Emotions are not explicitly related to how your body feels, but are more indicative of your state of mind. Like colors, every emotion is different.
For the most part, emotions are on the spectrum, and a swift change in the range leads to various kinds of happiness, anger, disgust, sadness, and many more.
Evoking different emotions, depending on your product and services, helps to impact your marketing strategies in various ways and makes them as robust as possible.
Are you considering incorporating emotional marketing into your marketing efforts, but unsure how best to start? Then, you are on the right page!
As the name implies, emotional marketing is a term that describes marketing and advertising primarily using emotional appeals to make your audience and prospective customers learn, share your content, or, more importantly, buy from you.
Also, it could refer to the deliberate use of clear and compelling messages to form a strong connection with the audience toward achieving the desired result.
Emotional marketing typically touches every single emotion, like sadness, happiness, fear, anger, etc., to evoke a consumer’s response.
For me, marketing, like communication, is incomplete if you do not receive any response from your consumer/target audience.
It Enhances Great First Impressions
The most significant benefit of emotional marketing or advertising is that it makes your content easy for prospective customers to connect with.
It is easier to build a brilliant bond with your audience when your content is pretty relatable.
For instance, suppose there are two available products and both advertise to attract customers.
However, one advertisement only talks about the products, while the other makes you laugh or cry – which of the advertisements will pique your interest?
I can bet it is second! This is exactly what emotional marketing helps you to achieve.
It Influences Purchasing Decisions
A study showed that 31% of ads with an emotional pull succeeded versus the 16% success of ads that focused on rational content.
An emotional response to an ad influences prospective customers’ intent to purchase.
It Helps Build A Base of Loyal Customers
As I mentioned earlier, emotions are powerful. It takes only one action to evoke emotion and have a long-lasting effect.
Incorporating emotions into your marketing efforts will make your content more memorable and, as a result, make your customers bond with you and stay loyal.
Emotional marketing enhances your chances of your client becoming returning customers.
It Increases Self-Satisfaction
This is inarguably the benefit of emotional marketing that isn’t discussed enough.
There is immense self-satisfaction in rendering excellent and strong services to customers.
With emotional marketing, you will intimately know how to transform people’s lives, which will increase your positivity and confidence.
Also, connecting with your customers emotionally will help your perspective on life.
It Helps Consumers Remember You
A successful emotional marketing campaign always leaves a mark.
Everyone wants people who understand their fears, challenges, and roadblocks and somewhat have the solution.
So, as a brand owner, you have the power to do that with your marketing when you employ emotions.
Doing this doesn’t only make your consumers remember your content, but the product and the associated brand.
A perfect example of a successful emotional marketing campaign is Heineken.
Most consumers care about transparent brands and are willing to take on social issues.
Heineken’s “Open Your World” campaign conjures feelings, inspiring actions, and hopes, creating a deep connection with its audience.
The campaign was based on a real-life experiment pairing two people from different ends of the political spectrum.
First, they were asked to work on a series of practical tasks as a team, and after, they were asked to publicly share their thoughts, views, and feelings with the brand.
Heineken used Facebook (Meta) as their primary campaign channel.
The campaign shows that human understanding can overcome political differences, building a real sense of community in the process.
It is important to note that the campaign earned over 3 million video views and 50,000 shares in its initial month – crazy numbers if you’d ask me
Like every other marketing effort, you can easily measure your emotional marketing campaign to how your audience responds to your advertisements.
Below are the two primary ways to do this:
Running Feedback Surveys during Your Initial Campaign Launch
This open-ended, manual yet quantitative approach gives room for honest, real-time audience reactions and gives you feedback on where you need to improve.
Another way to manually analyze your audience feedback is by having a focus group.
Interpreting How Your Audience Emotions Manifest as Actions
Often, happiness leads to sharing, fear leads to loyalty, sadness leads to giving, and anger leads to virility.
So depending on the emotion you evoke through your marketing, you might anticipate seeing a spike in one or more of these activities.
Know Your Target Audience
This is usually the first and most crucial step for any marketing strategy, much less emotional marketing.
If you don’t know your audience, you might not be able to develop the content they respond to best and the emotions to elicit a valuable response.
Conduct comprehensive research on your audience before deciding on the emotion to incorporate into your marketing strategy.
Doing this improves your marketing decisions and saves you precious time and resources.
Lead with Colors
This might look simple, but it holds more influence than you can imagine.
As I mentioned in the introductory part of this article, colors and emotions are closely tied; the former plays a significant role in evoking the latter.
For instance, consider the Starbucks green or Cocoa-Cola red.
Green is associated with balance, harmony, growth, health, and nature, which are all components of the Starbucks brand.
Also, the Cocoa-Cola red shows friendship, love, positivity, and great energy.
Therefore, don’t just use any color; use the ones that perfectly describe your brand.
Leverage on Storytelling
This is a surefire way to connect with your prospective audience.