Humor and Stories as a Way to Build Loyalty
Content marketing and what role humor and stories plays in the mix
Summary
People love to share stories and humor with each other. Its a way to build a tribe and build a position in that tribe. Both, humor and human stories, are most effective in engaging audience and retaining them.
Personal Example
We tried building a brand by publishing stories on finances and women. We interviewed Indian women and asked them interesting questions to understand their financial journey, their key take aways and ascertain their financial choices. The interviews got us attention on Instagram, where we used paid route to build an audience. Instagram stories that we published were pictorial and artistic summary about gritty financial stories about women. The topic of bringing women and finance together is hard one but still on Instagram, the cost per profile visit was as low as INR 5 and CPM was INR 9.16. The statistics state that CPM varies from INR 8 to INR 12 for Indian audience [1] and ours was a hard audience to target.
Our key learnings there were that you always need to give audience a feeling that interacting with your post left them with a positive feeling that time was well spent, either in form of learning or entertainment or both. Also, ideally the color palette of the post as well as the language should appeal to the target audience.
Tracking customer engagement in Business presentations
Did you know that laughs per minute could be used to track the the quality of business presentation and audience engagement ?. Dharmesh Shah, CTO of HubSpot, speaks on how he optimizes his business presentations with live audience for laughs per minute as an effective strategy to give engaging presentations [4].
All content marketers have repeatedly leveraged humor and stories to gain audience attention, focus on retention and build a brand story. Zomato is an example of a company that does it well.
Things to Remember
Lot of factors influence people to follow your content. Following are the some aspects that need to be considered :
Create compelling content
Change how people feel in the moment.
Give people a story to tell in house.
References
How Much Do Instagram Ads Cost in India? | Digital Uncovered
Marketing : A Love Story by Bernadette Jiwa
Experience as a founder
