How to Use Humor to Increase Sales
By Roger C. Parker
Using cartoons can help brand your marketing and drive home
important messages. Although surprisingly inexpensive to
acquire, humor can be one of your most powerful marketing tools.
Humor puts your readers at ease. Readers appreciate a touch of
humor in an otherwise overly serious world.
Humor operates on an emotional level, driving home your message
in a far more memorable way than words alone. Humor makes
sensitive topics more approachable while summarizing and
reinforcing points that would otherwise be lost.
Different types of humor work best in different contexts. Many
speakers begin with a joke to put the audience at ease, or a
story about ‘a funny thing that happened on the way to the
meeting.’
But jokes and stories are less appropriate for written
communications. Jokes can be misinterpreted and depend on
delivery and timing for their effectiveness. Stories can take
too long to tell.
Cartoons are perfect for print communications. Readers who
typically check them out before reading the adjacent articles
appreciate cartoons.
More important, cartoons communicate at a glance. A cartoon can
attract your reader’s attention and drive home an important
point in a memorable way.
The editorial page of any newspaper shows how effective humor
can be in simplifying complex subjects and driving home a point
of view.
Humor also adds a visual dimension to your marketing,
differentiating your message from your competitor’s. Cartoons
encourage readers to look at topics they might otherwise skip.
Where do you get cartoons? One of the best sources is the
Cartoon Bank, www.cartoonbank.com. Here, you can license
reproduction rights to cartoons that originally appeared in the
New Yorker Magazine.
You can select from tens of thousands of cartoons. You can
search by topic or keyword. After choosing an appropriate
cartoon, you can find out how much it will cost to license it,
and then you can download it.
Licensing fees are surprisingly reasonable for most business
applications. For example, you can license New Yorker cartoons
for use in presentations for just $19.95! For other purposes,
the cost depends on where you’re going to use it and how many
people will see it.
There are, of course, other sources of cartoons. If you see a
cartoon you like in a newspaper or magazine, write the
cartoonist in care of the publication and ask about availability
and pricing. If there is a particular cartoonist whose style you
like, contact the cartoonist about a custom cartoon.
This has worked very well for me and I owned total rights to use
the cartoon any way I wanted.
Cartoons are great for the home page of your website,
newsletters, training materials and presentation visuals.
In each case, the unexpectedness of a cartoon immediately
captures your audience or reader’s attention and visually
reinforces your message.
Here are some suggestions for marketing with cartoons:
- When in doubt, leave it out. If the cartoon does not perfectly
support your point, leave it out.
- Always add the copyright information described in the
licensing agreement.
- Never run a cartoon without first obtaining a license to
reproduce it.
- Optimization. After downloading, resize and sharpen the
cartoon in an image-editing program like Photoshop and export it
in the proper file format.
Using humor in the form of cartoons is a powerful way to brand
your marketing and drive home important messages to your
prospects and clients.
About the author:
Roger C. Parker is the $32,000,000 author with over 1.6 million
books in print. Do you make these marketing and design mistakes?
Find out at www.gmarketing-design.com
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