Incorporating humor into your text marketing efforts can help you grab attention and engage more with your audience. It’s also a great way for your brand to show some personality, helping it stand out from the crowd. A surprising, new and funny campaign can attract a whole new audience and increase your subscriber numbers too.
But get the wording or the topic wrong and you run the risk of alienating or even offending your subscribers.
If you’re keen to add some funny to your next text marketing campaign, here are some simple dos and don’ts to help you get it right.
Choose Your Topic
What do you want to joke about? Choosing a subject that directly relates to your brand will help your text marketing campaign achieve more impact. You might want to avoid sensitive areas like politics and religion, which run the risk of alienating or offending some of your subscribers. Food, fashion, law, retail - whatever your business, joke about your own area of expertise.
Lighten Up
You want to keep your funny text campaigns lighthearted and clean. Forget the toilet humor or anything rude or brash, as if you misjudge this it could lead to some offended subscribers and damage to your brand. Stick to simple jokes, plays on words, and make the most of puns - they’re a great way to raise a smile through the written communication of SMS messaging.
Make It Snappy
Remember you only have 160 characters to get them laughing. This means keeping your jokes, puns or phrases short. Forget overly long, multiple messages, which will only cost more to send. Get to the punchline fast with some succinct, snappy copy. This is where puns work really well, allowing you to get a laugh simply, through language.
Don’t Forget Your Brand Voice
Your brand’s tone of voice needs to be strong and consistent across all of your marketing channels, and this includes your text marketing campaigns, whether they’re humorous or not. Putting on a sudden change to a dry, sarcastic tone when the rest of your marketing has always been upbeat is only going to confuse your subscribers. Think about a funny tone that fits, and focus on lighthearted humor, which has wider appeal, rather than negative or sarcastic humor that can leave some people cold.
