How utilizing emotional advertising and marketing in content material might help drive extra gross sales
Whether you want to admit it or not, the decisions you make today are determined by your emotions. In emotional marketing, we talk a lot about using psychological triggers to get customers to click, convert, engage, etc.
"By using common psychological triggers that all people have," you might hear, "you can make more sales."
While it feels like we are making decisions with our minds using logic and reasoning, the "mental triggers" we hear about are more tied to emotions than anything else.
In this case, Antonio Damasio spent time examining people with damage in the area of the brain where emotions were generated and processed.
While these issues worked like any other, they couldn't sense any emotion.
The other thing they had in common was that they all struggled to make decisions.
Even simple decisions about what to eat turned out to be difficult.
While they could use logic and common sense to describe what to do, most decisions could not be made with simple reasons.
Without emotion, they couldn't make a choice.
This is supported by data from Gerard Zaltman, author of How Customers Think: Essential Insights into the Spirit of the Market.
Zaltman found that 95% of the perception takes place outside of our conscious brain and instead comes from our unconscious, emotional brain.
Emotions are an X-Factor that you cannot control, but you cannot afford to ignore them in your content marketing.
Why is emotion marketing so effective?
When you create an emotional connection with your audience, it's incredibly easy to get them to get the result you want.
They have built an emotional bond, as short and fleeting as it may be, that leaves them open to ideas and suggestions. It creates a level of trust that practically cannot be artificially manifested.
Rob Walker and Joshua Glen discovered firsthand what an emotional connection can do.
In one experiment, they bought hundreds of items from thrift stores and similar places – all at cheap prices.
The duo wanted to see if they could sell the products through an emotional connection through the power of stories alone.
With 200 writers on board, they created fictional stories for the products and used those stories to auction the second-hand items on eBay.
They raised just under $ 8,000, which is roughly a 2,700% profit.
And they did everything using that emotional connection through storytelling.
That is not to say that there is no room for the logical or the rational in decision-making.
This is where marketers often use the double processing theory in psychological marketing.
The theory is that the brain processes thoughts and decisions on two levels.
The first level is the emotion, which is processed automatically and unconsciously and provides a quick response when we need it with practically no effort.
The second level is the more conscious and conscious thought process in which we treat decisions with reason and logic. It happens a lot slower than the emotional response.
In most cases, we fire back our emotions with an instant response and then try to consciously rationalize them.
Think about some of the big brand rivalries and likes that will pop up on your mind.
How do you feel about this big brand comparison?
Here's another common variation in which people are divided, sometimes within the same family:
And then there is this brand rivalry that we know all too well.
In either of these cases, you are likely to have an opinion almost immediately that you prefer, but not because you have a logical reason.
It is usually tied to emotions and / or experiences. how you feel using their products, or how the brands left you after an experience or reading a news article.
The brain then tries to rationalize this emotional response.
For example, your emotional response goes straight to Cola, and then your brain works to rationalize the decision by deciding that it tastes better in a can, fizz, has a stronger bite than Pepsi, etc.
While you may feel like you are making a rational decision about your drink, it is really just an emotional one.
The most successful marketers know how to rely on emotional hyperlogic to attract their content in the audience.
Because of this, nearly a third of marketers report significant gains in profits from running emotional campaigns. However, the number of successful campaigns goes down when you introduce logic into marketing.
And those results are cut in half when marketers switch over emotion to logic.
Emotion marketing does not guarantee successful engagement
We experience a laundry list with emotions every day.
Is it really that easy to use emotions to make content more effective?
Yes and no.
Emotions are certainly important, but there are also other factors such as timing, exposure, format of the content, how it is presented, who produced or shared it, etc.
While we understand the role emotions play in content, we haven't yet perfected a formula that will make content go viral.
Although we got pretty close.
Brands have long sought to increase the consumer's emotional response through produced content. Some of them were very successful.
Take, for example, the five-part Intel series “Meet the Makers”.
The videos feature a person around the world using Intel technology to gain new experiences and develop new technologies that make a difference in the world.
Like 13-year-old Shubham Banerrjee, who built an affordable Braille printer using Intel technology.
And of course, some companies try to take advantage of emotion and create viral campaigns that just won't start.
The CIO reported on a number of failed viral marketing campaigns, such as Walmarting Across America.
On this blog, two average Americans travel the country to visit Walmart locations and share their interactions on a blog.
After countless optimistic posts about how much people loved working for the company, it was found that the trip was paid for by Walmart and the whole thing was a campaign created and managed by the company's PR firm.
The blogosphere, which viewed the content as "flog" or fake blog, did not receive a warm welcome.
What emotions attract the most content marketing engagement?
Many emotions fuel our behavior and our decisions, especially our purchase decisions.
Some more than others – especially if they are authentic.
