with Customers

10 Ways to Humanize Your Brand and Connect with Customers

‘People buy from people’ is an adage that is as accurate today as it has always been. Here is a simple example of what the phrase means. There are two coffee shops that you could visit in the morning on your way to work. One coffee shop serves average-quality coffee, but the staff always greet you with a smile and pass the time of day with you. The other coffee shop serves excellent-quality coffee, but the employees are rude and abrupt, and you never seem to see the same face twice. The chances are that you would choose to frequent the coffee shop that gives you a personal service with a smile and put up with the less than perfect coffee.

Humanizing a small, local coffee shop is not difficult to do. But the ‘people buy from people’ idea applies to all types of businesses. Whether you are selling to consumers or other companies, your customers are human beings who like to interact with other people and not faceless corporations. So, how do you transform your business from an inanimate object into a brand with a personality? Here are ten tips on how to go about humanizing your company.

1. Start at the Top

Humanizing a business is a process that must start the top and then work its way through the entire organization. In the above coffee shop scenario, for example, the reason that the employees are friendly is not entirely down to the individuals who serve the coffee. It is probably down to staff training and the ethos of the business. In a

humanized business, the entire team is transparent and on show. There will be pictures and biographies of the management team on the company website and the CEO might even have his or her own Twitter account.

2. Start Treating Customers Like Friends

If you want to humanize your business, you cannot treat customers as though they are merely numbers on a spreadsheet. You must start to use the language that friends use when they talk to each other instead of the relentless hard sell. If you are launching a new product, for example, explain why you are so excited by this innovation rather than why your customers should buy it. If your friend tells you why they love a product, it will be much more convincing than a conventional advertisement.

3. Create Two-Way Engagement Start a two-way conversation with your customers and make that conversation publicly available. Respond to comments left on your website, your social media accounts, and on review sites. When you respond to comments, demonstrate that you are open to ideas and that you take on board and act on criticism. Let your customers know that there are human beings behind the brand who are working to resolve issues and provide a better service.

4. Make Good Use of Video Content

Video is an excellent medium for showing the human side of a business. If you use real employees in your marketing videos, it will help to create a connection between your brand and your customers. There is nothing wrong with written content, but video content is much more personal. And, with more than 50% of people now watching online videos every day, marketing videos are an excellent way of getting your message across to a broad audience.

5. Open the Door and Let People In behind the closed doors at your business by holding open days and producing behind-the-scenes marketing videos. People have a natural curiosity about how products are made and how companies are run, so let people see for themselves what happens inside your company. The objective of humanizing a company is to make your customers your friends. You would be happy to invite a friend into your home, so why not let your customers look behind the scenes of your business?

6. Communicate on the Same Level as Your Customers

Friends do not talk down to each other, so talk to your customers in a tone that recognizes you are equal and that you understand the customer’s issues and needs. Work with customers to solve their problems and, as mentioned above, encourage customer feedback and comments. If you want to humanize your brand, you will need to consider the tone you use in every letter, email, and post on your blog.

You will need to use the same friendly style of language, whether you are promoting a special offer or reminding a customer about a missed payment.

7. Inject Some Humor into Your Business

Try not to be so severe all the time! Everyone enjoys a good laugh, so look on the bright side and inject a bit of humor into your marketing campaigns. Share some of your calamitous failures with your customers and let them see that you are human. Crack a few jokes on your Twitter account and lighten up in some of your blog posts. There are some types of businesses that do not lend themselves to humor, of course. Still, for most companies a bit of fun will make it easier for customers to relate to the brand.

8. Become a Storyteller

As a part of your transformation from a monolithic corporate entity to a business with a human side, you will need to stop trying so hard to sell and start telling more stories. You are aiming to cease being merely a business and become a group of friends instead. Of course, you will still need to market your products. But you do not need to hard-sell to get a trusted friend to buy something from you.

9. Get Your Employees on Board

It will be crucial that employees at all levels get on board with your company’s humanization project. Everyone who works for your business will have a part to play in projecting the personality of your brand. Every employee should be encouraged to think of themselves as a brand ambassador. And all employees should be encouraged to talk about the brand outside of work as well. If employees speak about your business in a positive way on their social media accounts, for example, it will add to the connection that people have with your brand.

