Emotional connection plays a significant role in the choices we make as consumers. People don’t generally make purchases based on information alone. We are more prone to making emotional purchases than informed purchases.
Targeting your audience’s emotions through your advertising efforts makes it easier for your audience to connect with your brand on a deeper more personal level. Purely informational advertising can be difficult for people to connect with. One of the issues with informational advertising is that the audience might remember the facts you’ve provided, but not the brand itself.
How Does it Work?
Connecting to your audience using emotional advertising is valuable and important. Whether you’re pulling at their heartstrings or making them laugh, you’re making your brand more memorable. Your audience is more likely to trust you if you appeal to their emotions because it makes your brand more relatable. Which means that they’re more likely to engage with your brand, resulting in stronger customer loyalty even after you’ve closed the sale.
Not only does emotional advertising make more of an impact on audiences, but it also makes your content more shareable. Nobody is going to share a video or a blog post that is purely informational. However, they will share something they find funny or uplifting. It makes it easier to increase brand awareness.
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How Emotion Is Used in Advertising
- Happiness = More Shares
Before you can convince people to buy your product or service, you first need to convince them to trust your brand. This is done by developing brand association. Making an audience feel happy is a good way to develop this. It also makes them more likely to share your content. Emotionally positive content spreads faster on social media via social sharing than any other type of content.
- Sad = More Clicks
Another branding strategy that many companies use is to build an emotional connection with their target audience by touching on negative feelings, such as sadness. Sadness is a human emotion that naturally brings people together for support.
By sharing content that elicits an emotional reaction of sadness, then you will likely drive more clicks and engagement on the post as humans naturally want to learn more about it.
- Anger/ Disgust = Viral Content
Unlike happiness and sadness, which mostly just pulls on the heartstrings of the audience, anger and disgust can elicit an intense emotional reaction from readers.
This intense reaction often turns into actual action, like sharing, forwarding, or commenting on the piece of content.
However, we are not proposing that you purposely upset your reader or provoke your target audience. Instead of this, marketers will often choose a controversial topic related to their niche that already evokes emotional reactions from people without the help of their advertising campaigns and use this to generate more engagement with their content.
- Fear/ Surprise = More Loyalty
Fear is a natural human instinct, and something we all feel at times. When we experience negative feelings, such as fear, we naturally look for comfort and reassurance. In the world of emotional marketing campaigns, fear prompts people to act through urgency and a desire for self-preservation.
Fear can be harder to work with for digital marketers than happiness or sadness. If you frighten your customers too much, then you could send them running in the opposite direction of your brand. On the other hand, if you’re just frightening enough, you might just make your customers take notice — like WWF did.
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Emotional Marketing: Best Practices and Tips for Success
- Storytelling
As humans we love a good story. Stories are beautiful ways to stir our emotions, encourage relatability, and inspire connection. Therefore, it’s not surprising that they are the cornerstone of any comprehensive emotional marketing campaign.
Ways to use storytelling:
- Adding vivid narratives to your advertising and web content.
- Using customer testimonials in your advertising and adding your company’s backstory to your website’s “about us” page.
- Charity-related marketing campaigns can help humanise your company and give it a beating heart.
- Surprise your audience and get them curious
By catching your audience by surprise, they are more likely to remember an experience accurately. You can use this to your advantage when it comes to marketing.
For example: develop fresh ideas or approach familiar ones from an angle your customers may not have considered before.
Also, it doesn’t hurt to tease your audience a little, either. Tease your audience just enough to leave them asking a few questions about what they thought they knew.
- Know your audience and focus on them
Conduct some serious target audience research. If you don’t know your audience, how will you know what kind of content they’ll respond to best? How will you know which emotion to target to enable the best, most valuable response for both them and you?
Researching your audience will better inform your marketing decisions and save you precious time and resources.
- Always be authentic
People don’t like feeling like they’re being finessed into reaching for their wallet. Instead, they make connections with brands and companies that seem authentic.
They want to feel like more than just another potential sale and need to know you’re genuine before they give you their business. So always be authentic in your marketing, especially when you’re looking to tap into people’s emotions. Know your company’s core values, understand where they intersect with your customer’s, and be sincere in your branding efforts.
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Emotional Marketing Examples
Wrapping Up
Successful marketing revolves around tapping into people’s emotions.
Emotional marketing usually focuses on one specific emotion. Emotion is perhaps one of the most powerful and influential forces when it comes to human nature. Move a person to feel something, and you’ve successfully won their attention.
Most modern consumers want and expect to build personal connections with the brands they buy from and cultivate their relationships with them over time.
Emotional marketing is very effective as it helps people to remember you, it inspires people to share your content and encourages customer loyalty.
For more advice and ways to help improve your marketing strategy, contact us here at Floodmaker.