How to Determine if You Should Convey Emotions for Your Brand’s Content
When searching for great content marketing tips to explore and apply to your current strategy, the concept of emotional marketing will more than likely pop up. How do you know if you should take advantage of emotional marketing with your own content? Is it a good match for your niche? How can you tell? This guide is designed to help you answer those questions and get off to a great start:
The Definition of Emotional Marketing
How would you define “emotional marketing?” One may argue that all marketing is emotional – especially since the primary goal is to spark something inside the customer that compels them to act.
Think about the last time that a PSA commercial made you teary-eyed – such as the infamous sad-puppy-behind-chain-link-fence footage airs. Or, the juicy cheeseburger commercial that immediately created a fast food craving in your mind even though you just ate dinner? What about the goosebumps that raced up your arm and chills up your spine when you saw that teaser trailer TV spot for a new horror movie?
Smiles for Shares, Cries for Clicks
Once you understand how emotional reactions work with your content, it will become much easier to strategically market your content to push the right “button” with your audience. Studies have shown that happy reactions to your content will inspire your audience members to spread the word and share your work. For example, think about how many videos, memes, and even catchy articles you have shared with others simply because they made you literally laugh out loud.
On the other hand, if you want to increase your clickthrough rate, then you should add a little more sadness to your headlines and content. How so? Negativity has a stronger impact on the average consumer than positivity. For instance, think about how quickly bad news spreads in comparison to good news.
One report even claimed that negative words strategically placed in clever headlines have a much higher click-through rate than their positive alternatives.
Can Your Content Benefit from Emotional Marketing?
The simple answer to this question is “Of course it can!”
Keep in mind that several studies have drawn a connection between buying decisions and emotions. According to Psychology Today, the average consumer will depend on emotions and thoughts over insight and information when making decisions.
It may seem strange that the old saying “follow your heart” applies to effective content marketing strategies, but science has proven its validity in this regard.
Use Color to Enhance Your Emotional Marketing Strategy
Another point from a list of great content marketing tips is to use colors wisely when developing the emotional marketing strategy for your content. This does not mean you should change the font colors for your letters & words from top to bottom. However, you do need to pay attention to the themes, graphics and embedded images to make sure everything flows together.
For instance, think of the color red. Strong feelings seemingly emerge out of nowhere when the average consumer sees red. On one extreme, you have love and excitement while the other side features warnings, danger and anger. Depending on the message you are trying to relay, you can easily work red into your content to evoke the appropriate emotions.
Red is not the only color that evokes emotions if you use it correctly while marketing your content. Below is a list of other examples:
Orange: Energy, happiness, joy, sunshine
White: Light, innocence, safety, cleanliness
Black: Power, formality, mystery, elegance, death
Green: Nature, harmony, fertility, freshness
Purple: stability, royalty, power, ambition, luxury
Blue: Intelligence, truth, stability, depth
What You Should Never Do with Emotional Marketing
It may seem as if you can do no wrong with emotional marketing – especially if you have taken the time to develop a well-structured strategy to develop and promote your quality content. However, many failed businesses and brands would strongly disagree with you.
Among the list of the great content marketing tips you will find when researching emotional marketing are the following key points:
Recreate What is Not Broken: As referenced above, there is nothing “new” about emotional marketing. There is no reason to try to reinvent the wheel. Focus on what works and just stick to that.
Forget About the Core Formula: It is very easy to become so caught up in trying to spark emotional reactions with your content that you forgot the cornerstones of effective marketing in general. Remember that the spotlight still needs to focus on the offer, the benefits and the call-to-action. If you strip your content down to its skeleton, those 3 points should remain crystal clear to your target customer.
Sell the Product, Forget the Benefits: Remember that emotional marketing is designed to appeal to your customer and drive them to act. To achieve this, you must accurately paint a picture for your audience that depicts how the viewer will benefit by taking your content seriously and following your lead. Do not treat your content solely as a product listing or service description.
Authenticity is Essential
As you work to implement emotions into your content marketing strategy, you should always keep authenticity at the top of your list of priorities. The average consumer has a “deception detector” of sorts that automatically triggers as soon as they realize a brand or business is not being honest or fully transparent with them. Once that “detector” activates, your chances of turning that prospect into a paying customer with repeat business will plummet.
Therefore, it is imperative to focus on the needs of your customers and clients above anything else. Once you have taken that step, the paved road heading towards fulfilling those needs will light up before your eyes.
Once you know what your customer needs, you can determine which product or service from your brand satisfies that need. From a marketing standpoint, your only mission at that time is to paint that picture for your customers. Doing so will help you to boost the quality of and exposure to your content sooner than you think.
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