The Ultimate Guide to Emotional Marketing

What makes emotional marketing so powerful and how you can leverage it to connect with your audience and encourage them to act. Today’s consumer base is better educated and better equipped to research what they don’t already know. They’re also flooded with advertisements on a daily basis.

What is emotional marketing?

Emotional marketing refers to marketing and advertising efforts that primarily use emotion to make your audience notice, remember, share, and buy.

• Typically taps into a singular emotion, like happiness, sadness, anger, or fear, to elicit a consumer response.

Emotional Marketing Inspires People to Act

Emotions also encourage other activity that can help grow your business and brand

• Happiness makes us share… and sharing leads to increased brand awareness
• Sadness makes us empathize and connect… and empathy leads to altruism and the motivation to act on behalf of others
• Anger and passion make us stubborn… and stubbornness leads to viral content and loyal followers
• Surprise and fear make us cling to what’s comfortable… and embracing what’s comfortable leads to increase brand loyalty

First… Know Your Audience

Do target audience research

• Find out what content they’ll respond to best
• Which emotion to target to elicit the best response
• Research your audience to inform your marketing decisions and save time and resources
• Choose an emotion that resonates with their pain points

Inspire the Impossible

Aspirational campaigns are powerful because they tap into a dream, goal, or vision that your audience longs to reach.

• To successfully target aspiration as a marketing approach, businesses should understand how their product helps their consumers reach those lofty dreams.

Emotional Marketing Makes Great First Impressions

First impressions form in a matter of seconds.

• The same goes for a first impression of a product or brand, and marketing emotion can help shape that impression… and help that brand or product stand out in your mind.

Project an Ideal Image

Emotional marketing uses emotion to convince consumers that your product is the right solution.

• Explain how a certain product or service can solve a pressing problem and feel great using it
• Brands like Old Spice use the “ideal image” to their advantage when marketing their products.

Emotional Marketing Helps People Decide with Their Hearts

Emotional responses to marketing actually influence a person’s intent and decision to buy more than the content of an ad or marketing material.

• Out of 1,400 successful advertising campaigns, those with purely emotional content performed about twice as well as those with only rational content.

Create a Movement or Community

Using emotional marketing to establish a movement or community around your brand taps into a few different psychological triggers

• The bandwagon effect it creates keeps people intrigued by what the crowd is doing.
• Feelings of camaraderie, acceptance, and excitement can create a sense of loyalty to your brand.

How to Measure Emotional Marketing

Emotional marketing should be measured just like any other marketing effort… except for you’re measuring the emotional response itself

• To get a read on your audience reaction, consider running surveys or providing a space for feedback during your initial campaign launch
• Another way to measure your audience’s emotional response to your marketing is to decipher how their emotions manifest as actions

Over to You

Weaving emotion into your marketing and advertising is a surefire way to attract, resonate with, and encourage your audience to act

Emotional Marketing Strategies

There are a variety of ways to market your business using emotion. The below strategies can be combined and used to evoke all kinds of emotion.

Lead With Color

Emotion and emotion are closely tied

• Color psychology is used in a wide variety of businesses and organizations
• Brands such as Coca-Cola and Starbucks use color psychology to portray positive and friendly energy
• The color red evokes strong feelings such as love, excitement, and joy
• Other emotions associated with colors include harmony, balance, nature, growth, and health

Tell a Story

Storytelling is a surefire way to connect with your audience

• Relatable and shareable
• Proctor & Gamble’s “Thank You Mom” commercial
• Athletes tell the stories of how their mothers supported them throughout their athletic careers
• Another example is the MetLife commercial “My Father is a Liar”

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