Your customers make 35,000 decisionsย each day, and emotions play a role in a staggering 90% of their day. This means thereโs major overlap, and the bulk of those decisions are made when your customers are emotional.
Ifย youโre not prioritizing your customers’ emotions in all of your content creation, you’re potentially making most of their decisions (say, 31,500 of them) harder than they have to be โ including the one where they choose, or don’t choose, your brand.
Here’s why emotionally supporting your customers through content isn’t just good practice; itโs vital for impacting your target audienceโs buying decisions, and, ultimately, your bottom line. More importantly, how to do it the right way.
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Table of Contents
- Why Are Emotions so Important in Your Business?
- 5 Ways to Emotionally Support Your Customers Through Content
- Actively Listen and Create Space to Be Heard
- Reflect Your Customerโs Exact Language Back to Them
- Leverage the Power of Storytelling
- Use Emotionally Supportive Colors and Imagery
- Highlight Social Proof in Your Content
- Use Empathy as a Foundation
- Elicit the Right Emotional Responses
Why Are Emotions so Important in Your Business?
If you think emotions are a casual afterthought in your audienceโs buying decisions,ย think again.
When used proactively, you can use emotional marketingย to steer both your prospective andย current customers to become loyal, lifetime fans of your brand.
Why are emotions so powerful? Simply put, they impact your decisions โย big and small.
As for how decisions are influenced, hereโs a quick synopsis of what happens in your brain.
You have three brains: the lizard brain, the emotional brain, and the rational brain.
- Your emotional brain is responsible for your limbic system and wins more arguments than your rational brain.
- Your lizard brain, the brain way under and older than the emotional brain, triggers fight-or-flight mode and wins even more.
- Your rational brain is there to justify the decisions of the other two โย like a wingman, but itโs not really responsible for making them.
What does this all mean for your business?
While itโs not practical to appeal to your audienceโs lizard brain in your marketing messages โย no need to thrust anyone into fight-or-flight mode โย itโs definitely worth appealing to their emotional brain. This engages your limbic system andย draws them toward your brand.
On the frontend of your marketing strategy, you can use emotional marketingย to help connect with your target audienceโs emotional brain and persuade them to make a purchase.
In fact, one study of 1,400 ad campaigns found that ads with purely emotional contentย performed twice as wellย ( i.e. 31% vs. 16% ) as ads with only rational content.
After they convert, you can tap into your customerโs emotions and support them during their user experience (UX).
After all, thereโs a lot riding on a good customer experience, given that 32% of customersย would leave a brand they love after just one bad customer experience.
Howโs that for brand loyalty?
[Tweet “32% of customersย would leave a brand they love after just one bad customer experience.”]
To keep your customers happy, make sure you create a UX that matches the rational brain with the emotional brain.
Why? All forms of competition between the rational brain and emotional brainย will be a bad experienceย for users.
The point here is you can make a strong emotional connectionย with anyone who comes in touch with your brand โย whether prospective, new, or repeat customers โย so itโs worth hitting on the right ones, which will ultimately contribute to your bottom line.
As for making an emotional connectionย with your target audienceย the right way, hereโs how to do it.
5 Ways to Emotionally Support Your Customers Through Content
Your content shouldnโt just be about getting your point across and promoting your business, products, or services. You should be able to connect with your customers on a personal level and make them feel heard and understood. Here are some ideas on how to do so.
Actively Listen and Create Space to Be Heard
Whether itโs new visitors to your site or returning loyal customers, you can support your audience through the content in your live chat conversations.
To make an emotional connection, first and foremost, provide a space for your contacts to be heard. In other words, allow them to vent and donโt forget to really listen.ย Let your target audienceย know their point of view matters.
Sadly, this isnโt the norm. In fact, people dedicate only about 55% of their time to listening. This makes sense, considering the average person hears between 20,000 and 30,000 wordsย within a 24-hour period. Needless to say, we indulge in the daily bad habit of notย trulyย listening.
Sure, itโs not realistic to solve theย worldโs problems through a live chat, but you can make an emotional connectionย with your target audienceย by letting them express their emotions.
Even if itโs a simple chatbot prompt, like this chat messageย that asks how their site visitors feel.
Emojis and all, it immediately puts the conversation into an emotional context, which opens the door for people to trust you with their problem.
To make the right emotional connectionย with your live chat visitors, use positivityย and supportive phrasing as you engage in chats.
REVE Chat, for instance,ย recommends using affirmative words to help create a positive customer experience, like:
- Great
- Wonderful
- Excellent
- Absolutely
- Awesome
- Amazing
- Certainly
- Definitely
- Fantastic
You can also ask follow-up questions, clarify an agreement, and make sure youโve done everything you can to understand how to help your target audience.
Provide Support Live Chatย recommends using these phrases to verify you understand your target audienceย properly:
- โLet me check that I have this rightโฆโ
- โLet me see if I have this correct, you want me toโฆโ or โYou would like for me toโฆ?โ
- โIf I understand you correctlyโฆโ
- โYou are saying thatโฆ correct?โ
That way, you can share contentย and the right supportive resources at the right time โย instead of sending a frustrated or curious user something irrelevant to their unique situation.
