Why Is Emotion Important to your Digital Marketing – Authentic, Real, and Human Emotion

Happiness and joy. Sadness and tears. Anger and frustration. Emotions invoke a response. They motivate action. When we build marketing on emotion, it connects!

Think about it. The most meaningful purchases a person makes are based on emotion. The products, brands, and companies we connect with most deeply on are an emotional level.

Emotion is in the art of storytelling. A brand tells a story and it humanizes them. Even a customer who might not see value or who may not understand how a product relates to them can connect with an emotional story.

This article will help you build emotional storytelling that allows your brand to connect to target consumers.

What is emotional marketing?

It’s easier for digital marketing to be successful when you’re using storytelling themes and emotions. This is because emotional marketing is designed to motivate an audience to do four things – notice, remember, share, and buy. These 4 KPIs are how we measure whether such a campaign is working or not.

What are the best emotions to use in emotional marketing?

The four basic emotions used in communications are happy, sad, angry, and fear. That said, emotions exist on a spectrum. Here are more emotions – more specific ones – that can help you gain some insight into how to structure your marketing.

 Admiration.
 Adoration.
 Amusement.
 Anxiety.
 Awkwardness.
 Boredom.
 Calmness.
 Craving.
 Disgust.
 Excitement.
 Horror.
 Interest.
 Joy.
 Nostalgia.
 Relief.
 Romance.
 Satisfaction.
 Surprise.

One will find not every emotion resonates with a given audience. Emotional storytelling only resonates when you’re speaking directly to your audience.

Who is your digital marketing target audience?

Every brand has a target audience. Who is yours? To determine what emotion is most likely to produce a response, you must know who your audience is.

Look to your favourite brands for inspiration. We all like brands that are an extension of our style, personality, or identity. Mirroring a customer’s lifestyle with an emotional story, this is what loyalty is built on.

How will my customers know what I’m selling if I’m just telling stories?

The audience isn’t stupid. McDonald’s commercials are never selling Big Macs and fries. They advertise customer stories, from young people to parents, families, university students, and children. Coke and Pepsi take the same approach.

Some might say, those brands are different. They’re established. People already know what they’re selling. You’re right. Your cue to the product or service may need to be more obvious. It doesn’t have to be the centerpiece though. You don’t have to beat your audience over the head with what you’re selling – this is key.

How do I inspire action with emotional digital marketing?

Emotions can be negative or positive. Anger is negative. Joy is positive. Sadness is negative. Ideally, you want to steer clear of negativity. It doesn’t serve a purpose in helping you derive a response that benefits your brand.

This doesn’t mean though that you can’t have emotionally-driven digital marketing that’s angry, frustrated, or sad. If you’re going to go there though, spin it into a positive. If your marketing’s supposed to be angry or sad, give your consumer an action to cure the negative emotion or inspire positive action.

For example, ‘x’ makes me angry. If we did ‘y’, we can change ‘x’. If you do ‘y’ right now, you won’t ever have to worry about ‘x’ again.

Negativity is a tough tone to take. It’s something every brand will want to be careful with. You don’t need negativity, anger, or sadness for an emotional story. You don’t want your brand associated with negativity. Always ensure your marketing’s focused on positives or positives derived from negatives.

What’s the most popular type of emotional digital marketing?

Inclusive, inspiring digital marketing is the most popular emotional content. Audiences love inclusion. They want to feel inspired. The best marketing is future-forward and shares stories of perseverance, accomplishment, talent, and objective-driven behaviour.

A great way to inspire is by doing something positive for society. Is your brand connected to a charity – if so, make it known. If the environment is your passion, consider using ‘cause-based marketing’. This is when you market your brand as connected to a social cause. Donating a percentage of sales or using fair-trade ingredients in a food item are examples.

You want your customers to feel good about giving you their money. If they know they’re contributing to goodwill, locally or in greater society, that’s a good thing. This further connects a brand emotionally to the customer.

When it doubt, love

Love is represented in digital marketing in a big way. Love is emotion and arguably the most common. Consider how the following examples can be worked into your emotional digital marketing campaign.

 Your first romantic love in high school.
 The love between grandparents who’ve been together for decades.
 The love between parents who are so busy taking care of the kids they’ve forgotten to show each other affection.
 Love towards a pet.
 Love towards one’s self.
 Love towards a friend, giving them a hug and helping them through a tough time.
 Unconditional love from a parent to a child.

Identify your audience persona. To some degree, we’re all driven by love. Create content that gives love back to the customer. Remind them of the love they have. Represent the way they love in a way they might not think about. Love is a very positive and powerful emotion to work your digital marketing around, and is arguably the safest bet to place on emotional-driven content.

Have you structured your digital marketing around common milestones?

The universal experience of being human. Your target audience has had several common happenings between them. Use these common milestones in emotion-driven storytelling marketing.

 First kiss.
 First date.
 Graduating from high school or university.
 Your first day of school.
 Job interview.
 Getting married.
 Being let go.
 Job promotion.
 Getting the cold or flu.
 Disagreeing with our parents.
 Birthdays and anniversaries.
 Feeling stressed.
 Grocery shopping.
 Feeling tired and in want of sleep.
 Sexual desire.

Focusing on common human experiences taps into memory, nostalgia, and real events your audience can relate to.

In life, we all face a set of trials and tribulations. Use these to your advantage. Celebrate them. Celebrate being a human being! This takes a brand further away from being seen as a corporation or business and represents something meaningful.

More reasons to use real, authentic emotions in digital marketing

As if you didn’t already have enough motivation to play on emotions in digital marketing messaging, here are some facts, statistics, and info about emotional marketing we think you’ll want to know.

 The part of the brain that processes emotions does so in 20% of the time it takes for information to be processed cognitively.

 Brands using marketing ads that have an ‘above average emotional response’ see an average 23 percent increase in sales.

 Emotional storytelling plays a key role in viral videos and social media posts. It’s been described by researchers as a ‘deciding factor in virality’.

 Consumers emotionally connected to a brand are worth twice the value than the average customer.

 When a consumer has a positive emotional association with a brand, they are 8.4 times more likely to trust them, 7.1 times more likely to purchase more, and 6.6 times more likely to forgive a company mistake i.e. customer service, delivery time, etc.

Make your audience react. That’s where emotion comes into play. Emotions are like colors. Marketing needs color. Otherwise, you’re working in black-and-white and in this day and age, that’s plain boring. Are you looking for results-driven digital marketing in Toronto? Contact Unlimited Exposure today.