapping into human connection – essential to meaningful engagement and incurring customer trust.
Claude C. Hopkins, an advertising bigwig at the turn of the 20th century, famously said “People don’t buy from clowns.” But a little tasteful clowning-around takes the edge off and can lay the groundwork for a highly valuable relationship.
We all know that advertising is a way of life and allll up in our grill everywhere we look, especially online and especially when we’re glued to our smartphones.
But a genuinely funny ad is still a novelty and cannot only grab attention but elicit emotion – the bedrock of all successful marketing. It also lowers our defenses, making us less skeptical and more inclined to click, read or view.
Naturally, tasteful humor is essential so be sure to understand your audience and mold your jokes and puns around what they are most likely to react positively to.
In ye-olde times, people only bought stuff in person, in a shop. Remember those :-)? So building rapport and getting to know people’s likes and dislikes was pretty straightforward.
Online, creating those relationships is both easier (scale) and harder (humans get reduced to text). One way to put the human back into that text is with humor as laughter and fun are social bonding mechanisms, so they encourage us to get closer to each other.
It’s a fact. Bringing humor into your marketing makes you relatable and more connected to your audience.
Tip: Accentuate authenticity so that your humor feels natural and be sure to hold true to your brand identity, be it satirical, sarcastic or goofy.
When people see funny stuff, they like to share it because laughter is contagious.
And in today’s meme-generation, audiences especially love sharing visuals that seem to laser-tap into our funny bones.
Come on. You’re smiling, aren’t you?
Remember: Humor is an excellent way to level the playing field between business and customer and to boost your social engagement. Because forging that relationship directly impacts your bottom line. No joke.
