Episode 277: Humanise your brand
Humanizing your brand is not just showing the faces. It could be showing your lifestyle. In today's episode, Fiona shares a quick and important tip on how to capture people's attention for a second and remind them that they are talking to a human.
Tune in!
Topics discussed in this episode:
Introduction
Beyonce
Putting your name
About us page
Email Signature
Conclusion
Get in touch with My Daily Business Coach
Resources and Recommendations mentioned in this episode:
Welcome to episode 277 of the My Daily Business Coach podcast. Can you believe we're at the end of the first month of 2023 already? I can already hear, “where is this year going?” We have just got started, so don't stress out. There is plenty of time to get through everything that you need, including today's quick tip, which is exactly what you're going to hear in a couple of seconds. But before I get into that, I just wanted to acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians of the beautiful land on which I get to live and record this podcast. And that is the Wurrung and Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. And I pay my respects to their elders, past, present, and emerging, and acknowledge that sovereignty has never been ceded. I also welcome any other First Nations people, indigenous people who may be tuning in from all over the world.
Welcome. It is a quick tip today and it's important, particularly as we move out of a pandemic world. This has always been important, but I think it's even more important in today's world. What is it? Let's get into it.
I talk a lot about humanizing your brand. I think it is a hugely important part of running a business, not just from the nice to have and isn't it lovely and have these real connections, which I completely agree with. It's also proven statistically to do better for business when like financially, your bottom line when people feel a connection. I think it's something like 306% higher lifetime value if people feel an emotional connection to your brand. And the biggest and easiest way to do that is through humanizing your brands and showing the people behind the business. That may not necessarily always be the figurehead or the CEO, it may be the people that are working for you. It could be people in the store, it could be your suppliers, it could be your creators, manufacturers, and artisans that you work with. All sorts of people go into creating a brand.
Yet we don't show that. It's not just showing the faces. It could be showing your lifestyle. It should. What, what are you eating? Where did you go on holiday? Which park are you working out at today? I mean, you think about Beyonce, and Ivy Park, right? One of the biggest brands, well, Beyonce, the biggest, probably one of the biggest, biggest brands in the world, most recognizable brands, very curated. It is a brand. You can go to beyonce.com. There are all sorts of products that you can buy there. I know I've bought many of them, but Beyonce has humanized things like Ivy Park, which is her athleisure wear because she has talked about so many times in her origin story for that, coming up with a name, that was named the park that she used to have to work out with her father when he was managing Destiny's Child.
He would get them to run and sing through that park. At the same time, she has then referenced that park again when she was giving birth for the first time. She said I imagined myself back at that park. Pushing through. She has referenced Ivy Park, an actual park in Texas where she grew up. And that is part of humanizing her brand. It is coming into the origin story. It is differentiating her business. Let's face it, it's Beyonce. Her business is pretty differentiated, but it is giving humanity to that brand to the story. Humanizing your brand can come up in so many ways. Today it is a quick tip episode. I'm going to keep it quick. But three ways that you can humanize your brand in about 10 seconds can help with doing this.
Especially if you're somebody who fears maybe putting your face out there. These are other things that you can do to humanize your brand. In no particular order, number one, a big one, I see this mist all the time and as somebody who also worked as a journalist for a long time, I don't understand why people don't do it, to be honest. That is putting your name in the biography of your Social Media. Now, I know people might say, but I have a brand and I have a big business and I have all these people working for me, I don't want to put my name in there. That's fine. You can put founded by at and your own, even if you don't have anything else there. At least somebody is saying that there's a person behind it.
But the biggest one is that I wonder why people don't do it when I know that there's one person behind this business. It is a small business. Maybe you're a maker, maybe you are a service-based business like a photographer or a graphic designer, and I can't find your name anywhere. I can't find who runs this business. Social Media is supposed to be social. I would say that a huge part of the time that I spend, which is 15 minutes max a day on Instagram, is in the DMs being social, and having conversations. Now we get a lot of DMs about this podcast, which is very lovely, thank you. We get DMs about the book and all sorts of lovely DMs from people. Often I want to want to say, I want to write back "hi," whoever their first name is, and maybe they haven't put their name in the message, which is fine.
