Emotional Marketing: What Is It and How to Use It in Your Brand Strategy

Marketing is not just about promoting products or services, it's also about connecting with your audience on an emotional level. Emotional marketing is a powerful strategy that leverages the emotions of consumers to create a deeper connection with your brand.

By tapping into the emotions of your audience, you can create a sense of trust and loyalty, which can ultimately lead to increased conversions and sales. In this article, we will explore the concept of emotional marketing, its benefits and how to use it in your brand strategy.

What are emotions?

They are the engine that moves society, that humanizes human beings... And people love to buy from humans!

Why should you value emotions in marketing? When entrepreneurs analyze user behaviors on social networks, the first thing they notice is the number of conversations about their brands, as well as any positive or negative comments that may exist. But, for a more in-depth analysis of how your audience behaves, it's necessary to go a little further and determine the emotions that users feel when they share their opinions. That’s the foundation of an emotional marketing strategy!

Knowing how your audience responds to emotional stimuli pushes you towards an action (a purchase, subscription, awareness, etc.) and the right action with the right emotion will help your brand to be different.

Covering the affective needs of our public

Humans are more emotional than rational beings, and we love telling stories and remembering experiences and moments, and a successful brand must understand that meeting the affective needs of its consumers is one of its main objectives.

That’s when emotional marketing comes in. Achieving an effective bond with customers (and potential customers) is the key to make them feel the brand as their own and create a message that hits their subconscious minds appealing to their more human side.

What are the pillars of emotional marketing?

• Brand-consumer bond. You must think that without the brand-consumer bond, emotional marketing would be non-existent. That relationship or emotional bond is the one that makes people live the experience of your brand. And smart brands will know how to take advantage of customer’s feedback to generate a marketing strategy that meets the emotional needs of its customers because they also buy the emotions the brand conveys. Just take a look at the videos of Lego and the emotional marketing campaigns they launch to attract more customers.‍
• Experiences, sensations and emotions. You must make a difference with valuable content for your followers, users, consumers and customers. What people really want is to know what’s behind the brand, its story, challenges, experiences, etc. So, your advertising efforts must make them live the sensations of your brand. It’s a matter of humanizing your brand and showing that you are more than a seller. In addition, it is vital to believe in the philosophy of the brand in order to transmit and communicate its true essence to its consumers.‍
• Lovemark. A lovemark is making people fall in love with your brand. Great brands are those that create great relationships with the consumer beyond the product and going one step further is essential since it’s not enough to be different, innovative or attractive, but the brand must have the purpose of making the consumer fall in love with you.‍
• Content marketing. Content marketing focuses on planning, creating and sharing attractive, educational and coherent content with your audience. Also, content marketing helps you understand what your users want. Thanks to content marketing you create content and based on your audience’s comments, you can adapt your content to make it more interesting, valuable and emotional.‍
• Branded content. Branded content refers to quality content created by a brand to transmit an experience to its users. It means generating content linked to your brand that allows you to connect with your audience. In other words, you’ll be consolidating your audience’s loyalty generating valuable content, capable of transmitting emotions and building a community of fans around your brand. So, branded content is a valuable tool to make your brand gain more notoriety and more people will identify themselves with your products and services, being the best ambassadors and defenders of your brand.

For great brands to survive, they need to create loyalty beyond reason. That's the only way they'll be able to differentiate themselves from the millions of dull brands with no future. The secret is using some sense of intimacy to make a real connection. Don't forget that the competition is just one click away.

Characteristics of emotional marketing campaigns

Here are the main characteristics of emotional marketing:

• It has more impact by awakening diverse feelings in our psyche. In fact, it causes a long-lasting effect and a high degree of empathy.
• It awakens a great interaction in the different digital communication channels.
• It improves the image of the brand. Working the emotional part is a plus for any business.
• It strengthens the bond with customers and your satisfaction as well. It goes to a higher degree as there are emotional implications.
• The message penetrates deeper into the client and lasts longer. You can repeat the purchase. These options mean a greater possibility of generating more sales.

Brands communicate their personality through their storytelling, their packaging, their "voice", in other words, the type of communication they carry out on social media and how they describe themselves and their products/services.

It's a matter of building a brand personality and seeing the impact your brand has on people's minds through images, videos and words, but also by the behavior of your brand. Now that you know what emotional marketing is about we’ll give you some practical tips to apply in your business.

