By Agatha Singer
Using emotional marketing is not only a way to increase engagement but also an effective strategy for strengthening your brand and enhancing customer loyalty. Emotional marketing yields great results and is extremely conductive for lead generation. In fact, a study of 1,400 campaigns determined that the ones based upon emotional content performed 50% better than those campaigns that focused upon rational content.
The benefits of emotional marketing — appealing to the audience’s feelings through your campaigns — are too numerous to ignore. So the question here is not whether you should be using emotional marketing, but how to use it most efficiently.
The following five tools must be included in your strategy when targeting emotions.
1. Facebook Ads
There are over 2.055 billion active users on Facebook and, on average, they spend about 43 minutes there daily. It follows then that Facebook ads are a surefire way to reach your audience with your emotional message.
When creating an emotional appeal on this platform, the following strategies should work best:
- Generate the “fear of missing out” (FOMO) by creating ads which show impressive data. For example, “200,000 entrepreneurs already subscribed and found solutions to their problems. Are you going to miss out on this opportunity?”
- Trigger curiosity to generate more clicks by asking a question or telling part of a story which cuts off at the most interesting place. Using the Facebook ad format questions will be most effective as they can be very short, such as “What’s your click-through rate from Facebook ads?”
- Make people smile, and benefit from the fact that content that invokes happiness gets the largest number of shares. To develop the right “happy ad” you’ll need to research your target audience.
- Call forth some anger as it will help you to generate both clicks and shares. To do this you should come up with a negative (but not too much) headline that mentions a bad situation which your customers encounter daily, such as “Say no to losing invoices.”
Think about your audience and goals when developing your emotional Facebook ads. What will appeal to these people? What do you want to make them do? Check out our review for the best small business marketing tools here!
2. Postcards
Do you know what makes an even better marketing tool than an ad, from an emotional point of view? Something that invokes a positive emotional impact on several levels! Physical objects do extremely well in this type of campaign. In spite of the fact that the world has gone digital, there is no denying the joy of possessing a beautiful or useful item which has positive associations.
Of all the offline marketing tools, postcards are the most efficient for this kind of campaign. This is because they trigger a strong emotional response, not only to the beautiful image and a message, but to the fact that postcards often inspire nostalgia. And nostalgia is a great tool for emotional marketing; it tricks our minds into seeing the past through “rose-colored glasses.”
Thus simply by sending postcards to your leads you are creating a strong positive association with your brand. What’s more it needn’t cost you a fortune to create an exclusive designer postcard. Choose a positive quote or a simple message that will put a smile on your customers’ faces. And use a simple postcard creator tool to do it. As long as the postcard’s design is visually appealing, it’s sure to work. You can use your target audience research to help you choose designs which are sure to resonate with the people you are appealing to.
3. Videos
Storytelling is one of the most effective ways to make an emotional marketing to make an impact; videos are the best medium through which to do it. You don’t have to invest in shooting a short film to create videos that will make an impact. In fact, for the purpose of emotional marketing, authentic clips will work best.
This means that all you need to add videos to your emotional marketing campaign are your smartphone and an online video editing tool. You can find plenty of free products and they are so easy to master that you’ll be making great videos to share on social media and your website within a couple of days.
For a B2B marketing campaign, the best kinds of videos to use for emotional impact are testimonials and “behind the scenes” insights. The first shows how your product or service helps real people. The second shows the people and processes behind its creation, thereby presenting a human face to your business. After watching these videos people will want to work with you because of who you are, not because your sales pitch sounds good.
4. Instagram Posts
Instagram is the perfect platform through which to pursue the above strategy, in other words to make your brand more relatable and “human.” Of all the types of Instagram content that can help you here you should focus on posts which describe your workspace and showcase your employees, as well as illustrate your company culture.
Appeal to emotions too by posting silly and fun pictures of your office life as well as photos from events and meetings with customers. Staged images won’t have this kind of an emotional impact, but you can use them for announcements and product presentations.
5. Communities
Literally speaking communities are not a marketing tool. But you can use them to further your marketing goals. In the case of emotional marketing, creating a community united by a common purpose or objective will be extremely effective. You should use this as a part of your branding strategy as you’ll need to align your brand with a cause that your target audience supports and will want to work towards with you.
For example, your brand prides itself on sustainability and your target audience is interested in services/products that can be sustainable. Establish an online community of people who want to contribute to making the planet a better place.
Note that for this strategy to work, you will need to be proactive. Release educational videos containing passionate appeals, sponsor eco-friendly events, and otherwise show that you are working towards achieving the goal of saving the planet, whilst all the while asking potential leads to join you in this mission.
In Conclusion
Emotional marketing makes a lasting impact, which is the reason why it’s so effective. Using these tactics is a must for any business that wants to stand out and be memorable.
To achieve the best results with this strategy, you will need to make it extremely diverse. Use every available medium to generate a variety of emotional responses and see which perform the best. But be advised that different tools work best with different types of emotions. For example, Facebook ads should call out to the more potent feelings such as happiness, sadness or anger as this will generate shares and clicks. On the other hand, your authentic video stories should trigger a complex mix of emotions which will all coalesce into enhancing the trust in your brand.
Testing, measuring, and processing analytics from these campaigns are the essential elements which will determine the success of your emotional marketing strategy.
