While some forms of branding involve a noble quest to improve one’s standing in the community through concerted effort, that’s not always the way the game works. Some companies are downright dastardly. And you should be too.

The aim of the game is to find ways to get your customers hooked on your brand. It might sound easy, but it is not. At root, it means tapping into their psyche and giving them something that they want on an emotional level. That’s not something that many companies ever achieve.

In this post, we’re going to take a look at some of the tricks that you can use to get your audience hooked. Check them out below.

Make Them Laugh

Getting people interested in your brand is about more than selling products. It also requires getting them to associate positive feelings with your enterprise. Masking people laugh, therefore, is one of the best ways to get them on your side. Plus, it is a way that you can deliver value to your audience without asking them directly for anything in return.

Just make sure whatever you say is actually funny, though. No dad jokes, please.

Appeal to Their Inner Child

Do we ever really become adults? Or do we just paper over our inner child selves with a layer of social etiquette?

Ask most psychologists, and it’s the latter.

You still have to pay homage to adult sensibilities, but nothing is stopping you from injecting elements that appeal to your audience’s child-like nature.

Animated video, for instance, is an excellent option for companies who want to get their points across. It helps to explain whatever it is that you want to sell in simple terms. And cartoon graphics instantly make even the dullest of companies more appealing.

Do Something to Trigger Their Senses

People tend to process the visual world better than they do words, so the most successful brands are usually highly visual. Communicating with your audience in prose is okay for specific intellectual niches, but you need to go beyond that. Keep things sensory, no matter what marketing channels you use.

Focus on Their Fears

Marketing does, however, have a bit of a dark side. Focusing on the positives is a powerful strategy, but so too is concentrating on your audience’s negative emotions also.

People worry all the time. And, because of that, they’re always looking for things that could potentially solve their problems. Companies that can play to their audience’s anxieties but also provide a solution put themselves in an excellent position to succeed in the future. You need to be able to soothe your audience.

Use the Active Voice

The active voice was once a technical writing style where you put the subject before the object and avoid placing verbs at the end of the sentence. Now, though, it’s come to mean “implying action” in the way that you speak. So companies that focus on using phrases like “we will” and “we can” bring their audiences along for the ride and assume that they’re on board. It’s a trick that works.