I will go to their account and profile and I can't find a name. Even more, sometimes I'll go to the website and I can't find a name either. It's almost like I feel like I can only be a certain amount of social because I don't know what your name is. I can't have that connection because I don't know what your name is. I don't know who's running this business. When I can see a name in a BIO, it instantly allows me to feel that there's a human behind this brand and that I can connect with that person. That is a huge part of business today. One of the quickest ways you can do that is to put your name into it, even if you just want to say founded by Anna M you don't have to give away your whole details.
Maybe you're like, maybe you're related to Beyonce, who knows? You don't want to put your full name in there. That is fine. But to put something likewise About Page is a massive one where you can't see people, it's all third party or there's no photo, there's, there's just nothing to give me that there are humans behind this brand. One of the quick ways, because I said there were three quick ways. First, one name in bio, the second one, which I've alluded to already, is having something on your About Us Page that is about you, about us, about the people behind the brand. Do not have it all in third-party language. Do not have some generic image there that has no face to it, even if I get it. Not everyone's comfortable putting their face out there, but maybe it's a photo of you with other people that work in the business.
Maybe it's a photo of you creating something. Maybe it's more like your hands and an image of your head with your hands creating and it's taken over the shoulder. It could be anything, but give it some life. The number of times I've gone to an About Page because I want to write about that brand or I want to shout them out for Mother's Day or Father's Day or whatever it is. I can't find any information about the people behind the brand. Now I understand that people may have an exit strategy, they might want to sell the business, and yes you have to think about earnouts and all sorts of things, but a lot of the time people don't have that. They are getting started and for whatever reason, they have maybe thought that they will look small if they put just like a single person on the About page.
Believe me, it'll do better business overall if people can feel a connection with you because you are humanizing your brand by having an About Us page. On the About Us page, you also want to add something that's going to stick in their mind, something that is a little different. It could be something about how you were raised, which is what I have in ours. It could be something about that you love thrash metal music. It could be that you once were a backup dancer for Beyonce. It could be something that is going to stick in my memory and create a human connection. That is what we're aiming for here. The third one, which I alluded to in a recent episode, I think the last tip episode, actually episode 275 where I talked about email signatures and I talked about a great tool.
Go and listen to that if you are thinking of updating your email signature. You may well after this. The third one is to humanize your brand through your email signature. That could be through an image of yourself. Again, putting a nice little photo there so people can see who they're talking to. It could be through a tagline, or it could be through video content. I know one of my good friends, she has a cool video that like an animation that plays at the bottom of her email signature. It could be all sorts of things. But all day long we are sending emails and receiving emails and we are not utilizing that incredible piece of marketing real estate as a way to humanize our brand. Those are the three number-one names in the bio, whether it's your Instagram, whether it's TikTok, or whatever it is you want to be putting in your name.
Number two, About Us, About Us pages are still one of the most read pages on websites, and yet they don't have much information about the actual people behind the brand About us. And number three is to consider zing up your email signature. As I said, episode 275 tells you about a great tool to do that. But it could be as simple as just putting in a tagline or putting in a photo of yourself or putting in this week I have eaten the most delicious Vietnamese at wherever, or I love Vietnamese food or something else. That is going to capture people's attention for a second and remind them that they are talking to a human.
That is it for today's quick tip episode. If you wanted to have links to anything that I talked about or any more information in text format, you can find all of that over at mydailybusinesscoach.com/podcast/277. Thanks so much and I'll see you next month.
Thanks for listening to the My Daily Business Coach podcast. If you want to get in touch, you can do that at mydailybusinesscoach.com or hit me up on Instagram @mydailybusinesscoach.