10. Plan and Be Consistent a business will not be achieved without planning and a consistent approach. The new-look personality of your brand will have to be rolled out right across the company. If the company has a well-entrenched formal approach to business, it will take time for a more approachable persona to take root. You may also find that some employees may resist the change. You cannot, of course, force an individual to be friendly and cheerful. With persistence, though, you can change the personality of a brand.

Conclusion The above points will help you get started with humanizing your business. But you will need to continue with your efforts if you want to maintain a consistent brand image. After the isolation that the coronavirus crisis has caused, people are looking for a personal approach to business more than ever before. So, if you have not done so already, now is the time to begin humanizing your brand and making your business more approachable.

Your Purpose, Your Story: With Ted McGrath

This month’s Meet & Greet features theater performer, speaker and bestselling author Ted McGrath. He has created five household brands and made millions teaching coaches, speakers and servicebased business owners how to turn their life stories into a lucrative business. I was introduced to Ted’s webinars and books in 2013 and have found that he brings a unique approach to coaching, speaking, transformation and information marketing by combining his business marketing strategies and his transformational skill set with his talent as a performer.

Dennis Postema: Tell us about some of the early days in your career in insurance and sales.

Ted McGrath: I started in the insurance business fresh out of college, at 21 years old. I didn’t really have a better idea of what I wanted to do. I walked into New York Life for an interview and initially thought it must be a magazine, only to find out it was an insurance company. I had nothing better to do, so I sat in the interview. The guy who interviewed me asked me one question, and we talked for four hours. We just clicked. He hired me and we’re still best friends, 20 years later.

Between age 21 and 22 while working in insurance, I cracked six figures. Then I went out one night and ODed on drugs. I took a bag of cocaine, a couple pills of ecstasy, and topped it off with 15 drinks. Next thing I know, I’m on the kitchen floor at four in the morning and my soul is coming out of my body.

At the same time, professionally, I was being promoted to partner with a company. That’s when I decided to stop doing drugs. Most people will say, “Why? Did you fear almost dying again?” I would say fear of dying was second. My primary fear was losing my job. When you get into a leadership position, things change. So I spent the next six or more years as a top partner at New York Life.

Dennis: You were making great money, you were a big success financially, but there was something that was inside that made you switch and want to go get more. Can you talk about that?

Ted: I think deep down people know what they want to do right away. I think a lot of times, people try to ignore what they really want, or they think they can’t do it—that they aren’t enough—and they just follow societal norms, pressures. Also, people are very influenced by what they see, what’s in their environment. People think, “Okay, well, this is what my life is going to be because everybody around me is doing it.”

I always had a performer in me. My core purpose is the play, Good Enough. It’s my life story. I did some performances as a kid, nothing formal, but I always loved performing and found it inspired me. And even when I played athletics in college, I was always center stage. That’s a form of communication too. Even though you’re not using your words, you’re expressing yourself. When I got into the insurance business, my performance needs were met by giving seminars.

The first seminar I did had 40 attendees. We’d sent out a mailer and a bunch of people showed up for dinner. My whole focus for the seminar was how good of a story I was going to tell up there. I started to tell the story and my only real interest was to tell a great story, and even to this day at my seminars, it’s an interesting thing. My story was the thing I rehearsed the most before the seminar. Most people think, “You’ve got to get up and make a pitch.” Most people go through their pitch religiously. I glanced over my pitch, got up and did it.

Telling my story has always been more important to me than the money. It’s not that I don’t want the money, I love the money, but even when I was doing those seminars, I wanted to do the story more than I wanted to

I found storytelling in my career in the insurance business, which was a stepping-stone to actually doing theater now and acting.

Dennis: In some of your talks, you mention mentors and relationships. I was fortunate enough to have a mentor at an early age, and I see a lot of successful people do. What are your thoughts on mentorship?

