You have designed a killer website and created profiles and pages on countless social media sites. Now it’s time to build a following, and one of the best ways to accomplish this is by humanizing your brand. This refers to the process of allowing customers to understand more than just the basic details of the products and services offered by a business, inviting them to participate in a cultured community of the people behind the brand. Here are some effective suggestions for cultivating and nurturing an online community:
- Create a plan. Effective brand humanization incorporates a blend of social community, company values, and workplace culture to nurture customer loyalty. While not a difficult concept to understand, it is a challenging task to implement. Careful planning is imperative; consider the current company culture. What are its strengths and flaws? How might it need to change? What must happen to influence change? Do whatever it takes to solidify a healthy company culture.
- Open up to others. When the company culture is thriving, it is acceptable to make it visible to others and invite them to participate. Social media platforms are the ideal tools for accomplishing this objective. Customers can be encouraged to participate in discussions via comment sections and urged to address concerns within them. Employees may be highlighted regularly. Internet users can also be educated about how the company is run, including photos and videos of behind-the-scenes work.
- Set appropriate boundaries. Ideally, social media friends and followers will evolve into brand ambassadors, educating others and (to some extent) representing the brand. To maintain focus, however, boundaries are essential. For instance, certain behaviors or topics, such as political discussions or the use of prejudicial terms, may need to be prohibited in company forums.
- Consult or hire for brand humanization. The process of humanization requires unique skills, which some people master better and more efficiently than others. Employees should be able to exhibit some level of warmth, humor, and emotional empathy. They should also communicate openly, respectfully, and assertively. Individuals with these talents and characteristics will better facilitate the inclusion of customers, friends, and followers into the company culture.
- Treat consumers as friends. Although the overall goal of business is to achieve conversions, consumers are more likely to become customers if they are first treated as friends. Relationships must be built and interactions should be experienced. Focusing on the feelings and perceptions of consumers adds further depth to conversations. One way to do this, for example, is to provide more than a simple, one-time response to tweets. When possible, follow up later to find out if issues have been resolved, products are being used, and services are being enjoyed.
- Incorporate storytelling. A brand story is a combination of its company’s mission, history, goals, and audience. It is based on the people, ideas, places, and all other components that comprise the business. These stories can be told in various ways, but should always be consistent. Storytelling can occur in fairytale form, in the images of comic books, by video, or infographics.
- Promote other content.Self-promotion is an obvious component of marketing, but it is not fully representative of humanizing a brand. Community engagement is about people, and they will notice when efforts aren’t genuine and are founded solely on underlying agendas. Instead, community is about being neighborly and helping others. Accomplish this effort by sharing others’ content.
- Offer education. Part of the human condition is empathizing with and helping one another. Brands can participate in this phenomenon by sharing expertise and thought leadership. Users will appreciate tutorials, informative articles, advice, demonstrations, and lectures pertinent to a given industry. Education may take the form of white papers, webinars, infographics, videos, tips and tricks via social media and push notifications, and offline gatherings.
Brand humanization begins on the brand’s website, where security and speed are crucial for defining your brand, along with social media functionality and usability for both parties. WordPress has emerged as the leading CMS in these areas, which is why it’s highly recommended for any brand looking to humanize, particularly due to its easy blog functionality and social media plugins, coupled with its rich suite of security features.
To illustrate the rising trend in the popularity of WordPress for proper branding, web hosting providers are now offering WordPress-specific hosting services to maximize server speed and optimize usability within the WordPress framework. This integration is another reason WordPress offers the toolset and features to optimize brand humanization efforts.
Humanizing your brand has many benefits, and social media engagement is the path to building that humanization. Has your brand developed a social media strategy yet?
from Soshable http://ift.tt/1KjjZSY
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