What is storytelling and how can it generate more traffic to your website?

Narratives, or stories have an incredible power to attract attention. It is probably an anthropological question: stories fascinate us and have a power of attraction that is difficult to overcome by other techniques, and today, that technology allows us to share content with high emotional value, you can connect with your target with greater intensity.

Storytelling relates to video since this is the preferred means of telling stories. But storytelling has multiple formats and different channels, this means that texts, photographs or audios, are just as valid for creating successful and effective storytelling strategies.

What is the secret? No matter the format your storytelling strategy should contain the following characteristics:

• Tell a story that is convincing, effective and, above all, that engages and excites our audience, appealing to their feelings.
• The story has to cause shock and surprise (WOW effect).
• It is also important to communicate something relevant and with a certain degree of originality.
• The message you launch should reflect experience, it cannot be a cliché and automatic slogan.
• The story must have a moral, it must teach something.
• An outline or script that works very well is to focus the story on a hero or heroine who has a problem and manages to solve it.

If you really want to make a good story that catches attention, include these elements in your narrative and you'll see how the bond between your audience and you gets stronger.

Some keys for attracting more traffic with storytelling

To ensure the greatest effectiveness of storytelling in terms of attracting traffic, it is important that you consider the following keys:

• Create an omnichannel strategy. It is important that the storytelling content is not only on the blog, but also on social networks to increase its visibility and, if possible, make it go viral. Check out this article on Why an Omnichannel Experience is a Must.
• Align the storytelling with the rest of the online marketing or inbound marketing strategy. Although it is a different content due to its narrative approach, storytelling must have points in common with the rest of the content that makes up the strategy: it has to be valuable content that helps users solve their problems and creates a brand image (branding).
• Involve the audience. You can do it in an active way: through comments and intense feedback, so your audience will express their opinions and say whether or not they like the story. 

Now it’s time to create your own strategy!

We shared with you some basics to help you get started creating your own emotional marketing strategy. In short, follow these steps and you’ll have a successful emotional marketing campaign:

• Study your target: The first step in developing an emotional marketing strategy is knowing your target perfectly. Do you know what your customers' tastes are? Could you tell us what your customers value the most about your company? What do they expect from your brand? These are some key questions that you should know before continuing with the process of implementing emotional marketing in your brand.
• Choose a value, feeling or emotion: After studying your customers, you must classify the values and feelings that stand out the most about your brand. For instance, if you sell ecological products, you probably value respect for the environment. So, evaluate feelings such as love, trust, security, friendship, family, nature ... and analyze what feelings match with your brand. 
• Apply the value or feeling in your communication strategy: Once you have selected the feeling that you think is the ideal one, let customers associate your brand with it. This way, you’ll increase the bond with them emotionally and remember to create an attractive slogan that contains that word or even, a series of short videos that can make your audience feel your value. Videos that really put their emotions on the surface will consistently get you loyalty and love from your customers.
• Build a relationship of trust through the stories of your clients: Create your marketing campaigns with stories of your satisfied customers, this way, your audience will see that they can trust your brand because other people have already done it and are happy. Reviews, testimonials or stories work very well to generate loyalty towards a brand, if you use them for your marketing strategy, you will see how they help other people decide to get your products/services because they want to feel just as "happy" than users who give their testimonials and who have already tried them. 
• Check the effectiveness of your emotional marketing campaign: If you studied your clients and classified their values ​​and feelings you want to offer and share them. Check the comments, has it served any purpose? Do they like the videos? All this effort would be useless if the client didn't understand the message, if the client does not associate your brand with that emotion you have to start all over again and create a new story with the feedback of your audience.

Make these strategies valuable for you!

If you focus on adding emotions to your content, your audience will feel your brand and you will take a step forward in the purchase process because they will visualize the satisfaction of having bought your products.

Finally, check the effectiveness of your emotional marketing campaign. Has it served any purpose? All this effort would be useless if your customers didn't get the message,  and they don't associate your brand with emotions. Ask and study if this campaign had an effect, have you managed to retain your customers and attract new ones through the emotional bond?

Don’t lose the opportunity of taking advantage of emotional marketing. And if you're looking for more content and stay with us and check out our articles here!