Brands that don’t make emotional connections with their prospects and customers will eventually lose out to those that do. The practice of emotional marketing is all about getting your target audience to connect with your product, service, and brand at a very basic and fundamental level – the level of emotions. Examples of emotional marketing can be seen with top brands such as Starbucks, Porsche, and so on.
These products and services make an emotional connection with the people they serve. Your challenge is to identify how your products/services can connect emotionally. What is the larger purpose? What type of experience can you offer your customers? Emotional marketing can only take place once you deliver a user experience that embodies your purpose. Once you are able to deliver on that promise, you can market the experience to your prospects.
When your product or service delivers an experience, get prospects to participate and have the experience themselves. Remember…emotional marketing is a powerful strategy if you can deliver a strong customer experience. Marketing strategies without emotion will not work. Emotion stimulates the mind 3000 times faster than rational thought. It’s an emotional world we live in. Many people say we live in a rational world but nothing could be further from the truth. Emotions drive our behaviour; the world is driven by emotions. Rational thought leads customers to be interested but it is emotion that sells. People really aren’t much interested in attributes; they want to know if they can have a product that suits their personality.
It is all about values.
Do you remember the equation? Emotional marketing is better in many instances than rational marketing that focuses on product attributes. Capturing minds is one thing; capturing hearts is quite another. Build emotions in your marketing strategies; don’t always chase “share of wallet – chase “share of heart”. Employ strategies that would make decisions very emotionally driven and remove the rational questions that might drive the prospect elsewhere.
Highlight the Emotional Satisfaction Your Clients Will Get
No matter what your business is, if you are serving people, you need to be able to tap into the emotions that motivate them. Describe the emotional gratification that your clients get from your services. Example: Your clients feel a sense of “pride” because they have improved skills; “confidence” that they will provide better outcomes for their own customers; “relief” that they will more easily meet some legal requirement, “joy,” etc. Pushing the right emotional buttons to get your visitors to buy
First we need to learn what kinds of visitors come to our sites.
What kind of people are they, and what kinds of emotions compel them to buy? Does keeping up with the “Jones” motivate them? Do they have a family or children? Are they middle aged and planning for retirement? Are they more motivated by competitive price or quality of merchandise? Do they prefer ease of use or features, what benefits are they looking for?
The answers to all these questions can be and should be simplified down into basic emotional needs. Take for instance a person who is looking for ways to generate more income because of the financial needs of college tuition and a nest egg to pass onto their children. Now combine that person with a website that could help them cater to these needs, and help them to accomplish their goal.
Think about the feelings that could be generated to compel this person to buy. Think about the feelings and reasoning this person has for the goal they are trying to achieve.
Doesn’t every parent want their children to have it better than they did? What can a webmaster/website designer do to convey feeling in this instance?
To begin with let’s start with painting a picture. Stories are good at that. Using words to paint a picture for them about what our services can offer, and how those services can benefit their children with financial stability. Then we can choose pictures that convey the same kinds of feelings that our text did. For instance, maybe a picture where the child is young, and then the same picture where the child is older and standing in front of a college or university. We could also use a picture of a new car to imply the financial stability and wealth to own such high-ticket items directly resulting from purchasing our products/services. These are just some examples.
Keep in mind that we need to keep the trust in tact. Do not make offers that cannot be delivered upon. Done correctly, you can see how compelling such a site could be. Of course, there are other factors that come into play. People like to deal with reputable companies. People also look for companies that are going to be around for a while. They fear making a purchase and then being left alone without anyone to turn to for technical information or repairs. Again, all of this boils down to feelings and basic emotional needs. Knowing which buttons to push will help develop websites that not only draw visitors back, but also compel them to buy, or click through affiliate programs.
The ten emotions that add the most force to a sales or marketing effort
1. Achievement – How does your product/service contribute to the customer’s achievement or accomplishment of something notable in life? In this example, your product/service becomes part of the customer’s identity.
