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How Using Emotional Marketing in Content Can Help Drive Way More Sales

Whether you care to admit it or not, the decisions you make today will be driven by your emotions. In emotional marketing, we talk a lot about using psychological triggersย to get customers to click, convert, engage, etc.

โ€œBy leveraging common psychological triggers all people have,โ€ you might hear, โ€œyou can drive more sales.โ€

While it may feel like we make decisions with our minds, using logic and reasoning, the โ€œmental triggersโ€ we hear about are tied more to emotion than anything else.

Case in point,ย Antonio Damasioย spent time studying individuals with damage to the area of the brain where emotions were generated and processed.

While these subjects functioned just like anyone else, they couldnโ€™t feel emotion.

The other thing they had in common was they all had trouble with making decisions.

Even simple decisions about what to eat proved difficult.

While they could describe what they should be doing using logic and reason, most decisions couldnโ€™t be settled with simple rationale.

Without emotion, they werenโ€™t able to make a choice.

This is supported by data from Gerard Zaltman, author of โ€œHow Customers Think: Essential Insights into the Mind of the Market.โ€

Zaltman found thatย 95% of cognitionย happens beyond our conscious brain, instead coming from our subconscious, emotional brain.

ecards emotional marketing

Emotions are an X factor you canโ€™t control, but you canโ€™t afford to ignore them in your content marketing.

Why is Emotion Marketing so Effective?

When you make an emotional connection with your audience, itโ€™s incredibly easy to steer them to the desired outcome.

Youโ€™ve formed an emotional bond, however brief and fleeting, that makes them open to ideas and suggestions. It creates a certain level of trust thatโ€™s virtually impossible to artificially manifest.

Rob Walker and Joshua Glen found firsthand what an emotional connection can do.

In one experiment, they bought hundreds of items from thrift stores and similar locations โ€” all cheaply priced.

The duo wanted to see if they could sell the products using an emotional connectionย through the power of stories alone.

With 200 writers on board, they generated fictional stories for the products and used those stories to sell the thrift store items at auction on eBay.

significantobjects example | Emotional Marketing

They raised just under $8,000,ย which was a profit of approximately 2,700%.

And they did it all using that emotional connection through storytelling.

Thatโ€™s not to say there isnโ€™t a place for the logical or the rational in decision making.

This is where marketers often leverage the theory of dual processing in psychological marketing.

The theory holds that the brain processes thoughts and decisions on two levels.

Emotional Marketing dual process

The first level is that of emotion, which processes automatically, unconsciously, and provides a rapid response when we need it with virtually no effort.

The second level is the more deliberate and conscious thought process, where we handle decisions with reason and logic. It happens far slower than the emotional response.

In most cases, we fire back with a ready response from our emotions and then try to consciously rationalize it.

Think about some big-brand rivalriesย and preferences will surface in your mind.

How do you feel when you look at this major brand comparison?

brand rival in Emotional Marketing

Hereโ€™s another common one that has people divided, sometimes within the same family:

brand rival example in Emotional Marketing

And then thereโ€™s this brand rivalry we know all too well.

Jobs vs Gates in Emotional Marketing

In each of these, you likely have an opinion almost instantly about which you prefer, but itโ€™s not because you have a logical reason.

Itโ€™s typically tied to emotion and/or experience; how you feel using their products, or how the brands left you feeling after an experience or reading a news article.

The brain then tries to rationalize that emotional response.

For example, your emotional response goes straight to Coke and then your brain works to rationalize the decision by deciding that it tastes better in a can, itโ€™s fizzier, has a stronger bite than Pepsi, etc.

So, while you might feel like youโ€™re making a rational choice about your beverage, itโ€™s really just an emotional one.

The most successful marketers know how to lean on the emotional over logic in order to make their content draw in the audience.

Thatโ€™s whyย nearly a third of marketersย report significant profit gains when running emotional campaigns, but the number of successful campaigns dips if you introduce logic into the marketing.

emotion logic in Emotional Marketing

And those results get sliced in half when marketers switch to logic over emotion.

Emotion Marketing Doesnโ€™t Guarantee Successful Engagement

We experience a laundry list of emotions every day.

Is it really as simple as leveraging some emotion to make content more effective?

Yes and no.