Do this and watch the positive emotionsย shine through your conversations.
The same concept of listening first, and then validating and offering an emotional responseย that supports their perspective, applies to your interactions in any online community, too.
From Facebook Groups and online forums to designated comment logs and social media, respond to every comment and let every contact know theyโre being heard and taken seriously.
After fully understanding your contactโs perspective, share content thatโs helpful โย whether itโs educational tutorials or links to support resources, like in this social mediaย postย comment by Amy Porterfieldโs team member.
After learning about a target audienceย memberโs problem accessing Amyโs podcastย episode, Joshuaย sent over a helpful piece of content in the form of a resource link.
The main takeaway is, regardless of the channel, provide a space for your target audienceย to be heard and use that to inform your content creation. After all, your target audienceย (including their emotions) should be at the heart of your business.
If you use our next tip correctly, itโs a big indicator that youโre listening to your target audience.
[Tweet “Regardless of the channel, provide a space for your target audienceย to be heard and use that to inform your content creation.”]
Reflect Your Customerโs Exact Language Back to Them
Another way to emotionally support your customers through content is to use your target audienceโs exact language and phrasing in your content.
Whatโs the best source for gathering their verbiage? Your target audience, of course.
Whether itโs in first-hand conversations or through secondary research methods, doing remarkable customer researchย can make all the difference in your business. Itโs a way to gather a key list of repeat words, phrases, and issues that come up often from your target audience.
If youโre going the secondary research route โย as in, social listening or combing through conversations in relevant online forums, like Reddit or Facebook Groups โย you can find a ton of comments by looking up your threads and groups based on your niche topic.
Letโs say youโre in the personal development niche, for example. A quick query for โpersonal developmentโ in Amazon Books turns up over 80,000 resultsย for reviews and verbiageย from your target audience.
Once youโve gathered your verbiage database, the next step is to organize your data into pain pointsย and relief points.
When content creationย time comes, you can pull verbiage from your list and reflect your target audienceโs exact language back to them.
As marketing queen, Amy Porterfield, puts it:
One thing to pay attention to as youโre deciding which phrases to use in your copy is their stage of awareness, which include these five stages:
This is something that copywriting guru and Copyhackersย founder, Joanna Wiebe, uses. Itโs a useful way to put yourself in your recipientโs shoes, so you can write specific content for their stage of the awareness funnel.
Even if itโs past the awareness stages, and youโre creating content for your converted customers, you can use your target audienceโs language and phrasing in customer support content, too.
Just use their exact language when creating helpful support content, like guides, tutorials, or even in onboarding emails.
Content creationย formats aside, when you use your target audienceโs exact language, it shows that youโre carefully taking inventory of their needs and concerns, which makes you come off as authentic in wanting to help solve their problems.
Considering the fact that 57% of consumersย think that less than half of brands do content creationย authentically, this tactic can help you stand out from the norm.
In a nutshell, investigate the language your target audience uses by doing your due diligence and conducting research. Find recurring patterns in the words they use, and use your target audienceโs exact language in your content creation.
This will help you tell a story in which your target audienceย can relate. Maybe more important, tell the kind of stories they need to hear โย which is our next tip.
Leverage the Power of Storytelling
Another powerful way to capture your audienceโs emotional connectionย and impact their buying decisionsย is to use compelling stories that also reflect back their emotions.
From pain pointsย to the moment of relief, try to tap into your target audienceโs emotions at every stage of the story.
This can be a super powerful way to connect with your audience, given that messages delivered as stories are up to 22x more memorableย than facts.
For a skeleton storytelling frameworkย to follow, consider the classic narrative arc, which goes something like this:
- Setting and characters
- Tension and conflict
- Climax
- Resolution
- New normal
The โnew normalโ being, of course, highlighting the positive emotionsย that come with partaking in your offer.
Of all the emotional marketing strategies, storytelling is one thatโs very effective in eliciting an emotional response from your target audience.
[Tweet “Of all the emotional marketing strategies, storytelling is one thatโs very effective in eliciting an emotional response from your target audience.”]
Particularly, if you go the cinematic route and produce videos in your content marketing.
Founder of Billy Gene Is Marketing, Billy Gene, takes his storytelling to another level and produces mock mini-movies to boost his brand awareness.
In his marketing campaign videos, he turns his staff into temporary actors for the day while shooting video, like in this Wolf of Paid Advertisingย marketing video that mimics The Wolf of Wall Streetย blockbuster flick.
Of course, your storytelling doesnโt have to be as dramatic as Billy Geneโs, and your digital marketing content doesnโt have to be in video format, either.
Storytelling can be used in your pocket of copywriting skills, too.
Just check out how well Joanna Wiebe lays out the storyline plot at the top of her 10x Emailsย sales page, selling her online course.
