What is emotional marketing? How can it help your business? Check out this guide to all about emotional marketing.
An Abode business study shows that 7 in 10 customers buy more from brands they trust. Since trust is directly related to human emotions; thus, we can say brands that target emotions have a loyal customer base.
Here enters emotional marketing, marketing that simulates customers’ feelings to convince them to make a purchase.
Do emotions and marketing actually move together?
To know that, you have to first go through this full emotional marketing guide. So, let’s get started.
What is Emotional Marketing?
Emotional marketing is an advertising or digital marketing approach targeted by human emotions. Marketers try to hit a feeling with emotional marketing campaigns such as sadness, happiness, anger, etc.
This marketing tactic helps companies to establish personal connections with their audience. When companies target the right emotions, they can achieve higher results within their marketing budgets.
Why Does Emotional Marketing Work?
A new Stanford study has shown that people’s motivation depends on how they let others influence their emotions. It means if you motivate people in the correct order, you can make them understand emotions, leading to a higher customer experience.
This is one of the reasons behind practicing emotional marketing to promote your business. Besides this, emotional marketing helps to:
Make long-lasting impression
Emotional marketing helps you stay in the mind of users for a long time. When people establish an emotional connection with your product, they will always remember it.
Suppose you offer payroll accounting software to companies. And through your email marketing campaigns, you have targeted businesses that are struggling to create their payslips on time. In that case, you can establish personal connections via hammering on the problem and leave a remarkable impact on their minds.
Help with decision making
Emotional marketing helps people decide whether to purchase or not. It streamlines a customer’s logical brain and emotional heart, so they come to buying decisions faster.
In fact, it is found that emotional content works twice better than rational content. Thus, you should use emotional content marketing strategies while creating advertisements.
Take an Action
Emotional marketing can persuade customers to take action. When customers feel connected to your brand message, they will not hesitate to take action.
If a person feels happy after reading your social media post, they will comment, share or like it. For example, look at this funny Salesforce meme post that has compelled sales CRM tool users to take action.
Simulate instant reaction
Emotions are highly powerful. When you use the right content tone and visual graphics, you can drive instant reactions from your customers. As a result, the lead nurturing cycle can be reduced, enabling you to convert leads faster.
Promising Emotional Marketing Strategies
Emotional marketing can help to improve your lead generation rate and conversion rate. In addition, it can humanize your brand in the eyes of potential customers. But, you have to follow the right emotional marketing strategy to drive maximum value. Here are some simple emotional marketing methods to deploy in your marketing plan:
Know your audience
Every marketing strategy starts from knowing your audience. Since emotional marketing entirely revolves around the feelings of your audience; thus, you can not move ahead without knowing your audience.
Normally, simple demographic data on your audience’s needs and requirements is sufficient to run a marketing campaign. But, for an emotional marketing campaign, you need to dig deeper into your targeted audience base emotions.
For this, you can leverage social media platforms as a study shows that many people prefer to discuss their personal and professional feelings there. You can use link scraping tools to dig deeper into your customer’s feelings.
Suppose you have created a call center automation solution for small SaaS businesses. In that case, you have to search for problems faced by small companies to make their sales call system automated. You can even contact small sales teams on LinkedIn to understand their problems and accordingly promote your product.
Categorize audience based on emotional
Every human is different. Therefore, every person will react differently to each emotion. Some might get more excited after seeing happy content, and some might feel more connected with sad advertisements. That’s why you need to categorize your audience based on their emotional trigger points.
This will allow you to practice emotional account-based marketing where you can target particular emotions for an individual account. This way, you can drive maximum value from your emotional marketing campaign.
For example, you can create a better-personalized email after knowing your audience’s emotional level. You can use the right words and visuals to make your email sequences responsive and engaging.
Play with colors
Feeling revolves around colors. When you walk into a blue and white room after spending all day in the scorching sunlight, you will instantly feel calm and cool. This is all the impact of colors.
For ages, brands have been exploiting color and feelings to invoke certain emotions among their customers. Businesses select their color palette very carefully to create brand logos and social media posts. You can also use color psychology to create emotional content and visuals for your advertisements.
For example, Coca-Cola has used classic red color to create their brand logo and labels. The color red helps to invoke happiness, excitement, and energy among viewers.
On the other hand, Lays has used a diverse color palette to tell users about their flavors. So today, just looking at the red Lays pack, customers know that it is tomato flavored chips.
Tell a story
Storytelling is the best way to stimulate emotions. You can easily express different emotions through stories like love, happiness, sadness, anger, and others.
You can leverage different content distribution platforms to tell your brand story using visuals, graphics, and audio. For example, you can create a YouTube video to tell your brand story with full emotions like Zoho.
Zoho has created a short YouTube video on its 25th anniversary. They used soothing music and real person narratives to walk viewers through their 25 years of work and achievements.
Support a social cause
Using emotional marketing, you can support a social cause to tap into different customer psychology. You can build a community of people who believe in your cause and products.
However, you need to select your cause after thorough consideration. Ensure that your selected cause has the power to influence people and promote your product without any effort.
Brands have exploited numerous social causes over the years like Black life matters, like a girl, ice bucket challenge, etc. Now, lately, many brands are openly supporting Ukraine to promote peace and harmony.
For example, Grammarly has modified its logo colors to support Ukraine. The company has also banned Russian users on the portal.
Trigger pain points
The best emotional marketing campaign revolves around your targeted audience’s emotions. When you direct your marketing campaign on your audience’s needs, it will help you encourage and motivate them to use your product.
If you are a new brand, you can better introduce yourself and your product to them using your targeted audiences’ pain points. In addition, you can reach the right audience without making much effort. Also, established brands can use this strategy to generate leads.
Nike’s Just Do It campaign is a great example here. They used stories of elite athletes who suffered hardship or made sacrifices to get to the top.
With this campaign, they connected directly with their sports users who face challenges daily to stay on the top. As a result, the brand has become the first choice for people who wish to chase hard workout goals.
Monitor your emotional marketing campaigns
Once you have created an emotional marketing campaign, don’t sit idly. In fact, you need to constantly monitor your campaign’s performance to make timely changes and drive maximum revenue from your campaign.
For this, you might need to get some data analytics and monitoring tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, MonsterInsights, etc. In addition, you can use native social media tools to monitor your emotional content posts and Reels performance.
You can also use surveys, polls, and other feedback methods to get real-time opinions of your targeted audience. This way, you can better choose strategy and content to build your emotional marketing campaigns.
After getting real-time data, you should make immediate changes to your marketing campaigns to drive maximum sales and revenue.
To Wrap things up
Marketing is a human science. It revolves around a person’s liking, disliking, and other personal traits. Therefore, marketers are always focused on getting as much personal information as possible about their audience before creating a campaign.
In a way, all marketing approaches are emotional. That means, without even noticing, you are tapping into your audience’s emotions to drive better results from your marketing efforts.
Therefore, emotional marketing is not something new or unique. You have been using segments of it without even realizing it.
So, we can say that all you need is to organize and understand emotional marketing aspects better and you are all set. This post has already made you acquainted with emotional marketing and its strategies.
Now, you can start exploring this marketing approach and customize your emotional campaign today.
illustration: technology illustrations by Storyset
Vineet Gupta is a SaaS marketing professional who helps businesses in improving their online presence and lead generation. He blogs at 5minutesseo.com. Connect with him for more engaging conversations on Linkedin.