2. Pride of ownership – How does your product/service contribute to the pride someone would feel from ownership? When you pit pride against features or benefits, pride usually wins in the end.
3. Security – What kind of security does your product/service offer? This is a blanket emotion that includes money, love, acceptance, power and control. Do not emphasise it if you cannot offer it.
4. Self-improvement – How does your product/service appeal to a person’s self improvement needs? The internet was born from information relay ideas. Almost everyone uses self-improvement books, articles, or newsletters of some kind. Information is what keeps the internet moving, and content is king.
5. Status – How does your product/service contribute to the status your visitor achieves? Everyone knows that you can fly in second class because it is cheaper and more economical, but deep inside almost everyone would rather fly in first class. What is the “first class” of your product or service?
6. Style – How does your product/service fit your buyer’s style? Are your products/services the Ferrari of style, or are they the Reliant Robin? Keep in mind that their style needs can be real or imagined.
7. Conformity – Does your product/service fall into a conformity niche? People do not want to be alone. They flock together in groups. You have seen them throughout school, and surely have seen them in your adult life. Does your product or service command a group following? How would your product/service help to fulfil the need of community? Does peer pressure play a role in your product/service?
8. Ambition – How does your product/service help people to get more out of life? More out of life is a broad term and can be applied to money, love, security, power, or just about anything else you can think of. What is it that people want more of that your product or service can help them get more of?
9. Power – In what ways does your product/service offer a person more power? Power can be over something as simple as their own lives, time, or any number of other things. What ways can you come up with that will help people gain more control over things that they want more control over?
10. Love – This one is the grand daddy of them all. The more of these feelings you can incorporate into your design and information, the better chance you have of generating the emotions needed to compel a person to buy.
Incorporating these 10 emotions into your design may help you produce better results.
The top emotional response words Marketing firms have an inside secret that helps them to write compelling content and advertisements. They know there are certain words with the English language that, when read, create an emotional response. The big names in marketing use those words every day to write compelling copy that increases the potential for higher sales volume. Those words are words that conjure a specific positive thought, or pull on the emotional senses that each of us have. They make certain implications that give us warm fuzzes about the products or services we review, and the security needed to trust the company involved.
Those words also add a time constraint, another secret in marketing, which compel people to act before they “miss out” on something.
Incorporating these words into your content will help generate the emotions needed to move potential customers from potential to customers. You need to inform your visitors while also giving them adequate reasons to act upon your information. By adding some of the words from above, you can add a time constraint to your offering that compels people to take advantage of it. Failure to add a time constraint can allow someone to bookmark your proposal and then forget about it. By adding a time constraint, you compel them to act now, not later.
Why would you want to spend all that time in design to generate the emotions needed to compel a visitor to buy only to allow them to bookmark the site and forget about it? Implementing the emotional marketing strategies will set you well on your way to higher profits through increased sales volume.Emotional marketing is the most powerful way to increase market share and create undying brand loyalty. However, if you do it wrong, you can spend millions on advertising that actually talks people out of buying!
In “Ogilvy on Advertising”, David Ogilvy discusses a study done by a former research director at Ford. Automotive ads were placed in every other copy of the Reader’s Digest. At the end of the year, more cars were purchased by people who had not been exposed to the ad! Use emotional marketing correctly and you’ll create Irresistible brand that builds long lasting relationships with loyal brand customers. However, if you use emotional marketing incorrectly, you’ll drive people away and erode your market share.
Here are five of the most harmful emotional marketing mistakes, and they are a lot more common than you might think!!
1. The Empty Promise – You can’t sell on attitude alone. People may buy for emotional reasons, but they want to justify their purchases with logic. So you must give them real reasons to purchase. Real features and their respective benefits that deliver!
2. The Emotional Mismatch – Emotional benefits are the human needs that attach to real features. Not every emotional benefit is appropriate for every feature. Your emotional promise must be logically consistent with the features you have to offer.
