How to flex your humour muscle to improve your brand tone of voice

Do you feel like your tone of voice for your business or brand needs some more oomph? Does it sound like everyone else’s in your industry? Ever thought that adding a drop of humour into your conversations could make a massive difference to engagement and make your brand stand out in an ocean of vanilla voices?

The pandemic and Brexit have made people far more serious. The world of work has changed unimaginably and right now the power of humour is unleveraged. It could be the perfect time to sprinkle some throughout your copy. Could you add in some humour or a little light-heartedness to your tone?

Humour not lols

Sense of humour is very different to trying to be funny. We’re not suggesting for one second that you grab a red nose and be the next Zoom call comedian or boardroom clown.

Maybe start by lightening the tone of your content to help potential clients and customers really see the positives that your business or brand brings. For example, how does your product or service improve their life? Or reduce their headache or daily groans?

Can you set a scene of how they feel without your service and then quickly flip it to show how life would become a lot rosier if they had you working alongside them?

No sense of humour, eh?

If you feel you’re a tad sour-faced and don’t laugh often or easily, then fear not. Humour is a muscle (figuratively) and like any muscle, if it’s used enough, it can get stronger.

You just need to flex it regularly, and here’s how:

• Become aware of what makes you laugh and when you make people laugh.
• What do you laugh at when you’re watching Netflix, listening to podcasts or the radio?
• Are there any brands that have a tone of voice that you naturally gravitate to? Do you find yourself smiling or smirking when you read the packaging.
• Why not spend some time browsing the shelves and see how other products or services describe what they do and talk about their business?
• Don’t just automatically look to your competitors for inspiration. Get ideas from brands in totally different sectors. What’s happening down the personal care aisle on your favourite shampoo bottle? What do you like about the copy on your favourite beer? Or how does the personality on that vegan snack make you feel?
• Create a list of words and phrases that you automatically warm too, and you feel suits your services that could raise a smile.

The humour you add-in doesn’t need to be in your face and obvious. It could be warm and subtle. Drizzle it throughout your content maybe in a blog post, a video or on some of your adverts. See how it looks and feels and ask people what they think. Start small and then when your confidence grows you can go bigger and bolder.

When you start to see the world and your business with more humour it can have transformative effects on your behaviour, mindset and mental health, creativity, and productivity. Humour is a learnable skill and one that could do wonders to lift your tone of voice and give a new life to your products and services.

If you want to chat about how Scribble can help you bring more personality to your prose, then click here.