What Is Emotional Marketing?
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:
- Sadness – an emotional pain associated with, or characterized by, feelings of disadvantage, loss, despair, grief, helplessness, disappointment and sorrow.
- Fear – a feeling induced by perceived danger or threat that occurs in certain types of organisms, which causes a change in metabolic and organ functions and ultimately a change in behavior, such as fleeing, hiding, or freezing from perceived traumatic events.
- Anger – emotion characterized by antagonism toward someone or something you feel has deliberately done you wrong.
- Surprise- a brief mental and physiological state, a startle response experienced by animals and humans as the result of an unexpected event.
- Disgust – an emotional response of rejection or revulsion to something potentially contagious or something considered offensive, distasteful, or unpleasant.
- Anticipation – an emotion involving pleasure, excitement, or anxiety in considering or awaiting an expected event.
- Joy – a feeling of great pleasure and happiness.
- Trust – typically refer to a situation characterized by the following aspects: One party is willing to rely on the actions of another party; the situation is directed to the future.
Each emotion has various stages and strengths that we tend to call other emotions.
For example, joy, anger, and anticipation can translate into a 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 buy 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.
In the meantime, here are some examples to take a look at:
Procter & Gamble – This award-winning ad elicits feelings of community, belonging, family and pride very well.
Netflix Commercial – This commercial makes you want to belong to the community of watchers and see the shows that only are on Netflix, due to the innovative, funny, and interesting shows.
Pfizer – This commercial pulls at the heartstrings to promote the message of a drug company.
What commercials can you find that evokes emotions in you? What about sales pages, or blog posts, or other types of advertising?
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 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 a 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.
Why Engage in Emotional Marketing
Emotional marketing has always been around, but lately, it’s caught on with many mainstream brands. Even companies that on the surface aren’t really emotional by nature have found ways to include emotional triggers into advertising. It’s that old line that “sex” sells. However, the truth is that it’s not just sex – it’s an emotion that sells. Sex just triggers a specific emotion, such as the need to belong, that causes people to want to buy.
The most effective emotions that you can trigger in your audience with the right words, images, and colors are:
- Affection
- Amusement
- Delight
- Excitement
- Happiness
- Hope
- Interest
- Joy
- Pleasure
- Surprise
These emotions usually elicit positivity in your audience. It’s true that other emotions may get more response, such as anger, but you have to be very careful with anger so that you don’t have a situation that backfires on you.
The more dangerous emotions that you can also trigger with the right words, images and colors are:
- Anger
- Contempt
- Despair
- Doubt
- Embarrassment
- Frustration
- Guilt
- Hurt
- Politeness
- Shame
With the right type of emotional marketing you can:
* Turn Wants to Needs:
Everyone wants to be rich, work on the beach, or have their perfect kitchen, but they aren’t really “needs” – they are wants. Many people will not spend money on wants over needs. With the right emotional triggers, you can turn a want into a need that someone needs so badly that they’ll buy it right now, no matter the price.
* Prove Value:
It might seem weird to say but if you can trigger the right emotions, you can also prove the value of your products and services. The way to do that is to sell what the product or service provides. Is it free time? What intangible concept does your product give the buyer? Exploit that.
* Provoke a Sense of Belonging:
If you really want to get people to want to follow you anywhere, make them feel like a special part of your community, such as a VIP or a member of your “inner circle” or “mastermind” group.
* Create a Viral Trend:
Emotional things are more likely to be shared by your audience on social media and become viral. If you can identify the ideas that will go viral, as well as the emotions that trigger more sharing, you can create a trend of your own.
* Connect with Customers:
The right words will make your audience feel very connected with and close to you. They’ll become your biggest fans and turn word of mouth into an avalanche of potential leads for you.
Emotional marketing can change your marketing efforts completely and make your sales pages, blog posts, and other marketing content really stand out. Study your audience and determine not only what they need in terms of products and services, but also what they need to hear in terms of trigger words – words that evoke emotions that make them do something you want them to do. This could be something like joining your mailing list, or buying your products, or using your services.
Leave a Reply