You’ve developed your company brand and established your business as an industry authority. But along the way, you’ve forgotten about customers who had at one time been engaged but haven’t kept your attention for a variety of reasons. Before you write them off completely as a loss, give those forgotten customers another look. After all, winning them back benefits everyone. You cultivate conversions and they get information and services from a source they learned to trust. One of the best strategies is using humor to re-engage customers who forgot about you.
Establish Your Online Personality
Making humor a part of your company’s online personality keeps it memorable. That generates likes and shares, and interaction from your audience. But how do you do that? Just by incorporating a fun tone into your content that’s already helpful and informative.
As part of establishing your online personality, it helps to ask a few questions:
- Are your company’s offline and online personalities similar?
- How does humor fit into both of these personalities?
- How does your audience follow you on social media? That audience includes followers, fans, and existing customers.
- How does your audience perceive you? Do they think of you as conventional, adventurous, educational, daring, edgy?
Once you’ve answered those questions, you’ve got a better handle on your company’s online personality. That shapes your content and its messaging.
But what do you do with that messaging to reel back in those customers that are close to getting away? Simple, use that previously mentioned fun factor to reel them back in.
Have Fun With Your Audience
- Post videos that are informative and entertaining.
- Once a week, post a thank you to your most engaged followers for the week. You can post a picture or GIF of your coworkers celebrating or a video of them dancing joyously, etc.
- Conduct weekly polls that tie what’s going in pop culture into your company.
- Do short interviews with coworkers with fun questions like what they have on their desk, things they can’t live without, how they plan to enjoy the weekend, what chore they hate, etc. Then ask your audience to weigh in with their own answers.
- Have a Take-Over Tuesday. Let different people in your company or special customers takeover your social media feed for the day each Tuesday. It shakes things up and attracts an audience curious to see what’s in store.
- Have a Throwback Thursday. Spend each Thursday reposting from the past. This gives new followers insight into your company’s history and showcases how far you’ve come.
Tell A Good Story
Everybody likes a good story. It grabs and retains attention. It’s really effective when you incorporate humor, even if it’s subtle. If your office has a company mascot, post his daily adventures and weave it into a narrative from his perspective. If you get regular visitors to your business, post pictures giving a shout-out to them and put it in an ongoing story format. If something weird happens in the office or just outside, post updates in a tongue-in-cheek news format with pictures or video.
Keep It Short, Sweetheart
As the old entertainment business mantra says, “Leaving them wanting more.” These days, audiences want their content in tiny nuggets that don’t take a lot of time to peruse. That’s true for video and written content. So even if your aim is to give your audience a slight grin or an all-out belly laugh, be concise. That way, your content will stick with them and motivate them to engage and share with more potential customers. Keeping it short will also leave your audience eagerly awaiting your next post.
Avoid Insults
In today’s society, we’re striving to be a lot more open minded and accepting of others with a live and let live attitude. While the bread and butter of stand-up comedians has always been taking jabs at the world around them, some of them are getting called out for being callous. So when you’re planning ways to weave humor into your content, it’s probably best to stay away from poking (too much) fun at others. Otherwise, you could be starting a social media war that ends up spiraling out of control.
Plus, your seemingly innocuous post could alienate part of your audience, leading them to unfollow you and share their disdain in their own posts. And that’s definitely NOT what you want. So it’s best to be safe and play nice.
Stay Consistent With Your Brand
With your content, your aim is to inform, entertain, and generate various levels of laughter from your audience. But keep in mind that it should always point back to your company. Even if it’s a subtle undertone, the message should respect your company brand. After all, developing content that draws followers to consider your products and services is the ultimate end game.
With a little creativity and strategy, you can easily incorporate humor into your online presence. Then before you know it, you’ll find those customers who forgot about you are back and actively re-engaged.
Cathy H has years of well-rounded experience in the writing field. Since transitioning from the newspaper industry, she has written countless pieces for clients that include content for blogs/articles, website landing pages, apps, press releases, and email newsletters. While her versatility enables Cathy to adapt her tone to the need, her favorite projects are those that add a dash of fun.
