Emotions play a crucial role in marketing because they help your brand connect with its target audience in a deep and meaningful way.
Consumers are bombarded with marketing messages. The role of emotions in marketing is crucial. And all those messages aim to do the same thing: make them purchase a product or service.
They get messages from their dentist, car mechanic, grocery store – you name it, someone is always after their patronage.
So how can your messages stand out, especially if you are new to them and they’ve yet to make a purchase with you?
The answer is simple: Emotion.
You have to connect with customers in a more meaningful way than other companies are. That’s how you can break through the noise, grab the customer’s attention and begin building a meaningful relationship with them, which you hope will ultimately lead to sales.
Before you can use emotion in marketing, you need to understand its role, the importance of understanding your audience on a deep, meaningful level, and how the human psyche works.
When people make everyday decisions, they use one of two areas of their brain: the rational side or the emotional side. But often, the emotional side of the brain influences decision-making far more than the rational side.
Emotion is an ingredient in most of our decisions. Another strong influencer is past experience.
So if you can appeal to emotion and highlight how your product or service solves the customer’s pain points, you’ll win more leads and convert those leads into more business.
Emotional marketing aims to elicit an emotional response from your target audience to begin forming a connection with them. These ads then encourage an action from the consumer.
An action might be something small and introductory, like subscribing to your newsletter. Or they might go all the way to finalizing a purchase with your business.
Appealing to the customer’s emotions is deliberate and intentional. And to get to this point, you must know what drives them, which means building out clear customer personas that demonstrate what matters to your customers.
To start using emotions in your marketing, you need to take several steps. There is no simple switch to flip to suddenly employ the use of emotion. You need to work for it.
When businesses first start out, they often want to cast a wide net and attract anyone to be their customer. By being less choosy, they think they’ll find greater success faster. But with that approach, your messaging will lack directionality, and won’t truly appeal to anyone’s emotions.
You’re much better off creating segments of your audience and trying to choose the strongest of those audiences to be your main target audience. You start there with creating messages that resonate with the emotions of that audience. And as you find success, you can target subsets of your audience.
When developing your target audience, you want to focus more on psychographics – thoughts, emotions, drivers – than demographics, which include age, income, housing. Psychographics help you get deeper into why a customer is seeking your solutions and not just characteristics of their lives.
Now that you know who your target customers are, you can evaluate what’s driving them to seek out solutions like yours. Understanding what drives them and the types of messages that might resonate with them will help you build emotions into your marketing in a meaningful way.
To get you started, here’s a look at some of the things that might drive your consumers.
With a clear understanding of who your customer is and what drives them, you’re prepared to start appealing to their emotions in your marketing and advertising messages.
One important element of appealing to customer emotions is to do good brand storytelling. Customers who have a deeper understanding and connection to who you are will feel more compelled to purchase from you.
The human brain is wired to appreciate storylines and lovable characters. Your goal is to make your brand a loveable character that the consumer can get behind.
Additionally, you need to make your marketing a sensory experience for your customers. Creative design uses colors and sensory experiences to attract attention and build meaningful bonds with consumers.
But don’t forget the importance of your copywriting. The words you use should be extremely intentional and target everything you’ve learned about your audience. Scrutinize every word and avoid jargon that will turn off your customers or confuse them.
Customers will see through inauthentic messages. Be careful that you aren’t just saying what you think will appeal to your customers. You have to mean it and stand behind it.
Without authenticity, you might only succeed in attracting your target audience. But you won’t get a response out of them if the messaging is inauthentic.
Creating marketing messages that are appealing, emotional and elicit a response is challenging and requires incredible expertise. New Light Digital helps brands connect with customers through dynamic websites, SEO strategies, content marketing, reputation management and more. Schedule a free consultation today to learn more about how we can help you appeal to your target audience’s emotions.
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