3 Ways To Use Emotional Marketing To Reach People

While you might not immediately think of emotions when you think of marketing to your customers, they are an integral part of relating to your clientele and establishing a genuine brand connection. According to Shayna Smilovitz from Instapage, “Emotional branding then is creating an emotional connection to one company that separates it from the rest, creating brand loyalty over time.” By playing on different kinds of emotions, you can humanize your brand and show customers how your products and services solve their essential problems.

You can establish genuine trust with customers by making them feel like they’re an important part of your brand and creating content that gives your readers something to discuss. Fifty percent of every buying decision is driven by emotion, so creating effective emotional advertising is the most effective means of gaining and retaining customers.

But how do you craft this emotional connection effectively? Do you use branding, ads, or stories to facilitate the relationship? We’ll explain how to use storytelling to engage with your audience, review several different approaches to emotional marketing, and show how utilizing this strategy can benefit you in the long run.

Using Storytelling to Connect with Customers

Ultimately, whether you’re writing the great American novel or crafting retail content, you’re trying to tell a compelling story. Emotional advertising is about developing a story that speaks to your audience by entertaining them. Even if you’re just writing a “how-to” guide or a recipe, you can make it fun and exciting, adding storytelling elements into it. Customers respond more readily when you use emotional marketing that appeals to the senses directly.

When writing or creating emotional ads, you’ll need to consider your audience. What are their wants and needs? Understanding their desires and aspirations will help you create relatable content.

When telling your story, it’s essential to use the tone of your audience. Write in the vernacular that your target customer is familiar with, with authentic words and powerful verbiage, to craft copy that directly speaks to your customers.

Different Approaches to Emotional Marketing

An excellent emotional branding campaign successfully transforms a casual customer into a brand advocate. According to the Disney Institute, emotionally engaged customers are:

• At least three times more likely to recommend your product
• Three times more likely to re-purchase
• Less likely to shop around
• Much less price sensitive

These statistics show why it’s integral to create a campaign that stimulates your customers’ emotions.

There’s more than one way to make an emotional connection with your customers. Hubspot has identified six core emotions that encourage sharing, engagement, and purchase including happiness, sadness, fright, surprise, anger, and disgust. By playing on these feelings, you can create personalized advertising suited to your customers’ needs. Emotional advertising is about understanding how to utilize these core emotions, evoke a response in your readers, and have that lead to action. That act can be a purchase, sharing, or engagement, depending on your goals.

Your Customers’ Deeper Desires

Emotional marketing can also tap into certain desires of your customers, utilizing deeper feelings than the core six emotions. Developing an ad or campaign that utilizes these approaches (detailed in Entrepreneur), can be more powerful and lasting. They include:

• Inspiration: Creates pride, like a human interest story
• Aspirational: Taps into audience’s dreams, like a lofty goal, lifestyle, or experience
• Expressing love: Reaches into personal and raw emotions
• Milestone Connection: Celebrates a brand anniversary or important life events
• Local angle: Connects to people’s passion and pride for where they live

This way of approaching emotional marketing helps create meaningful connections with your customers in a way that feels reliable and honest. If you don’t manage this authenticity, your advertising can fall flat and damage your relationship with customers. It’s essential to determine which strategy will work best for your business. The key to emotional advertising is understanding your audience and telling an authentic, believable story that will stick with them.

Are you interested in developing an emotional advertising strategy? The Leverage Marketing team specializes in creating campaigns that build lasting relationships between brands and their customers. Contact us today to learn what we can do for your company.