2010 is a Great Year for Using Humor in Marketing

I have been thinking about quite a few marketing ideas for a few clients who have marketing plans in the works, and I keep coming back to a common theme – humor. I am pretty sure right now, 2010, is one of they best years to have some humor with your marketing. At a minimum, it’s one of the best years to test how well the funny works with your audience. So why do you ask is 2010 one of the best years to have fun with your marketing? There are many great reasons, but this one’s the best:  It’s easy to test.

Social media often gets a bad wrap for things like… it’s time consuming, it’s always changing, there are too many mediums, I don’t know how to get started, etc. but in my opinion, it’s one of the best places to throw out new ideas and tactics and see if they stick. Think of 10 years ago, or let’s take five, even, and how quickly would you test out a new marketing campaign? How would you test ? People were a lot less willing to try multiple new marketing ideas in a given year. I think that mindset is gone, and hopefully gone for good.

Let’s discuss an idea I know a bit about. The Proust spoof we have been doing at Silver Square, launching with the new year, was a new marketing tactic for us. We came up with it to show and tell the great people in our network, whether they be clients, friends, family, family friends, peers, etc. and to also bring new people to our site. We can already tell this tactic is working. In 30 days, we know a spike comes each Tuesday, when our Proust appears on our blog, and typically visitors read three more additional posts. They come, they stay, they read, they get to know us. Exactly the point. Even more to the point we get a few people signing up for the blog, interacting with us, signing up for our newsletter… you see how this works? Had this marketing idea cost $10,000 to implement do you think we would have thrown it up there for kicks to see what happens? As the driver of this bus, I can tell you most definitely not. This idea is fun, is interesting, and brings about a personal side to our marketing mix.

Another way using the web makes testing for humor easy is that you can change it and make updates on the fly. Can you imagine how loud you would gasp if a promotion in a printed magazine went out with the wrong phone number or web address? Well, if you do that on a Facebook ad or on your LinkedIn status, you just go change it. Ta da. It doesn’t live forever wrong.

So your challenge for this week is to come up with some humor for your marketing. Have an extremely fun brainstoming session, have some of your employees play like your clients to make sure your humor is actually on target with your audience, and toss out some fun campaign ideas. Pick the best and decide which medium(s) you’ll post your greatness. How will you get people to your funny? Do you want them to interact? Do you want them to go to an event? Think through the idea, give it some legs and run with it. If it didn’t work, it cost you an enjoyable brainstorming session with your team, and a step further in learning about what works for your audience.

Try again. Measure, repeat.