A study was conducted by Buzzsumo which analyzed the 10,000 most frequently shared articles on the internet. These articles were then assigned emotions to determine which emotions had the greatest impact on the content.
The most beloved:
- Awe (25%)
- Laughter (17%)
- Entertainment (15%)
Conversely, sadness and anger were the least popular, making up only 7% of the content that was shared the most.
Two Wharton researchers also wanted to dig deeper into virally shared content to find common ground and better understand how that content spreads.
What they found was the emotional element and some very specific outcomes associated with emotions.
- It is far more likely that content will be shared if it makes people feel good or creates positive feelings, such as: B. when they are entertained.
- Facts or data that shock or awe people were more likely to be passed on.
- By instilling fear or fear, engagement increases, from comments to content that is shared.
- Most often, people shared content that caused trouble and also left comments.
While some are more emotionally engaging than others, every audience is different. What drives one to act can do very little for another.
This modern adaptation of Robert Plutchik's Wheel of Emotion, illustrated by CopyPress, shows the range of eight main emotions: joy, trust, fear, surprise, sadness, disgust, anger and anticipation.
In order for content to become widespread and affect your audience, one or more of these emotions must be used.
The evidence is on the web, not just in the stats I shared above, but in the popularity of user communities who regularly share content.
Check out Reddit and some of the most popular subreddits by subscriber count. Everyone can be tied to emotions (some more obvious than others) like anticipation, awe, joy, and more.
Here's how some of these emotions can flow into your engagement with your audience:
Fear can lead to uncertainty among customers
You don't want your audience to make bad decisions. Poor choices can lead to buyer remorse, which puts your brand and the overall experience in a negative light.
However, it can help if you leave the audience a little more open to influence.
A Berkeley study found that anxiety can be linked to difficulty using information around us to make decisions. When we experience uncertainty, it becomes more difficult to make decisions and our judgment is impaired.
However, fear can also stimulate people to act because of this uncertainty.
Take part in a two-year study by Wharton Ph.D. Alison Wood Brooks student and professor at Harvard Business School.
They found that 90% of "anxious" participants, after increasing the anxiety of certain subjects with video footage, chose to seek advice and were more likely to take it.
Only 72% of those in a neutral state who watched another video sought advice.
Capture the focus of your emotional marketing audience with awe
Awe is like amazement, but it doesn't always fall under the umbrella of joy or humor.
It is supposed to captivate and captivate the audience.
You often see these types of hooks in headlines that seem so earth-shakingly significant that no one in their right mind wants to be without them.
Here's a good example of that kind of awe that was used in content when Dropbox was first launched.
Co-founder Drew Houston submitted his product to the Digg website in hopes of getting some visibility on the social bookmarking website. This headline helped a lot.
Another great example of using awe to get attention is a video produced by the Texas Armoring Corporation.
To highlight the quality of the company's bulletproof glass, the CEO crouched behind one of TAC's panes of glass while multiple shots were fired at it from an AK-47.
Awe can influence decision-making as much as fear.
A Stanford University study found that people who experience awe tend to focus more on the present and are less distracted from other things in life. They also tend to give more time.
When you have their attention and focus, they are more likely to have time to rationalize a decision.
Getting people to act with laughter and joy Through emotional marketing
While joy and laughter can blur your lines, they are really two different emotions when it comes to your content.
Because while laughter often leads to joy, not everything that makes joy is funny to laugh.
Aside from awe, joy, laughter, and enjoyment contributed most to social sharing and engagement in the above studies.
This influence dates back to early childhood.
As babies, not long after we are born, our first emotional act is to respond to our parents' smiles with our own smiles.
According to psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, joy and pleasure are ingrained in us from birth.
His studies show us that our innate need for joy increases when it is shared. That is the nature of the "social smile".
That explains why these feelings or emotions are such big drivers of content virality. Overall, happiness is a big driver of content sharing.
In fact, Jonah Berger's study of the most shared articles in the New York Times (around 7,000 articles) found the same results when it came to emotions.
The more positive the article, the more likely it is to go viral.
For decades, brands have incorporated “joy marketing” into their strategies to keep audiences warm, comfortable, and happy.
This is the intent of campaigns like P & G's hugely successful and viral "thank you mom" campaigns that evoke a lot of emotion (especially joy) in celebrating mothers strength.
However, joy can take many forms and need not be commercial in order to produce a direct sale.
Check out what Beringer Vineyards did to influencer marketing.
Russian Instagram sensations Murad and Nataly Osmann built a fan base of more than 4.5 million people with photos of them holding hands on their trips around the world in places around the world.
You have added the hashtag #FollowMeTo to these posts.
The couple have partnered with Beringer Vineyards to create some imagery designed to instill joy, love, and of course, the sense of adventure that the couple has already shared using their hashtag.