Ted: Mentors are good for different things that you want to learn. Ultimately, the great goal is your spiritual growth and your personal growth, and I think you have to find what works for you, and I think you evolve with that. The greatest mentor you have is yourself. Of course, there are great people who are knowledgeable in different subjects that you want to learn from. Like my mentor, I had no experience in business at 21 years old. Without him, there’s no way I’d have done what I did that first year. Nobody does it alone. Even in doing a one-man play, you’re up there alone, but you have a whole team of people supporting you. Dennis: You teach confidence in a way that I love, not only in your book but in what you do. How can entrepreneurs gain more confidence and bring it to the table?

Ted: A lot of it is life experience. Some of it is acknowledging what you know, deep down. Anybody can have uncertainty in different situations. But if you have a strong point of view, then you certainly won’t be shaken. Even when you lose your focus and you feel uncertain, if you know what you’re capable of, you can get through it.

Knowing is just at your core. I think the biggest thing that knocks people off is when you have people in your environment who are invalidating you, you’re going to think less of yourself if you’re not trained to smack them over the head a little bit. You have to be able to protect your space.

Dennis: That’s a very good way of putting it. Do you have any tips for people who are scared to get in front of a camera?

Ted McGrath: It’s all about practice and confronting it. If you’re going to do a video with an iPhone, you’ve got to pick it up and be there with the iPhone, because it’s just a lens. What are people worried about? It’s just a lens. If you go live, then you have eyeballs watching you, so you need to have the willingness to confront that.

You also need to realize that you’re always going to have people who make negative comments. I don’t see a point in this lifetime where you’re going to put something out and not have people who are negative about it. You’ve got to learn to deal with that and not even pay attention to the comments on it and just send your message.

I would also say that it’s important to know what you want to say. Have three bullet points you want to talk about and just talk. If you’re not confident, practice before you even go live or before you go on video. Do it 100 times.

Dennis: What would you say the best business advice you ever received was?

Ted: There is really good advice out there and I’ve gotten a lot of good

marketing tips and things like that, for sure. I could probably be better at seeking out advice. I kind of jump in and learn it myself. Ultimately, I think any advice you get, you have to take the spirit of it. I don’t think you just follow advice point blank, because your situation is different, who you are is different, how you see the world is different.

You can look at a model of how something’s done and think, “What’s my idea on the situation? What would I do?” Anytime I’ve really just taken advice and gone and done precisely what somebody else says to do, it hasn’t turned out in a way where I’ve owned it. It’s not that it hasn’t turned out well, just it hasn’t turned out in a way where I’ve owned it. to put your own twist on it ... take it with a grain of salt to make sure it fits into what you’re doing and then put your own spin on it.

Ted: Yeah. I think you’ve got to. There was a quote in the Wall Street Journal years ago that said, “Starting a business is rarely a dignified affair.” Is that true, though? It sounds good, but is it true? I think it’d be a very dignified affair, to do what you love. Don’t take blind advice. A lot of times people look at authority and think what the authority says must be true. Don’t ever take advice from an authority without inspecting it to see if it’s true.

Dennis: Do you have any advice for those who want to get started as entrepreneurs and do you think that they should jump in right away? Or do you think they should start in an intrapreneurship or working for somebody else?

Ted: I think they need to make a decision that’s best for them. Everybody’s situation is different. I was in the insurance business with no kids and no wife. At the end of the day, I just left because I didn’t want to do it anymore, but I knew deep down inside, there was something more for me. I knew that I had an entrepreneur in me, I had somebody who wanted to go do something that I was passionate about, that was going to bring me fulfillment, so I jumped.

I had a transition plan of six to seven months and then one day, I called my mentor and said, “Listen, I’m out.” And I just left. I didn’t even have a plan. I think you have to determine what your risk level is and make sure when you leave something, the need to succeed is high. Do I regret the way that I left? No. Maybe I never would have if I’d waited and waited and waited. I jumped and I broke the rope when I jumped. That was fine for

me at the time. Do I do things differently now? Yeah, to some degree, but when I wanted to do a play, I was like, “I’m going to do my own version of it without any coach.” Then I got up on stage and flopped around like a dead fish and embarrassed the hell out of myself.