Emotion is certainly important, but there are also other factors like timing, exposure, the format of the content, how itโ€™s presented, who produced or shared it, etc.

Despite understanding the role emotion plays in content, we still havenโ€™t quite perfected a formula for what makes content go viral.

Though weโ€™ve gotten pretty close.

Brands have long tried to inflate the consumerโ€™s emotional response through manufactured content; some met with great success.

Take, for example,ย Intelโ€™sย five-partย โ€œMeet the Makersโ€ series.

The videos profile a person around the world who uses Intelโ€™s technology to create new experiences and build new technology that makes a difference in the world.

intel in Emotional Marketing example

Like 13-year-old Shubham Banerrjee, who used Intelโ€™s technology to build an affordable Braille printer.

intel 2nd Emotional Marketing example

And of course, some companies try to leverage emotion and create viral campaigns that just donโ€™t take off.

CIO reportedย a number of failed viral marketing campaigns, such as โ€œWalmarting Across America.โ€

In this blog, two average Americans travel across the country visiting Walmart locations, reporting their interactions on a blog along the way.

After countless upbeat entries about how people loved working for the company, it was discovered thatย the trip was paid for by Walmartย and the entire thing was a campaign created and managed by the companyโ€™s PR firm.

That didnโ€™t receive a warm reception from the blogosphere, which deemed the content to be a โ€œflogโ€ or fake blog.

Which Emotions Attract the Most Marketing Engagement in Content?

Many emotions fuel our behaviors and our decisions, especially our purchase decisions.

Some more than others โ€” especially when theyโ€™re authentic.

A study wasย done by Buzzsumoย analyzing the top 10,000 most-shared articles on the web. Those articles were then mapped to emotions to see which emotions had the greatest influence on content.

The most popular:

  • Awe (25%)
  • Laughter (17%)
  • Amusement (15%)
popular emotion | Emotional Marketing

Conversely, the least popular were sadness and anger, totaling just 7% of the content that was most shared.

Two researchers at Whartonย also wanted to dig deeper into virally shared content to find commonalities and better understand what makes that content spread.

What they found was the emotional element, and some very specific results tied to emotions.

  • Content is far more likely to be shared when it makes people feel good or it creates positive feelings such as leaving them entertained.
  • Facts or data that shock people or leave them in awe were more likely to be shared.
  • Instilling fear or anxiety pushes engagement higher, from comments being posted to content being shared.
  • People most commonly shared content that incited anger, leaving comments as well.

While some emotions are more likely to engage than others, every audience is different. What drives one to action may do very little for another.

This modern adaptation of Robert Plutchikโ€™s Wheel of Emotion,ย illustrated by CopyPress, shows the range under eight primary emotions: joy, trust, fear, surprise, sadness, disgust, anger, and anticipation.

emotion wheel in Emotional Marketing

For content to be widely shared and have an impact on your audience, it needs to leverage one or more of these emotions.

The proof is on the web, not only in the statistics I shared above, but also in the popularity of user communities that regularly share content.

Just look at Reddit and some ofย the most popular subredditsย by subscriber count. Each can be tied back to emotions (some more obviously than others) like anticipation, awe, joy, and more.

subreddits Emotional Marketing example

Hereโ€™s how some of those emotions can play into the engagement with your audience:

Anxiety May Cause Uncertainty For Customers

You donโ€™t want your audience to make bad decisions. Bad decisions can lead to buyerโ€™s remorse, which can paint your brand and the overall experience in a negative light.

But it can be helpful if you leave the audience a bit more open to influence.

A Berkeley studyย revealed that anxiety can be linked to difficulty in using information around us to make decisions. When we experience uncertainty, it becomes harder to make decisionsย and our judgment is clouded.

anxiety example in Emotional Marketing

Still, anxiety can also spur people to act as a result of that uncertainty.

Take a two-year studyย by Wharton Ph.D. student Alison Wood Brooks and a Harvard Business School professor.

They found that upon increasing the anxiety of certain subjects with video footage, 90% of the โ€œanxiousโ€ participants opted to seek advice and were more likely to take it.

Only 72% of the participants in a neutral state, who viewed a different video, sought advice.

Capture the Focus of Your Emotional Marketing Audience With Awe

Awe is comparable to wonder, but it doesnโ€™t always fall under the umbrella of joy or humor.

