 Can you guys hear me? OK, so I'm Beth Ball. I'm senior content strategist at Uplink Spider out of Eugene. And my biggest passion in writing is including humor, because humor is so effective in marketing, hence the title of Take a Chill Pill. And so there I am. They told me to put a little slide about myself, but I don't really like focusing on myself too much. So I'm going to start with a story. Before I was a professional and before I started working with Uplink Spider, I was a stay-at-home mom and I was a homeschooling mom. So if you know anything about homeschooling moms or stay-at-home moms, it's that they love crafts. They love sparkles. They love glue. They love all of it. And they love scrapbooking. And they love anything that takes a lot of time and makes a huge mess. And me, well, I'm more like the cat up there. I hated crafts. I couldn't stand it. And one day I was at home avoiding a scrapbooking party. And yeah, they kind of exist. And I think I faked sick or something. And I saw an ad for something that completely blew my mind. And it didn't blow my mind because of the product itself, although it is really cool actually, but it blew my mind because of how quickly it won my loyalty and how quickly I felt connected to it and bonded by it. And so I'm going to actually show it to you and let you guys watch it. You've probably seen it. So we're going to watch it, and then I'll keep going in a minute. I have three kids, and I work from home. So people always ask me why I stay so calm or anything. Why isn't it working? I'm going to do it in September. Here, let's see. Where's Jocelyn? Did she still hear? This is your computer. What are you trying to do? Play this video. Oh, I don't know why the, uh, I don't know. You're unfulfilled. Have you guys seen the chatbooks video? Anyone? Yeah? I hear one, yes. Anyone else, this long commercial? No? Oh, you have to watch it. Did I kill this? Yeah, kill it. Or we can just play the audio if you want. Oh no, the visual is where it's at. Where you on the Google? You are here? Yeah. Stay up here just in case I need to get back to my thing. Yes, ma'am. OK. I have a cold pillow. I fell on the top of it, so I don't want to disturb it. 26 hours. Now go to the museum there. How long does this lie to you guys? I've had it for more than four hours and 12 years. My dad insists that the touching bar is as pedic shifts the idea of the dark nightly intro. And my children are going like, please, but I've already had enough time to keep them alive. I just let a little group picture with them. Because here's the problem. What the fork? Maybe it's all those socks. Hey, it sucks. Don't say suck. They're designed for moms with lots of free time. Imaginary moms. What? They're in each other. Really? Four magnet takes hours. The main question is when are they easily cost $50? So I'm sorry, doesn't it be adorable to have to say, maybe that's cute enough. $50. Maybe I could do a job or no kids, so I cannot bring it. Jack, we need to get down across some. And it's so tight. Don't get me wrong, I love Instagram. My kids never see our photos. Everything's falling. Hi. Oh. This is so much nicer to have time for, and it needs to take some no time. Introducing Chatbooks. The app that automatically creates all the photo books from your phone. Chatbooks is shockingly easy, because you've already done the work on each of the photos. Chatbooks creates and ships a photo book to you every time you have a 60 photos to Instagram face over your phone fingers. It even includes your virtual dates and captions. It's like hanging a magazine subscription to your own life. Thank you. Why is that a boring address? OK, that's me. I'm going to show you this mistake. OK? On my default website, the Chatbooks app takes only 30 seconds to set up, and you do it once. 30 seconds to recover the lives of your kids. Technically, that's not the time that I'm actually just to make a guess. How do I make it? You're going to do your best quick. So let me wait. Let me install it in here. Or search Chatbooks in the app store or Google Play to install the Chatbooks app today. What's awesome is your Chatbooks is private zero phone app. And if you're signing up phone app against when you use an ID photo books, then this isn't for you, great mom. This isn't for you, great design. Did you do it? Did you do the party dance? Plus, these Chatbooks cost just $8. That's what you pay for a day's worth of diapers, except you fill Chatbooks with kind of crappy camera. How about this? Then your photo books will just be your special occasions. They'll be for all the corporate and daily stuff you and your family can about. Yes, it's that easy. It really prints and shifts your photo books without you having to lift a finger. Thank you. Jeffrey, get off the roof. OK. I reckon I'm going to talk about this shift, because we don't have enough time to edit the work. And if you want to test phone, you can always take your money back. So this actually keeps going for a couple more minutes. But I think you guys kind of get the idea. It was pretty funny, right? And I don't know how many of you guys have kids. Does anyone have kids? Right. So it's pretty accurate, too, isn't it? So the thing I love about this is humor proves that the brand relates to the audience. And that's what this did so brilliantly. I should probably get my slides back up. It did this so well that, to me, to be funny and to really do it right, you can't just sort of understand. You have to really, really get it on a deep, deep level. So that is one reason, in one way, that humor and marketing really is effective, is it just proves to the audience that you're understood. And your clients, your target audience, your customers already, they want to know that they are deeply understood. And you can do that in a funny, non-offensive way, especially if you're marketing something that might be a little bit serious. And it is just a brilliant way to really reach your audience and to let them know that I get it. For me, it was that doing any sort of