So, you learn, and you go do it. You’ve got to look at your responsibilities, what you have going on in your life, and everything that you need to fulfill. Ultimately, if you think you have responsibilities now, I think as you grow, you have more responsibilities, not just for your family and yourself, but responsibilities for your groups and mankind and making sure you do good things in the world to help.

Dennis: One of the things you mentioned about entrepreneurship is that when you see something, you take action and you go for it. I see so many people with paralysis analysis, and they’re just like, “Well, if I knew everything about this, then I would finally take the jump,” whereas I’m like, “At least move toward it. You’re going to mess up, but course correct versus not doing anything at all.” You probably saw that in insurance too. You always have the people who want to know everything about something before they’ll go out and talk about it. Do you have any advice to get out of that rut?

Ted: I think it needs to be balanced. It’s about taking action intelligently and doing it in a sane way that makes sense. It’s interesting, if you’re doing things that are on your purpose, there’s no question in your mind that you’re going to do it. So it helps when you have a purpose or a passion that is guiding you because you have another reason to confront it. If it’s a business thing that you have to confront, there has to be the drive behind it to want to confront it.

There are business situations you have to confront because they’re a problem. Then there are those you want to confront because they are opportunities to help you realize your big purpose. Those are different kinds of confrontation and different kinds of taking action. They’re universes apart. One’s reactivity and one is choice. you know now, what advice would you give a 21-year-old who’s just starting out?

Ted: You hear this all the time but do what you’re passionate about. Do what your purpose is, what your main purpose is. You can be passionate about many things and you can have multiple purposes, for sure, but do what your purpose is—whatever is true for you.

Don’t worry about what Mom or Dad want you to do. I didn’t have that with my family—they weren’t like, “You need to go be a doctor, you need to do this.” That wasn’t their path at all. They weren’t very, I would say, influential in terms of me deciding to do things. When I wanted to play tennis, it was my own idea. I’m going to go play tennis, which was cool. They let us make up our own minds in that respect. So, find something that’s a purpose of yours that is true for you and go, “This is what I know is true for me.” Don’t worry about the expectations, whether it’s an expectation to go to college or go to grad school or get a stable job. What is a stable job?

today. It’s a joke. No disrespect to anybody, but it’s barely surviving. It’s living in a prison that you don’t even know you’re in, where you’re barely making the house payment, you’re barely making the car payment ... Open your eyes and look at what’s true for you. Don’t worry about what you see out there because most of what you see is a façade, and if you pull back the curtain, you’ll actually see the truth. Look at the person who’s giving you the advice, see how they are and how they’re being. Look at their life, look at their actions, pay attention to their ethics.

Dennis: What advice can you give on staying motivated?

Ted: You’ve got to figure out what is the core thing that you’re passionate about. When you’re doing that core thing, fulfilling your purpose, and you really nail it, it feels amazing. You get done with that and you feel satisfied, fulfilled, excited and inspired. But then, at that point, if you’re not growing or shooting for something bigger, how can you really be happy? Because you’ve got to be moving forward toward goals to be excited and inspired in life.

If you are just stagnant, then how can you get joy out of life? Even if your goal is to spend more time with the grandkids, you have to be doing things that progress that and move it forward. For some, when they know what their potential is, what they’re capable of, many accomplishments won’t feel like enough because comparatively to your potential, it’s not.

Then what do you do? You keep growing. You keep heading toward your purpose. And when you’re on purpose, there will be good days and bad days. But you learn and you take something away. It’s like you go smash into the experience a little, you pull some information away, and go back stronger next time. Don’t smash into the experience and then let the takeaway be “I shouldn’t do it again.” Let the takeaway be “I need to do it again.”

To find out more about Ted and get some free gifts, visit tedmcgrathbrands.com.

One of Ted’s favorite causes is Drug-Free World, the largest nongovernmental, education-based drug initiative on the planet. Of the cause, he says:

“Drugs are destroying our society, particularly in America. Psychiatric drugs are running rampant. They’re misused and abused among a big percentage of the population and that, to me, is a problem.

That’s why top running back Marshall Faulk and I do a video podcast every two weeks called the Drug-Free World podcast. On the show, we’ve interviewed people from Deion Sanders to Dr. Jay as part of an effort to raise awareness about drug abuse in the U.S.”