What Is Emotional Marketing?
Emotional marketing is a term thrown around in the marketing world that means basically what you think. It means that you use various words, colors and images to evoke certain emotions in the audience in all your marketing messages. There is an entire science involved in marketing that studies the effect of the colors, images and words on the page and how they affect the consumer.
There are eight emotions that can be brought out by various words:
1. Sadness
2. Fear
3. Anger
4. Surprise
5. Disgust
6. Anticipation
7. Joy
8. Trust
Each emotion has various stages and strengths that we tend to call other emotions. For example, joy, anger and anticipation can translate into passion. Feelings of anticipation and joy can be called optimism. The trick is that each audience has their own trigger words that will evoke certain emotions, and they have certain emotions that will trigger various actions for that particular audience.
Encourage Sharing
For the most part, emotions like joy and trust make us want to share with others. That being the case, you may want to make your audience feel trusting and happy to get them to share their information with you and to share you with their friends. Each audience has its own language that elicits trust and happiness. It’s important to learn it.
Make Them Want to Help
If you want people to empathize then you should seek to evoke feelings of sadness and loss in the audience members. Think of the ASPCA commercials where they show abused and starving animals during a sad song. This makes the audience feel sad and terrible and want to help. Since they’re a well-known organization with a good reputation, trust is already there. Each time the commercials air, many people donate.
Go Viral
If you want a post to go viral, you should pair it with some anger, disgust and anticipation or fear. Be sure to give your audience members a way out of these bad feelings, which is to buy what you’re offering. This works because these feelings are extraordinarily powerful and have lasting consequences.
Feelings First
When engaging in emotional marketing, it’s important to realize that feelings go first. People feel, and then they buy. If you want more people to buy, make them feel something that leads them to buying what you’re offering.
Examples of Emotional Marketing
A great lesson in the way emotional marketing works is to watch the entire series of Mad Men, especially the early episodes. You can learn so much about how the copywriters and ad men dealt with their audience’s emotions through the written word, images, and eventually TV commercials.
Emotional Marketing Online
Everything you do online can incorporate emotional marketing techniques. It doesn’t matter if it’s text, images, audio or visual in the form of video. First, let’s talk a bit about the various types of emotions that you can elicit with your content.
Types of Emotion
* Visceral – When something impacts an audience member at the subconscious level, we say that the reaction is visceral. Your content, website design and so forth should evoke the feelings you want the visitor to feel without even thinking about it.
* Behavioral – Emotions and behavior go together hand in hand. When your audience member reads your content, listens to a video, or visits your website, the feelings they have should also elicit a behavioral response. For example, if a visitor comes to your website and feels frustrated with the navigation, their emotional feelings of frustration will elicit the response of leaving your website.
* Reflective – Once your audience member leaves your website, stops reading your eBook, or moves on past your content, it should stick with them enough to cause a response of some sort based on their feelings. They might answer the CTA, or share your information with others, or think about it for a while, but they won’t forget.
Aspects to Consider
Emotional marketing is a powerful tool that you can use in all your marketing efforts. It doesn’t matter if it’s a website, a sales page, a video or something else entirely – all aspects of it should be considered, such as:
* The Words – Know what words trigger emotion and action in your audience. Use words to focus on the benefits your product or service offers your audience. Remember that they want to know what’s in it for them, not what’s in it for you.
For example: Use trigger words like “Limited time offer…” or “Act now to completely change your life in the next 10 minutes…” You don’t want to lie, but you do want to give it to them straight and tell them exactly what their benefits are for acting now.
* The Images – Images of people tend to bring forth more emotion for people. Let the face of the person demonstrate the emotion that you want the audience to feel as they look at your website, watch the video or consume other content that you offer.
For example: If you’re writing about freedom and how your audience can experience freedom, try using a picture of something that demonstrates freedom to your audience. Use also a typical person that could be part of your audience, showing the emotional release they feel as they realize they have true freedom.
* The Colors – Some colors evoke different emotions based on culture, sex, and many other factors, so it’s extra important to understand exactly who your audience is. You want the colors you choose to elicit the right emotions in your audience.
For example: If you want your audience to feel as if they should be excited and passionate about something, choose known passion colors like red and orange. If you want them to feel happy and free, choose a color like yellow to emulate the color of sunshine which makes people joyful. Do check to ensure that the culture you’re marketing to does not have a different idea.
In order to accomplish that, you need to understand your audience completely so that you realize what their emotional needs are, plus what emotions trigger action for them. You can learn this by surveying your audience, getting to know them more, and asking for a lot of feedback as you create new products and services for them.
Why Emotions Matter in Marketing
The truth is, nothing can elicit a response quite like the right emotion. The thing marketers want most from their audience is a response. They want them to answer their calls to action. They want them to take action, engage, buy, join or do something. And, the best way to do that is to evoke the right emotions that cause the right action to take place.
* More Likely to Go Viral – Any marketing message that evokes a strong emotional response is more likely to “go viral” than a bland message that doesn’t pull at any emotional strings. The emotion most likely to be shared widely, however, is anger, so you need to tread lightly when it comes to that. Give your audience a way out of their anger by taking an action.
* More Engaging – When you get your audience to feel something strongly, the advertisement automatically becomes more engaging. Content that evokes an emotion, then solves a problem, is gold when it comes to emotional marketing.
* More Useful – Most emotional content is going to prove to be more useful than content that isn’t as heartfelt. Highlight the social implications of the product and service and you’ll create a fan for life.
* More Motivating – Elicit emotions like confidence or fear in your audience, and you’re going to motivate them to answer your CTA faster and easier than if you don’t use those emotional triggers.
* More Compelling – Bringing emotions to your marketing messages will make every message more compelling to your audience. They’re going to be more likely to hear your entire message or read your entire message, thus getting more of the information they need to make a buying decision.
* Better Branding – If you want your brand to represent a specific emotion, you can do that. Think about the brands you know and what emotions they elicit. Coke brings people together, Amazon makes all things possible with extreme personalization, FedEx makes promise and keeps them, and so forth. What does your brand represent?
* Science Says So – Many neuroscientists and psychologists are involved in marketing companies these days, and are doing a lot of study into the power of emotional marketing. They say it works and science has the proof.
* Demonstrates Passion – People want to be part of something special and if you can show in your marketing messages the passion you have for your niche and for your customers, you can achieve more than you ever thought possible.
Using emotions helps all of us make choices in life; your audience is no different. Evoke the right emotions, and you can get your audience to do almost anything you want. Provide a quality product or service that solves serious issues and problems for your audience, and you’ll cultivate a life-long customer due to the trust you’ll develop.