Finding your voice: How to make marketing personal

Connecting to Your Audience Through Humour, by Christina Egerstrom

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Christina Egerstrom is a content writer and marketing strategist that specializes in creating content that builds community and support for large corporate brands as well as personal brands.

No matter whether you are a solopreneur business or a big brand, succeeding with marketing will require finding a unique and genuine voice that your audience can relate to and be a part of. You need to find the unique voice and language that represents you and what you do, but in a way that people respond back to so that they can have a conversation with you. 

The way I connect with my own audience is through humour. Humour is part of my personal brand language because it’s a big part of my personality and it helps me express myself. It’s also one of the ways in which I build approachability because it encourages my audience to reciprocate and be casual and honest with me. 

And this is the goal of making marketing personal. It’s about making it easier for people to interact and respond to your content in a way that feels natural and honest to them and to you.

But, how do you do this?

1. Don’t be selfish! Make it about them 🫶

It’s easier said than done and requires breaking from the traditional form of marketing that focused on product promotion. This kind of promotional content is not very successful anymore. It still has a place, don’t get me wrong, but the most it can do is get someone to become aware of your product or service and hopefully buy it. 

However, purely promotional content will not build loyalty, support, or community for your brand. It will not turn your audience into advocates. Why? Because when you’re too focused on your products, it shows a certain kind of selfishness. It feels more about you and increasing your sales than it is about them. The key is to make it about them.  

You can think of it as a conversation in which one person can only talk about themselves and what they care about. You don’t want to be the kind of person or brand that does this. Instead, you must think about what your audience finds interesting, what they want to know and how they want to receive that information. Is it as videos, blog articles, memes, or as short social media posts? 

2. Use your audience as a compass and experiment 🧭

The answer to what content to create and in what form will be different for each brand and it can take time to get it right, but as long as you keep thinking of your audience first, you will get it right. 

Constantly question whether your assumptions about them are right and whether you are helping them answer the right questions, because it may not be the type of content you’re creating that is not working. It may be that you are talking about the wrong topics to the wrong people. 

But getting it wrong just means you’re getting closer to getting it right so don’t be afraid to experiment. You will eventually find that voice which strikes the perfect balance between personal, professional, and promotional. And once you have that, you have it forever. 

It’s like the perfect logo. You won’t change it unless you’re completely changing your brand. 

3. Build your own language 🧬

Nailing what kind of content to create and what topics to talk about so your marketing feels carefully personalized to your audience is the easy part though. Speaking with your audience can help you figure that out. 

The next step is the harder one: To develop your own original brand voice that feels natural, inspiring, entertaining, funny, supportive, original, disruptive, or whatever you want it to be, to your audience in a way that also represents you. 

This requires building your own brand language that helps your audience get closer to you in the way that you want them to. You have to think about language elements like:

• Emojis

• Kinds of visuals

• TOV

• Slang

• Level of technicality

These are just as important for making your marketing feel personal as the topics and kinds of content you create. They are actually the foundation or DNA from which you build your content. 

For my own personal brand, I talk about marketing to other marketers and I make it feel relatable and personal by speaking about issues and situations that we all know and face in a way that is also humorous. 

Gifs and memes were such a natural choice for me. They are fun and help marketers laugh a bit about the marketing world we all inhabit. Plus, I love gifs and this is another important part of finding your voice. It must feel connected to who you are and you yourself must enjoy it too!

And I like to think that my gifs also show some cleverness, originality and freshness 😉