3. Emotional Psychobabble – Be honest! Have you ever sat in a meeting where people were pretending to know what each other was talking about when it came to the emotional benefits in your campaigns?
4. Emotionally Biased Research – People like to think of themselves as smart shoppers, so they aren’t likely to admit to you (or themselves) their emotional reasons for purchase (especially if they’re not socially desirable – lust, greed, envy, etc). So you need special research techniques to uncover emotional marketing insights!
5. Emotional Advertising Blunders – When you execute on an emotional marketing approach, you can’t just blurt it out at the consumer (e.g. “Use my brand and you’ll feel more powerful!”)
Show them, don’t tell them! (Emotional marketing is for marketers to understand, and consumers to experience!) The market out there is fast and furious. The competition is heavy and the marketing messages are reaching consumers in their thousands every day. To compound the challenge most of your potential customers’ basic needs are already met. They are looking for things to enhance their lives, make them feel better, prettier and sexier. Marketing to today’s consumers is a challenging business because you are no longer listing the specifications of products and services. Instead you are meeting people on an emotional level to break into their consumer awareness.
Let’s focus on some of the tactics, what they are and what you should do to benefit from marketing on an emotional basis to your potential customer base. First take your cue from the marketing greats such as Nike, Coke, Pepsi. They have been top marketers for decades and have multi-million budgets. Yet you never see a Coke or Nike ad list the specifications for soda pop or running shoes. They market entirely on an emotional level. When figuring out how to market emotionally, you need to work out what drives your customers.
How do they spend their days? How can your product make their lives easier, make them healthier or better looking or their lives more fun? Once you get a grip on how your product appeals to your customer, you can then focus your marketing efforts on bringing to the fore the emotional offer that your clients will respond to. For example, if you sell liquid vitamins I would say off the top of my head that your target market are people who are health conscious, not as healthy as they would like to be, high income earners, probably leading quite stressed lives and they want their vitamins quickly and immediately. Obviously you need to pitch your marketing tactics at intelligent, busy people who are concerned about their health and want instant results from vitamins. You could show a before stressed executive at office or stressed mother ferrying the kids and after an executive in control of a meeting, mother is laughing with the kids to show the benefits of these vitamins.
This approach hits a number of emotional points in the consumer:
1. There is help out there.
2. It doesn’t have to be this way.
3. Ordinary people are benefiting from this.
4. All it takes is liquid vitamins to change your life.
5. My destiny is in my hands because I can buy liquid vitamins to change my life.
6. Vitamins make you healthy so they will make me healthy too.
7. Liquid vitamins have an instantaneous effect on your mood and life.
Whether any of these assumptions bear scrutiny is not the point. The point is the emotional response that your campaign induces in the potential customer. To build an emotional marketing campaign you need to read the psycho-social make-up of your target market and build up an emotional campaign to meet their needs. It sounds like common sense but surprisingly few businesses go about doing this. They simply have advertisements published and hope for the best. What you actually need is a promotional campaign where you are entering into an emotional back-and-forth relationship with the customer, persuading them that your service or product can meet their emotional need.
For more information on strategic and emotional marketing and to find out how this can be used to drive your social media and digital marketing to generate more leads contact us.
A strategic perspective on Emotional Marketing
Brands that don't make emotional connections with their prospects and customers will eventually lose out to those that do. The practice of emotional marketing is all about getting your target audience to connect with your product, service, and brand at a very basic and fundamental level - the level of emotions. Examples of emotional marketing can be seen with top brands such as Starbucks, Porsche, and so on.These products and services make an emotional connection with the people they serve. Your challenge is to identify how your products/services can connect emotionally. What is the larger purpose? What type of experience can you offer your customers? Emotional marketing can only take place once you deliver a user experience that embodies your purpose. Once you are able to deliver on that promise, you can market the experience to your prospects.
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