Immediate gains in emotional marketing through anger
Anger may be perceived by some as a negative emotion, but it can have both positive influences and positive results when used properly.
A leading researcher in the study of anger, Dr. Carol Tavris, draws a parallel between anger and its impact on society over the years.
Women's suffrage, for example, developed out of anger and frustration.
Anger can be a strengthening for the individual and bring a sense of clarity and a positive dynamic forward. According to a study by Carnegie Mellon, it gives people a sense of direction and control.
In the aforementioned study of content proportions in the New York Times, negatively perceived emotions such as anger are equally associated with the virality of content.
In fact, Berger's study of New York Times content found that content that leads to frustration or anger was 34% more likely than the average article to be on the list of most emailed lists of the time.
I am not suggesting that you intentionally create controversy by shooting or fighting readers.
The key to using anger in content is to constructively capture a problem that creates anger or frustration.
You need to be thought-provoking and engaging.
This New York Times interactive graphic is an example of how content can lead to frustration and anger about economic or social problems.
This content is simple, but it is both engaging and thought-provoking as results are revealed versus what an individual perceives to be truth.
Use the right emotional marketing words in content
The difference between logic and emotion in content depends on the words we use and how we position statements and information.
It's just like the laundry list with power words used to improve conversion or terms that are commonly used in e-commerce to encourage customers to buy more products.
When creating copies and content, it is important to know exactly whether you are approaching the information you are sharing rationally or emotionally.
You need to think about the response you want to trigger in order to direct your content development and create the right kind of psychological and emotional connection with your audience.
The context of your copy can remain the same.
However, by changing the words you use, you can make the content more responsive to the emotions of the audience and prospect.
The simplest approach to finding the right high emotion words takes just three steps:
- Think about the action you want your audience to take when they read your content.
- Decide what type of emotional state is driving this action. What would make them do what you want them to do?
- Choose emotionally compelling words that match the plot and the emotion.
As you search for the right words, you will find that emotionally compelling and impactful words tend to be abrupt. It is the short, concise, basic words that most appeal to our emotions through our intellect.
Check out this list from the Persuasion Revolution.
Most of this emotionally weighted list (and there are over 350 items) is made up of shorter words.
The rational mind, on the other hand, tends to associate itself with longer and more complex words.
You can't assume when it's about emotionsal marketing
It's not easy to make that emotional connection with your audience. You have to know them.
Like everything else in marketing, your decisions and the content you create must be based on data. In this case, that data is your audience research.
The same research that tells you what topics to create, where your audience spends their time, and what content they prefer can shed light on how to make that emotional connection.
All you have to do is expand your buyer personalities.
In this case, you want to build the psychological profile of your audience. You can accomplish this by asking the right questions to guide your content research and production.
- What do you find humorous?
- What are the pain points that frustrate you?
- What topics make you angry?
- What general problems are you talking about?
- What kind of content are they sharing that they clearly like or enjoy?
Their research could come up with a common topic or theme that appears frequently in the content they read and share.
For example, you may find that a certain segment or demographic in your audience has a strong affinity for family values or health and wellbeing.
Turn it into a content campaign that shares the feel-good side of your company.
Find out more about the family life of your employees, how your company supports the work-life balance or about better health initiatives.
Google is known for its corporate structure that encourages flexible schedules, support for family time, personal projects, and a focus on work-life balance.
The company often shares behind-the-scenes pictures (visual content) that show how employees are enjoying their jobs. Here is an example from the offices of Google Sydney:
This can influence a positive emotional response to the brand when certain segments see this content.
Emotional marketing works in the B2B process
Don't get caught up in the outdated idea that emotions only apply to consumer-centric businesses.
Emotional marketing also has its place in the B2B world.
You may face a lengthy buying process between one or more organizations, but the decisions are still made (and fueled) by people who are absolutely emotion-driven.
These include emotions such as:
- Shy: about what a solution is capable of and feels empowered to bring that solution to the workplace.
- Expectation: When looking for a piece of the puzzle in a product or service that will help the company achieve its next goal or milestone.
- anxiety: in purchasing decisions that can affect individuals and lead to personal risk in connection with a B2B purchase.
- joy: knowing that a B2B purchase is likely to produce a positive outcome that has a positive impact on the individual.
Emotions absolutely affect B2B purchases, and in some cases emotions are even more important than logic and common sense.
Conclusion
You have a huge impact on your audience when you are able to tap into their emotions.
Once you understand your audience, you can better determine their emotional state.
From there, make the decision whether you need to influence and exploit existing emotions or whether you want to generate or evoke emotions that the audience did not originally expect or experience.
Even the most (seemingly) rational decisions are influenced by emotions – and that applies to everyone.
As you learn how to use these emotions in your content, you will find that engagement, social action, and conversions increase in your funnel.
How do you use emotions in your content and copies?