Social Strategies Just Wanna Have Fun | Social Joey

So you’re ready to jazz up your social strategy—that’s great! While fun marketing strategies were once relegated to lighter industries, the rise of social networking allows any business to exercise their wit and wisdom. Thanks to the vast field of media sharing, the sky’s the limit on crafting a humorous marketing strategy that will turn your followers from fans to customers.

At Social Joey, we love having fun as much as we love social media marketing. Whether we’re swapping gifs or writing quirky copy, crafting marketing strategies with personality is a blast for us, too! When it comes to your own business, incorporating a bit of humor is probably easier than you think. Here are some ways to entertain your audience, while still staying true to what makes your brand unique:

###Think About Your Brand’s Adjectives One of the best ways to add pizazz to your social strategy is by brainstorming adjectives you want people to associate with your brand. Of course, you’ll start with “fun” for the purpose of this particular exercise, but try to dig a bit deeper to find ways to add depth to your brand’s personality. You might think up adjectives such as:

• Warm
• Knowledgeable
• Conversational
• Approachable
• Witty

While all of these things go hand in hand with fun, there are different ways for the brand to express itself within these parameters.

Say your top 2 adjectives are “fun” and “informative” — post about industry news, but instead of leaving that text field blank, pair it with a humorous caption. Alternatively, if you’re aiming for “fun” and “approachable” running polls or asking questions to start a conversation with your audience is a way to show them you’d be happy to chat. While these parameters will be different for each company, by using these as guideposts you can start asking “Does this fit with my brand’s adjectives?” which serves as a quick and effective way to vet and evaluate your content.

###Know What Customers Want to See The reports are definitive: consumers want to connect to brands on social media that make them laugh and feel good while sharing content that is relevant to their lives. That might sound straightforward, but if you don’t have a grasp on who makes up your target market or your buyer personas, it can be harder than you might think. There are two tips to make this a much easier process:

1. Know who your buyers are. Happiness and inspiration are universally-felt emotions. We all enjoy them and we all regularly seek out things that foster these feelings. The tricky part is that the things that inspire these emotions can vary widely from person to person. This is why knowing your audience is vital to successful marketing. Asking questions like, “What do they do for a living?” or “Would they prefer commentary about sports or a joke about the gym?” and most importantly, “What are their pain points that my business can resolve?” will help you drill this down. Once you identify these things and understand a general profile of where their interests lie, finding relevant content and writing engaging copy your customers want to read will come much more naturally.

2. Know where your target market hangs out online. While most people have profiles on more than one social media network, knowing where the customers you want to reach spend most of their time is essential information for digital marketers. This will help you market smarter, not harder — for example, if your buyer personas spend their time hanging out exclusively on Facebook, it’s probably not smart to invest all your resources into Snapchat Stories. The more time your consumers are spending on their network of choice, the more likely they are to run across a piece of your content while they’re there — as long as you’re actually utilizing said network.

By knowing who your buyers are and where they’re already at, you’ll be able to speak to them on their level. Targeting an audience how they want to be targeted and where they want to be targeted will make them much more receptive to a marketing message, and much more likely to engage with your brand.

###Keep it Authentic A fun social strategy doesn’t have to be a ²⁴⁄₇ comedy show, and the pressure of consistently producing hilarity would be enough to make any content marketer have a breakdown. The good news is that there are plenty of ways to infuse fun into everyday topics, so don’t be afraid to mix it up! Your brand shouldn’t feel pressured to be all funny all the time or be afraid of promoting and talking about products out of fear of turning people away.

Using humor is useless if you lose your brand identity in the process, so think of ways to authentically infuse lightheartedness into things that are already resonating with customers. Whether you think of fun plays off your pre-existing slogan or share a silly meme along with an actual fact about your product, incorporating a bit of fun into your marketing strategy doesn’t have to a total overhaul — just a little bit of humor will go a long way!

###A Word of Caution: Cheeky Versus Crass Many brands are using humor effectively in their marketing, and overall, it has made our favorite social sites an even more fun place to hang out online. However, with the rise of social media sass from industry leaders like Wendy’s, Moon Pie, and Charmin, there has been a recent boom in copycats trying to recklessly invoke the same results.

While jokes can go well for a brand’s strategy, remember that witty quips aren’t a substitute for actual customer service and the internet will certainly be able to tell the difference. Being able to blend the humor with remarkable customer satisfaction is the ticket to creating a sustainable and successful social strategy that will resonate well with existing and potential customers alike.

If you want to add humor to your social strategy and aren’t sure where to begin, Social Joey can help! Contact us today to see how our team of social media experts can work with you to craft the perfect content strategy for your business.