Emotional Marketing: How to Trigger Emotions in Your Client

Emotional Marketing is a powerful tool to help your business stand out from the crowd. This guide shows you how to use emotional marketing techniques to trigger your client’s emotions and drive more sales.

What is Emotional Marketing?

Emotional marketing is a way to provoke specific human emotions and persuade consumers.

Emotions are powerful. They can drive consumer behavior, and clients use them to help make their buying decisions. So by understanding and eliciting your clients’ emotions you develop your ability to build closer relationships with them.

Psychology Today reports that when evaluating brands, consumers primarily use emotions and personal experiences rather than brand information and facts. Thus, it is interesting, as a marketer, to exploit this emotional side of marketing to attract your client’s attention and boost the sales of your business.

It is then, easy to understand why the most successful digital marketing campaigns are those that create connection with viewers through their personal values, pains and feelings.

“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”Maya Angelou

This is a tactic that can be used by companies to build their brand. On the one hand, companies hope to create a connection between their products, services and the people who use them through “brand extension.” That is, by giving a personality and values to the brand in order to humanize it and bring it closer to clients. On the other hand, most consumers expect to build personal connections with brands and cultivate meaningful relationships with them over time.

The Impact of Emotional Marketing

Emotional marketing allows the client to feel as if they are part of something bigger – a community. Studies on advertising show that the emotional response to an ad influences consumers’ purchase intent much more than the content of the ad itself.

So through the deliberate use of persuasive messages that connect with human emotion you can create a deep connection with your audience that will help you achieve your desired result. These feelings it arouses in the consumer can be positive such as joy, excitement, anticipation or pride. On the other hand, many successful campaigns also enhance fear, anger, or envy.

The human emotions of sadness and anger are haunting. People feel uneasy when their emotions are not addressed, hence the need to act on them. According to a 2016 Nielsen study, emotional advertising stimulates more positive responses compared to non-emotional advertising, reflected in a 23% increase in sales.

But then, why is emotional marketing so effective?

• It makes your brand more memorable.
• Your content becomes more shareable.
• It influences consumers’ buying decisions.
• It helps build customer loyalty.
• Facilitates instant reactions.
• Inspires action.

How can you boost sales with Emotional Marketing?

Know your target audience

Emotional marketing can have a big impact on generating leads and increasing your sales. However, it is necessary to know your audience very well in order to be able to impact them in the desired way. Understand your audience’s interests, motivations, and values. Align your campaign according to this information.

Explore mental triggers

There are several mental triggers that you can use in order to arouse your audience’s emotions. You can use humor, for example, to trigger more reactions and shares on your social networks.

Use storytelling

Storytelling is closely linked to emotional marketing and can be used in any content format, from a blog article to a podcast. Human beings like stories because stories allow them to travel and connect. Use interesting plots, relatable characters and relevant themes to capture the audience’s attention.

How to Measure Emotional Marketing?

It may seem that measuring the results of emotional marketing is a difficult task, but in reality it is very similar to how you measure traditional marketing efforts. Here are 5 steps you can take:

• Analyze current metrics – Analyze your current business metrics and spot trends in order to understand how you can target a particular emotion and reach your expected result.
• Analyze the competition and benchmarks – research is essential to be able to ground your strategy.
• Define goals – it must be clear what your goal is for your strategy in order to understand what emotion to evoke. For example, if you elicit happy emotions, this may lead to more shares, while sharing something surprising may cause more brand loyalty through email subscriptions.
• Analyze client response – after putting your strategy in place, use surveys or focus groups to understand what the emotional impact of your action is.
• Use marketing tools – use analytical tools to understand the impact on your metrics (number of likes, comments, interaction rate).

Pro tip: You can use Swonkie to evaluate your social media metrics. Our platform provides full social media reporting within seconds.

Examples of Emotional Marketing Campaigns

Coca-cola – Connection

Oreo – Love

Hyundai – Hope

After seeing these ads, did you feel anything? Could you feel the emotion that the companies were trying to convey? All of these brands used emotional marketing to connect with the viewer and stay in the consumer’s mind.