scrapbooking sucked the life right out of me. And when I saw this video that I just showed you guys, it was just so, just like, yes, they get it. I hate it. I'm not the only one. And I will forever be a client of theirs. I will never stop getting them. I will never, ever go to anybody else. And they did that just in that short little video. So again, humor proves the brand relates to its audience. And two, humor tells the audience it's OK to need help. And isn't that what we want a lot of our target audience, customers and clients, to know that, yeah, you need help. You can't build your own website. No, you can't do that design work because you don't know what you're doing. It's OK to ask for help and to say, I don't understand this. Can you do it for me? And if you can make them laugh while telling them it's OK to need help, they're going to trust you a lot more. They're going to want to work with you. They're going to want to just say, you take it. I don't know what the heck I'm doing. It's going to take down those walls that are built up and let them know, hey, it's OK to need help. And if you can get your target audience to believe that, they're going to come to you. And they're going to trust you and they're going to stick with you. So humor also, speaking of sticking with you, builds brand loyalty. Like I said before, I will never, ever go anywhere else to have any sort of pictures printed but chat books. I am so fiercely loyal to them. So if you can get a chuckle out of anyone, whether it's a video, a blog, or a Facebook post, it's going to create this bond in them with you. And there was this study done once that, actually, a lot of studies where they had one group of people and then another group of people. And what they did was they were testing their pain tolerance. And in one group, before they inserted pain and did, I think, they were putting cold ice on them, they actually had them watch just a boring how to fix your car kind of video. Not that that's boring in case anyone likes to do that, but it wasn't funny. Then the other group watched videos about with comedians that were stand-up comedians. And they found that the people that were laughing out loud, like physically laughing out loud, had a higher pain tolerance. And so that is a really, really crucial thing, because if you can get them to laugh, you can get them to just really, really trust you. And anything emotionally, as far as, oh, it's so hard to ask for help, or I really suck at this and I need you to do it for me, those emotionally hard things are going to be easier for them. So now, how do you do it? How do you do something with humor without kind of sounding like a jackass? How do you insert sarcasm? How do you get them to laugh without actually feeling offended? Because it is hard to ask for help. It is hard to go pay someone a lot of money to build their website when you can go to Wix or Weebly or whatever those websites are, right? So one way to do that is blogs. Blogs are naturally just a phenomenal way to be more casual, to throw in humor, and to just, you can take a really heavy topic and juxtapose it with funny gifts or gifs, however you decide to pronounce that. And you can use blogs to really reach your audience and explain to them why it is you're a professional, why it is they need you, and really earn that trust and that loyalty. And again, get them to laugh out loud. It actually makes a difference if you can get a smirk or a little chuckle, and they're not actually just LOLing, but on the inside, you actually want them to physically laugh out loud. You can refer to a trending topic. So I know trends are kind of annoying. But if you at least follow them, you can always refer to something that's trending and poke fun at it. And if you really, really understand it and they really understand it, that's going to be pure gold as far as ROI is concerned. And of course, don't forget to use any of your blogs and your email marketing. That's another great way to insert humor and to have a quick, funny little subject line. And it is the clicks and the conversions. For anything humorous is always higher in my experience. Of course, use Facebook and Twitter. I'm not a huge Twitter fan, so I don't use it a lot. But as far as Facebook goes, if you can skip the professional designs and the typical things that you have posted and actually just put a candid picture of you or a live video or the sink that overflowed or the office dog, those little things can go a very, very long way. People want to know that you're human. People want to know that you get it. People want to be understood. And so that is just a fantastic way to reach another audience. And then one of the questions that I get the most is how do you stay professional while being funny and humorous? And that's probably a whole nother conversation. But it is absolutely important that you're not so professional that you're boring and you're dry. You want to have your personality in there. You want to make people laugh a little bit. And you should do both absolutely anytime you can. And so it's just super, super important. And then right here, I have another video. You guys maybe have seen, oh, is it not going to work? It may not work. So the old Spice commercials, who has seen those? And who likes them? OK, well, don't answer that. Maybe you don't like them. Their humor, my son is growing up on them. He's 11. He's stinky. He's the whole puberty thing. And because of how funny their marketing is, and especially even on their products, how to use it talks about zombies and apocalypse and aliens coming in from outer space, it is absolutely genius because they have now a lifelong customer in my son. And they've used humor. And he loves it. And he feels understood. And he knows it's OK to smell really, really bad. And that they are there for him. So this old Spice, which I won't show the video, but old Spice and then chat books are just really brilliant ways or examples of how humor and marketing is really, really effective. So that's it. I'm done.