Itโ€™s intended to captivate the audience and keep them riveted.

You often see this kind of hook in headlines that seem so earth-shatteringly significant that no one in their right mind would want to miss it.

Hereโ€™s a good example of that kind of awe used in contentย when Dropbox first launched.

dropbox start | Emotional Marketing example

Co-founder Drew Houston submitted his product to the website Digg, hoping to get some visibility from the social bookmarking site. That headline helped significantly.

Another great example of using Awe to capture attention is a video produced by Texas Armoring Corporation.

To emphasize the quality of the companyโ€™s bullet-resistant glass, the CEO crouched behind one of TACโ€™s glass panels while several rounds were fired at it from an AK-47.

Awe can impact decision making as much as anxiety.

A study from Stanford Universityย found that people experiencing awe are more focused on the present and less distracted by other things in life. They also tend to be more giving of their time.

When you have their attention and their focus, theyโ€™re more likely to have time to rationalize a decision.

Drive People to Action With Laughter and Joy Through Emotional Marketing

While joy and laughter can have their lines blurred, theyโ€™re really two different emotions when it comes to your content.

Because while laughter often leads to joy, not everything that is joyful is laugh-out-loud funny.

Still, next to awe, joy, laughter, and amusement were the highest contributors to social sharing and engagement in the above studies.

That influence goes all the way back to early childhood.

As babies, out first emotional action not long after being born is to respond to the smile of our parents with our own smile.

social smile | Emotional Marketing

Per psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, joy and amusement are hardwired into us from birth.

His studies tell us that our innate desire for joy increases when itโ€™s shared. Thatโ€™s the nature of the โ€œsocial smile.โ€

That explains why these feelings or emotions are such huge drivers behind the virality of content. Happiness, overall, is a huge driver for content sharing.

In fact,ย Jonah Bergerโ€™s studyย of the most-shared articles in the New York Times (around 7,000 articles) revealed the same kind of results around emotion.

The more positive the article, the more likely it was to go viral.

Brands have worked โ€œjoy marketingโ€ into their strategies for decades, aiming to make their audience feel warm, comfortable, and happy.

Thatโ€™s the intent of campaigns likeย P&Gโ€™s highly successful and viral โ€œThank You, Momโ€ campaignsย that are injected with a lot of emotion (especially joy) when celebrating the strength of mothers.

pg

Joy can take a lot of forms, though, and it doesnโ€™t have to be commercially intended to elicit a direct sale.

Look at what Beringer Vineyards did with influencer marketing.

Russian Instagram sensationsย Murad and Nataly Osmannย built a following of more than 4.5 million people with photos featuring them holding hands at locations around the globe during their world travels.

They attached the hashtag #FollowMeTo on those posts.

muradosmann example Emotional Marketing

The couple teamed up with Beringer Vineyardsย to create some images meant to inspire joy, love, and of course the sense of adventure the couple already shared with their hashtag.

beringer example | Emotional Marketing

Immediate Gains in Emotional Marketing From Anger

Anger may be perceived as a negative emotion by some, but it can have positive influences as well as positive outcomes when leveraged in the right way.

A leading researcher in the study of anger, Dr. Carol Tavris, draws a parallel betweenย anger and how it impacted societyย over the years.

Womenโ€™s suffrage, for example, developed from anger and frustration.

Anger can be empowering for the individual, bringing a sense of clarity and positive-forward momentum. It gives people a feeling of direction and control according toย a study from Carnegie Mellon.

In the previously mentioned study on content shares in the New York Times, negatively perceived emotions like angerย are equally associated with the virality of content.

angershare in Emotional Marketing

In fact, Bergerโ€™s study of the New York Times content found that content which incites feelings of frustration or anger isย 34% more likelyย to be featured on the Timeโ€™s most emailed list than the average article.

Now, Iโ€™m not suggesting that you deliberately create controversy by taking shots at readers or picking fights.

The key with using anger in content is to frame an issue that incites anger or frustration in a way thatโ€™s constructive.

You have to be thought-provoking and engaging.

This interactive graph from the New York Timesย is an example of how content can lead to frustration and anger over economic or societal issues.

interactive chart NYT in Emotional Marketing

This piece of content is simple, yet it provokes engagement as well as thought when results are revealed in comparison to what an individual perceives to be the truth.

