Advertising is all about creating a strong connection with your audience. What better way to do that than through emotional marketing? Emotional marketing can bring out feelings of joy, anger, fear, and other emotions that your customers will find hard to forget.

These days marketing takes many forms, whether it be promoting the company through wide-reaching social media campaigns with memorable hashtags or utilizing traditional methods such as printed leaflets and promotional gifts. Emotional marketing plays a significant role in many of these campaign methods. 

So, what makes emotional marketing a great tactic, and how can it help you to build customer relationships and encourage loyalty? This article explores the concept of emotional marketing and which emotions you should consider for your next campaign.

What is Emotional Marketing?

Emotional marketing is used to draw in audiences, build a brand’s reputation, and convert leads. As is the goal of any marketing campaign, the idea is to generate leads and profit. 

More specifically, emotional marketing efforts use emotion to grab the audience’s attention, encourage them to share the product and/or service, and ultimately buy it. It usually taps into a specific emotion, such as sadness, happiness, anger, fear, or disgust. 

It can be an effective way to humanize sales strategies that may otherwise feel irrelevant or meaningless. What’s more, emotions can help to spur decision-making—particularly when they are strong or overwhelming feelings—and that’s especially relevant when it comes to buying. 

Chances are some of your existing marketing messages and campaigns already seek to invoke feelings, creating an emotional connection with the audience as part of the overall objective. But emotional marketing goes further, where the campaign’s primary objective is to target the audience emotionally.

Ultimately, the aim is to leverage the connection with the consumer to convince them to invest in your business, whether that means purchasing a product, signing up for a subscription, or buying a service. As a result, call monitors may even notice an uptake in people calling to connect with the business.

What Makes Emotional Marketing Effective?

So, what is it that makes emotional marketing so effective? Let’s look into the main factors. 

1. Relatable and Engaging

Engaging customers is critical when running a business. After all, you want to hook customers and encourage them to spread the word about your business to their family and friends.

Emotional marketing can be used in many ways to engage customers more. In brick-and-mortar stores, this can be in the form of colorful displays or interactive digital screens. You can even tell a story through your messaging to encourage customer intimacy. This entices the customers and leaves them wanting more. The key is to keep it authentic and relevant to your brand.

When it comes to online, being relatable and engaging often comes down to messaging as you don’t have members of staff on hand to give customers the personal touch. However, you can tie in messaging customers may have seen elsewhere to give your brand an omnichannel presence. 

In addition, ensure you are responding to customer comments and queries so you maintain a healthy relationship with customers. You should always offer an easy-to-contact business telephone number on your website and Google.

You can also use website landing page tools to ensure the pages you’re driving traffic towards are as engaging as possible, with clear presentation of your main products, services and mission statement. 

2. Better Recall (Influences Buying Behavior)

Christmas adverts are notorious for being particularly memorable. Why? Because they strive to invoke strong emotions at a significant time of year. They’re often filled with joy and excitement, but in some cases, businesses tap into feelings of sadness. 

These strong emotions are what make a campaign particularly memorable. Whether the memories are positive or negative, a successful emotional marketing message can put your brand, product, or service at the forefront of people’s minds when they’re ready to make a purchase. 

Emotion can connect to memory, so things like events and experiences stick with people and leave a lasting impression. Make your audience feel something when it comes to your advertising, and they’ll be more likely to remember you.

3. Easy to Share

What do you usually do if you experience or see something that makes you feel a powerful emotion? 

Let’s say you recently switched your hosted VoIP solutions provider because of their powerful advertising that encouraged you to connect with the rest of the world. It helps that they may offer you a better service, but what really encouraged you to make the switch was how much you related to the messaging. As a result, you may have shared the marketing campaign with friends, family, or colleagues who you feel may also relate to the message. 

People like to see content that makes them feel something. When they do, they are inclined to share it with others because they want other people to share that emotion. 

This can be great for building your brand awareness and image. It can also be the thing that is the making of your brand. If done well, the conversation may continue for months or even years to come. 

If you are having difficulty connecting with your audience and developing a following on social media, then you may wish to look into companies that can offer help to you, such as an Instagram growth service.

Of course, social media isn’t the only method you can use to share things. You can also reach out to potential customers through email. If you don’t have a database of suitable contact details available, you can use an email finder tool to obtain verified emails.

5 Emotions And How to Use Them

As humans, we experience a plethora of emotions. However, there are five that can be used to connect with customers through marketing effectively. 

Joy and Happiness 

When we feel joyful or happy, we’re often inclined to spread the love. 

As the old saying goes, good news travels fast. This is why people like to share good experiences with one another to make others feel good too. That means positive and uplifting content is likely to be more widely shared on social media and in-person. 

With everything going on in the world, it’s nice when something makes us feel happy and hopeful. This emotion works well for themes of celebration and socialization and may be particularly poignant for food and drink companies and hospitality brands. In such campaigns, use power words that encourage friends and social groups to get together and spread the joy.

We can see the effects of this not only in advertising but also in our everyday office life. Spreading happiness helps to create a happier atmosphere. In companies that demonstrate workplace appreciation by taking time to acknowledge and recognize positive things that employees have done, they have a more positive company culture and higher levels of employee retention. 

Sadness

Sadness is the emotion that tugs on your heartstrings the most. It makes us empathize and connect with what we see. Sadness explores the themes of pain and mourning, which may suit pharmaceuticals or life insurance adverts. 

When engaging with a sad emotional marketing campaign, people may reflect on their own lives and be encouraged to help themselves or others. The feeling of sadness may also inspire people to take action, which is why it’s an effective form of marketing for many charities. 

Anger 

Anger often leads to passion, which may encourage people to interact and comment on your campaign. For instance, an advert about climate change or animal welfare may invoke intense feelings of unfairness and anger or be particularly thought-provoking. Such campaigns may lead people to feel motivated to take action, whether that’s making a donation or engaging with a campaign through comments and likes, which encourages shares and further interaction with a wider audience.

Fear 

Fear can often lead us to seek comfort, security, and support. In turn, this can increase brand loyalty.

Many emotional marketing campaigns create messaging along the lines of ‘without using our product/service, this could happen to you’. This can encourage potential customers to make a purchase, whether they fear they will miss out or feel the product or service would genuinely improve their lives. This is an especially effective strategy when marketing your business.

Fear can be tricky to get right when it comes to advertising, as businesses are worried that consumers will associate their negative feelings with the brand. But, if done right, consumers can see your brand as the bright light in a dark world, which means they rely on your business if things take a turn for the worse.

Disgust

Like anger, disgust may encourage people to take action. Some relevant themes may include safety, the need for social change, and the need to be satisfied. Companies that may consider using this emotive marketing tactic include legal firms, feminine product brands, pharmaceuticals, and skincare brands. For example, a feminine hygiene brand Always’ identified social gender stereotype as the common enemy in their #likeagirl campaign. It highlighted how we need to change the language surrounding puberty and society’s treatment of girls and women. 

Conclusion

Overall, emotional marketing is a great tactic to build customer relationships. As we’ve seen, it can invoke feelings within them that create memories that will then be associated with your campaign. 

If your advert spreads joy and makes consumers feel happy, they will remember this messaging whenever they shop at your store. Similarly, if your advert makes people angry at a cause, they will associate this with your brand and want to shop with you to make a change. 

So, if you want to make a powerful impact on your target audience, consider emotional marketing as part of your campaign.