Using Humor as Part of Your Small Business’ Marketing

Advertising Marketing Showcase Small Business

Humor is a universal language.

So, naturally, for a small business. Implementing humor as part of your social media content is a solid strategy.

Think about it, most corporate social media accounts and advertisements regularly use humor as part of their marketing.

These companies use humor with good reason too. 53% of people are more likely to enjoy and remember advertisements they find funny

Look at the results from this single tweet from the recent Mr. Peanut campaign:

By now you may be starting to realize that using humor in your social media is a great strategy for growing your brand’s audience. 

So let’s take a look at how small businesses can utilize humor in their social media. And why you should too!

Small Businesses and Humor In Social Media Marketing:

In my experience, many small businesses choose a simple, somewhat bland approach to their social media marketing strategy.

After all, the most important thing for a small business is staying in business. Deadlines are tight, bills are due, and as a result, creativity often gets overlooked!

Simply put, using creativity and humor may seem like a risk for small business owners.

As a result, humor often gets overlooked as a marketing strategy by many smaller companies.

However, here’s the hard truth. Unless your social media campaign is actually successful, hardly anyone will ever see it anyways!  
After all, the competition is steep!

With 100,000,000’s of Tweets and 10,000,000’s of Instagram posts published every day. Taking chances with creative content may be the only way to break through. 

Fortunately, when you finally break through, you can learn to tap into a nearly never ending stream of clients ready to purchase your product or service. 

So, how can you use humor to tap into that never ending stream? Let’s take a look!

Strategy 1: Memes Make it Easy

This strategy is perhaps the easiest method for incorporating humor into your social media.

Memes make marketing easy.

There are memes about everything. From courtroom memes to lawn mower memes. Literally every industry has memes.

Seriously, implementing memes in your social media is as easy as finding a good meme, adding a caption, and scheduling it for publication.

But that’s not all, go one step further! Make your own memes, and incorporate your brand or product into them.

You need look no further than the corporations that use them everyday. 

Some great examples of companies using humor on Twitter:

  • @Oreo
  • @TacoBell
  • @DennysDiner
  • @Charmin
  • @ChipotleTweets
  • And of course @MrPeanut

Seriously, if using humor in social media works for Taco Bell and Chipotle, you better bet that it can work for you as well!

If you want to make your own memes, check out the meme generator on ImgFlip. Making your own meme literally takes minutes. And it’s absolutely free.

Here is a great example of a branded meme from SlimJim’s Instagram, It’s simple but it works:

See Post here

Strategy 2: Engage With Others in a Humorous Way

One of the best ways to gain traction on social media is to engage with others.

By engaging with accounts with a bigger following than you, you can capture some of their audience.

Granted, this active engagement takes much more than passively scheduling a meme. And there is a good chance that the account you are attempting to engage will ignore you. Yet, if you continue to engage with others, you will slowly build connections.

And using humor is a great way to engage with others. Even if the account you are aiming to get the attention of doesn’t reply or even see your post, their audience likely will. Again, this is a strategy that the “big dogs” of social media also use all the time.

Listen, this next tweet serves not only as a great way to engage with others. It also shows that even on VERY serious topics such as people eating tide pods, a little humor goes a long way!

Original Tweet Here

Strategy 3: Humorous Video Clips

Maybe you have a video camera and like to make short videos on occasion, or maybe you saw a clip or gif that would go perfect with your post. Whatever the case, adding humorous videos to your content is a great way to implement a bit more creativity and humor into your marketing strategy.

According to research, Twitter posts with videos are retweeted 28% more frequently

Creating a new video doesn’t have to involve a studio. A short video of you having fun in the office, or a simple skit can be more than sufficient. When done correctly, you would be surprised how easy it is to make a video go viral.

For an excellent example of a small business using a short video on a budget look no further than Dollar Shave Club. By using resources, Dollar Shave Club was able to produce this video, which currently has over 26 million views, with a budget of only $4,500!

All-in-All

At the end of the day, there is no better strategy for small businesses to implement in their social media strategy, than a bit of humor.

We all love to laugh, and the last thing we want is another company with a scripted sales pitch to lull us to sleep. By implementing a bit of humor in your marketing plan, you can have fun, while spreading your company’s message. And who knows. If your marketing campaign is done just right, and you use a bit of humor….

You may just put your business on the social media map!

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