Using the Right Emotional Marketing Words in Content

The difference between logic and emotion in content comes down to the words we use and how we position statements and information.

Itโ€™s just like the laundry list ofย power words used to improve conversion, orย terms commonly used in e-commerceย to get customers to buy more products.

ecommerce words in Emotional Marketing

When creating copy and content, you have to be acutely aware of whether youโ€™re taking a rational or emotional approach to the information youโ€™re sharing.

You need to think about the response you want to elicit to help guide your content development to make the right kind ofย psychological and emotional connectionย with your audience.

rational and emotional mind in emotional marketing

The context of your copy can remain the same.

By changing the words you use, however, you can make content appeal more to the emotions of the audience and prospective customer.

The simplest approach to finding the right high-emotion words takes only three steps:

  1. Think about the action you want your audience to take when they read your content.
  2. Decide what kind of emotional state will drive that action. What would make them do what you want them to do?
  3. Choose emotionally persuasive words appropriate to the action and the emotion.

What youโ€™ll find in researching the right words is that emotionally persuasive and impactful words tend to be abrupt. Itโ€™s the short, concise, basic words that appeal most to our emotions over our intellect.

Just look at this list fromย the Persuasion Revolution.

emotional words in Emotional Marketing

The majority 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 with longer and more complex words.

rational words in Emotional Marketing

You Canโ€™t Assume When it Comes to Emotional Marketing

Itโ€™s not easy to make that emotional connection with your audience. You have to know them.

Like anything else in marketing, your decisions and the content you create needs to be based on data. In this case, that data is your audience research.

That same research that tells you what topics to create, where your audience spends their time, and the content they prefer to view, can clue you into how to make that emotional connection.

You just need to expand your buyer personas.

buyer personas demographics in Emotional Marketing

In this case, you want to build up the psychological profile of your audience. You can achieve this by asking the right questions to help steer your content research and production.

  • What do they find humorous?
  • What are the pain points that frustrate them?
  • What topics make them angry?
  • What are common problems they speak about?
  • What kind of content is being shared that clearly pleases them or brings joy?

Your research could turn up a common topic or theme that appears frequently in the content they read and share.

For example, you might discover that a certain segment or demographic in your audience has a strong affinity to family values, or health and wellness.

Turn that into a content campaign that shares the feel-good side of your company.

Delve into the family life of your employees, how your company supports the work/life balance, or better health initiatives.

Google is well known for its company structure, promoting flexible schedules, support of family time, personal projects, and aย focus on work/life balance.

The company often shares behind-the-scenes images (visual content) showing off employees enjoying what they do. Hereโ€™s an example from Google Sydneyโ€™s offices:

google sydney | Emotional Marketing example

That can influence a positive emotional response toward the brand when targeted segments see that content.

Emotional Marketing Works in the B2B Process

Donโ€™t get caught up with the dated idea that emotion is only applicable to consumer-focused businesses.

Emotional marketing has its place in the B2B world as well.

You may be dealing with a longer buying process between one or more organizations, but the decisions are still made (and fueled by) people who are absolutely driven by emotion.

That includes emotions like:

  • Awe: over what a solution is capable of and feeling empowered to bring that solution to the workplace.
  • Anticipation: in finding a piece of the puzzle in a product or service that will help the company achieve its next goal or milestone.
  • Fear: in purchase decisions that could reflect on the individual, resulting in a personal risk associated with a B2B purchase.
  • Joy: in knowing that a B2B purchase is likely to lead to a positive outcome that will reflect positively on the individual.

Emotion absolutely influences B2B purchases, and in some cases, emotion matters even more than logic and reason.

Conclusion

You hold a great deal of influence with your audience when youโ€™re able to tap into their emotions.

Once you understand your audience, you can better determine their emotional state.

From there, make the decision about whether you need to influence and exploit emotions that are already present, or if you want to create or give rise to emotions the audience wasnโ€™t initially expecting or experiencing.

Even the most (seemingly) rational decisions are influenced by emotion โ€” and that applies to everyone.

When you learn how to leverage that emotion in your content, you will see increases in engagement, social action, and conversions within your funnel.

How do you use emotion in your content and copy?

The post How Using Emotional Marketing in Content Can Help Drive Way More Sales appeared first on Neil Patel.