From her headlines to her description, she uses storytelling to move you from a โMontreal cafรฉ on a Sunday morningโ scene, to planning, writing, and optimizing โemails that get results worth bragging about.โ
The storytelling evokes an emotional responseย of relief and positivity in the end. If youโre trying to convert new customers, yours should do the same.
Use Emotionally Supportive Colors and Imagery
This oneโs more of a subliminal layer, but itโs also a powerful way to evoke the right emotional responseย from your visual content.
Use color psychologyย to trigger positive emotionsย from your audience. If youโre wondering how colors impact emotional responseย and buying decisions, look to colorology, which is basically a list of emotions evoked by colors. This includes:
- Red: action, energy, passion, warmth, intensity, bold
- Orange: happy, energetic, stimulation, pleasure, warmth
- Yellow: positivity, fun, happiness, laughter, cheer, frustration
- Green: natural, money, health, envy, prosperity, luck
- Blue: trust, power, loyal, success, purpose, calmness, cold
- Purple: royalty, wealth, wise, respect, mystery, success
- Pink: creativity, femininity, intuition, gratitude, love, romance
Visually, hereโs a nice chart that also sums up the psychology of colors:
These associations vary a bit across sources and definitely by cultures. The tactical tip here is to use the colors of the emotions that you want to portray in your content.
Beyond colors, itโs also important toย consider the emotional weight behind images during your content creation.
Ask yourself, โAm I using imagesย that evoke relevant emotions to my target audience within their awareness stage?โ
For instance, you can evoke a sense of wonder with animation or scenic imagery, like this Instagram video postย by TravelAwesome.
Positive emotions, like joy, can be created with images of happy and smiling people, like in this Warby Parker Instagram post.
The same concept applies to all your visual content, regardless of the format or channel distribution. Given that the brain processes images 60,000 times fasterย than words, itโs vital that your imagery and colors are making the right emotional connectionย with your target audience.
This will help bolster the point youโre trying to get across with words in your copy โย just like our final content marketingย pointer.
Highlight Social Proof in Your Content
Our final tip today is to center your content creationย around social proof.
Regardless of the format, if your audience feels an emotional connectionย to other customers who have โbeen thereโ and โdone thatโ, theyโll feel reassured they can also achieve the desired outcome by using your product.
Itโs no wonder a staggering 92% of customersย read online reviews before they make buying decisions.
Itโs also no surprise that customer testimonials score the highest in effectiveness for content marketing, at 89%.
The point is to feature testimonials and reviews wherever possible and appropriate, whether itโs directly on your site, like at the bottom of Billy Gene Is Marketingโs homepage:
Or on a podcastย page, like this one on Amy Porterfieldโs podcastย pageย below episode #266:
In a sales email, like this one I received from Dan Henry, that features a testimonial videoย of his successful student, Victoria:
Even featuring a testimonial quote and review in social mediaย ads works wonders, like this Darren Hardy Facebook ad, for example.
The moral here is to demonstrate in your piece of contentย the idea that your target audience member is not alone, others have been there before them, and you can help solve their problems.
On that note, no matter what format your content creationย takes on, the underlying theme is a simple, but pivotal, one:
Make sure empathy is at the root of it all.
Use Empathy as the Foundation for All Your Content Marketingย Formats
With a significant 42% of Americansย who say theyโve refused to purchase products from non-empathetic companies, youโll be ahead of the curve by simply using emotionsย the right way inย your marketing campaigns.
If youโre wondering which emotions are likely to make content go viral, generally, the most popular emotionsย in content marketingย are awe, laughter, amusement, and joy.
Of course, that doesnโt mean you should appeal to these emotions in every marketing message of every piece of content, if youโre going for virality.
Your content creation shouldย tap into the specific emotions your target audienceย feels in their particular pain pointsย and relief points.
The more you can use empathy in your content creation, the more accurately youโll connect with your target audience, and, in turn, increase sales.
Even if itโs a pain pointย youโre trying to agitate, let your audience know you have empathy for their negative emotions,ย and you can lead them to their desired positive emotions.
This will nudge their decision-makingย and push them to trust your brand as the solution.
At the end of the day, trust is the crux of any good decision โย especially the ones that have staying power.
Elicit the Right Emotional Responses
Focusing your content creation on evoking emotions that support your target audience will work wonders for your business. Thatโs especially true if you use empathy as the foundation for making an emotional connection with your target audience.
Five emotional marketing strategies to help you achieve this empathy in your content creation are:
- Create a safe space for your target audience to be heard, and for their emotions to be taken seriously.
- Conduct market research to find key phrases and language that your audience uses. Then, reflect their verbiage back to them in your content creation.
- Use the power of storytelling to let your target audience know you understand their emotions, from pain point to point of relief.
- Design your graphic assets using colors and images that trigger emotions matching those of your target audience.
- Use testimonials, reviews, and social proof to assure your target audience their emotions are shared and resolved by real customers.
Ready to emotionally connect with your target audience? Your target audience and their emotions eagerly await your next piece of content.
The post How to Emotionally Support Your Customers Through Content appeared first on CoSchedule Blog.