How to Infuse Humor in B2B Marketing

If you think comedy and business are miles apart and never the twain shall meet, let us introduce you to Richie Redding. He’s the founder of Funnier Than You Are, a comedy consulting company helping firms connect with their audience through humor.

As a professional design service for businesses, we’re all about connecting to target audiences through B2B content, so we invited Richie to our podcast to hear his rationale and process for crafting a compelling message.

Why Comedy?

Two words: organic share.

An Oracle study found that 91% of people WANT brands to be funny. If you’re funny, people will share your content. 

Being funny works, and Richie has real-life client experiences to prove it. For instance, he once created a video for a client that got 1000 shares, a drastic improvement from their previous shares: 0. 

With humor, you can infotain - inform and entertain the audience at the same time. You want to inform your audience about your product, but doing it with humor entertains them as well. And we all want to be entertained.

The Storytelling Process

What is Richie’s process for crafting business content that resonates with audiences?

First, he gets to know the brand.

• Who is their audience?
• Who is their competition?
• What is their tone of voice?

He then puts together a writer’s room of people who understand the audience well, so they can “talk like they talk.” Ideas are tossed around, selected, scoped out, and produced.

Richie tries to cast comedians in productions as often as possible. The benefit to casting comedians is once again organic reach - content shared by the comedians with a following is an inexpensive way to reach eyeballs.

Speak the Truth

What guides the team when they generate ideas for content marketing? Relatability.

“It’s funny because it’s true’ also applies to B2B content.”

Richie tries to speak directly to the people making purchasing decisions because “a business can’t sell to a business. You still need a person.”

People are the ones who absorb your content and decide whether or not it resonates with them. 

Your job as a B2B marketer is to let them know that you understand them and their needs. You get their frustration and pain. You connect with them on an emotional level and what Richie does enhances that connection by making it funny.

Richie’s Rules

Richie has some rules that guide him in his content marketing.

1. Don’t POOP at work: 

Don’t be a Psycho

Don’t Ostracize Anybody

Don’t Overdo It

Don’t Punch Down

 

2. Play offense. Tell them what you're not (ie, the competition!).

3. Use these three tips when crafting text:

• Rhyme 
• Repetition 
• Alliteration

Grabbing Attention in the Tik-Tok Generation

Richie used to have 5-6 seconds to grab an audience’s attention in a video - now he has 1. The audience has to know what it’s about way faster.

A model Richie admires is demonstrated by the Dr. Squatch ads, produced by Raindrop. They created 2-minute-long spots that can be broken down into four 30-second spots, and even eight 15-second spots. 

This model means you can take one piece of content and extract multiple components out of it, for use on various platforms. We follow a similar model at Gallery Design Studio with our GDS Monthly, where we create several signature pieces a quarter and then extract micro-content pieces.

Conclusion

It was great chatting with Richie and learning more about infusing comedy into marketing through great tips, such as knowing the difference between being funny and being clever. (It’s great if you can be both!)

Does your company use humor in its marketing? Do you need help crafting compelling content?

GDS is a creative design solution for enterprises and we’re happy to help. Book a call with us today to learn how we can help you!