Will Using The Power Of Emotion Help Your Marketing Efforts?

When you made your marketing strategy, you probably went into it with a clear idea of the results you wanted, and formulated your marketing tactics around them, deciding who your target audience will be, developing campaigns, and deciding the best places to run them to reach the audience. But are you doing enough, when you run your campaigns, to push them as far and a deeply as possible to get the right customer responses? Are they giving your audience what they really need from you – a brand experience? In other words, are your campaigns reaching them on the emotional level? That is where real marketing success will lie – in connecting with your audience by touching them emotionally. In essences, it is emotional marketing.

Emotional marketing, as the name implies, refers to marketing that arouses emotions within the prospective customer. Believe it or not, emotional marketing has been around as long as advertising has. After all, people are emotional creatures and often act based on their emotions. Therefore, emotions play a large part in consumer spending. Sure, information about products and brands have some impact, but rarely are purchases made based solely on facts and figures, logic and reason. Recent studies have even proven the value of emotions on marketing. One study published in Psychology Today shows that “when evaluating brands, consumers primarily use emotions (personal feelings and experiences) rather than information (brand attributes, features, and facts).” It also shows that their emotional response to ads had a greater influence on their decision to buy than the actual content of the ad did.

The growth of content marketing is allowing emotional marketing to make a resurgence and grow in popularity. Content marketing provides different ways for a brand to tell a story (blogs, social media, websites, text content, video content, image/visual content, etc.), and what is a story but something that creates emotions in the audience? When telling stories – creating marketing copy – a business should focus on benefits rather than features. Instead of describing the product, point out its benefits – how it can help the customer – as a way of reaching them emotionally. Another way is to focus your ad on individuals. Using babies, puppies, kittens is a way to reach customers’ emotions because they make us happy. Charities sometimes focus on one child, or one pet, instead of groups because the focus on one individual humanizes the story and makes people want to act.

The first step to successfully harnessing the power of emotion in your marketing campaigns, be it content marketing or otherwise, is to understand your audience. Who are they? What do they like? What do they want from a brand? Where are they most likely to be found? Survey them, interview them, frequent the blogs and websites they visit. Understand the emotions they feel and the emotions that drive them to act. Make them part of your content marketing. Within the title and first paragraphs of your content, focus on the readers rather than your product. In the content, show empathy with them and try to use their language as you talk in an emotional way about their pain, make them feel they have a painful, frustrating problem, then offer them hope that you have the solution.

People are more likely to buy from companies they have an emotional connection to. So once you establish an emotional connection with new buyers, make sure you keep that connection maintained. This can be done with post-sale content that can help generate repeat sales and is more likely to be shared online and go viral.

Use your marketing content to educate your readers and build awareness, but remember that humans are emotional creatures and often act on their emotions, including making buying decisions, so implementing emotional triggers in your marketing campaigns will attract more people and also help keep them around longer.