The Ultimate Guide to Emotional Marketing

Emotional Marketing is a new technique used by businesses to tap customers in a relatively different way. As the term suggests, emotional marketing involves influencing customer decisions by tapping emotions. Today, this technique has turned into a powerful tool allowing companies to connect with the audience and encouraging them to act. 

Customers are flooded with advertisements as soon as they go online. While conventional marketing strategies still remain relevant and popular, emotional marketing further increases the chances of turning a potential customer into an actual one. Let’s discuss. 

What is Emotional Marketing?

Emotional Marketing is a marketing technique that makes use of emotions to enable the audience to share, remember, and buy. Businesses usually tap into a singular emotion such as anger, fear, happiness, or sadness to elicit a customer’s response.

Before we dive into discussing how effective emotional marketing is, it is important for you to understand how it works. Think about how you are feeling right at this moment. Your emotions do not necessarily have to relate to how your body is feeling. In fact, they define your state of mind. 

Let’s assume that you are feeling tired at the moment. Tiredness is not an emotion. You can say that you are feeling annoyed since you are tired but happy at the same time because you have an exciting day ahead. Many times, your emotions will not fall into the four basic emotions categories mentioned earlier. 

Being annoyed can be grouped under angry while being excited can be considered happy but both are not exactly the same. To make it simple, emotions are like colors. Although there are a few defined concepts but one tiny change can lead to a different kind of happiness and sadness. 

Therefore, depending on your industry, audience, and product, you cannot simply always target general “happiness”. When it comes to emotional marketing, you have to dig deep into precisely what feeling you aim to elicit. This will guide your marketing strategies including blog posts, content, and media, etc. 

Why Emotional Marketing Works

There are several reasons contributing to the success of emotional marketing. Most of it has to do with the first impression. Let’s take two advertisements as an example. One advertisement simply talks about products while the other makes you laugh or cry. Which of the two will impress you more? It’s the second one, isn’t it?

You know what they say, the first impression is the last and that is one of the basic principles on which emotional marketing is based. The same applies to a brand or product. The best emotional marketing campaigns play with your emotions and allow products or brands to stand out in your mind. Emotional marketing plays with your emotions and allows products or brands to stand out in your mind. 

Another important reason is that emotional marketing influences people to decide with their hearts. If we wish to purchase something, the first thing we do is go online and start comparing products. We would like to end up with the smartest decision possible using our brains.

However, in most cases, the heart takes over the mind. While your mind might reject the product, your heart will push you to buy it. Studies show that the majority of the customers rely on emotions rather than information to make final decisions. In the long run, emotional marketing overtakes conventional marketing techniques by helping people to decide with their hearts, which then influences their minds. 

Emotional Marketing Inspires People to Act

Apart from how effective emotional marketing is, it is important to mention that it inspires people to act. Studies show that good news tends to spread faster on social media than any other type of content. As a result, if something makes us feel happy and excited, we like to share it with others so that they can be a part of the same happiness as well.

At the same time, sadness allows us to sympathize and connect. In the majority of cases, it inspires people to act on behalf of others. There is a reason that organizations use sad photos with moving background music while asking for donations. It motivates people to make collective contributions and fiscal giving. 

Emotional Marketing Strategies

Know Your Audience

The first and most important emotional marketing strategy is knowing your audience. It serves as the foundation of other marketing strategies too. Without knowing your customers, how will you be able to determine which response proves to be valuable for both you and them?

Therefore, before you dive deep into emotional marketing, it is important that you conduct some serious target audience research. Your efforts should focus on determining emotions that resonate with general desires, pain, and dreams. 

Lead With Color

Believe it or not, color plays a huge role in influencing emotions. As mentioned earlier, colors and emotions are tied together in ways more than one. Try walking into a room that is full of bright lights and then into a room with dull and dim lighting. Both situations will have a dramatic effect on your emotions.

While the room with bright lights will bring about positive emotions, the one with dull lighting will make you sad or depressed. This is called color psychology. The utilization of color psychology can be seen in clinics and hospitals where color schemes are such that calm the patients. 

Football clubs come up with unique colored kits to excite the fans. Perhaps a perfect example of color psychology is Coco Cola’s red color. The color red evokes the feeling of excitement, joy, and love. Meanwhile, the color green is often associated with growth, health, progress, development, balance, and harmony. 

Tell a Story

Storytelling does not only connect with the younger audience but the elders too. You will come across several businesses choosing storytelling over other marketing techniques. The reason is that it allows their message to resonate better with their target audience.

Take Proctor & Gamble’s 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics commercial aired in 2014 titled “Thankyou Mom” as an example. The commercial featured several famous Olympians thanking their mothers for everything they had done to support their athletic careers. 

Since mothers are a large part of P&G’s target audience, the commercial was a success interms of conveying the message effectively and marketing the products. 

Final Word

Influencing the decision-making process through emotional marketing is a sure way of attracting, resonating with, and encouraging your audience to act. However, there is a lot of groundwork that needs to be done. You need to know your audience and determine which emotions will resonate the most. Once you have done that, align your overall marketing goals with emotional marketing efforts and the results will mostly be effective and positive.