10 Secrets of Emotional Marketing for Building a Loyal Brand Following
New research has shown that digital marketing has recently surpassed non-digital marketing in revenue generated. However, no matter what medium you’re using to advertise, you need to make sure you’re using emotional branding to build your brand.
Many businesses don’t make use of emotional marketing, and so don’t take off the way that they could. By making use of emotional branding, a business becomes part of a person and builds lifelong fans.
This article will walk you through some of the best ways you can make your marketing emotional.
1. Get Specific
This is less of a secret and more of a guiding principle for the rest of the secrets on the list.
The key to people’s hearts is making them feel like you’re talking to them individually. If you shoot for a general audience, all of your messaging is going to come off as bland and generic. Bland, generic messages might affect people’s minds, but will never make it’s way into their hearts.
No matter which tip you follow on this list, make sure you do it in a way that no one else has done before. Another one of the easiest ways to stomp out emotional connection is to rip off another advertising campaign.
2. Know Your Audience
If you want to get through to your audience on an emotional level, you’re going to have to stop viewing them as just “your audience”. You need to get to know these people as a specific group. What are their likes, dislikes, what sort of advertising do they prefer, what do they do on their time off?
Know who they are, and you’ll be better at targeting their emotions.
3. Use Humor
The realm of emotion isn’t all intense — it’s not all about sentimentality, sympathy, anger, or companionship. Bouyant emotions, characterized by laughter, are just as important.
When you’re advertising, you’re reaching out to strangers. Sometimes, you need to use a bit of humor to break the ice.
Crack some jokes in your ads, and you’re more likely to take your customers by the hearts.
4. Use Irony
But sometimes, humor isn’t enough. The humor of generation Z is famously different from the humor of generations before it. Even generation X and the millennials have a distinctly different sense of humor than the Baby Boomers.
This sense of humor is heavily based on irony. Some of the best, and most emotionally relevant, ads in the 21st century have made use of irony.
One of the most famous examples of this is the iconic Old Spice “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” advertisement. This ad seeks to poke fun at ads while at the same time legitimately selling a product.
This sort of recognition of the form is very popular amongst younger people and will help them relate emotionally. They know you’re selling something to them in the first place; pretending that you aren’t, and using old-school TV knows best style of advertising feels patronizing. So why not acknowledge the fact that you’re advertising with a little joke about it?
5. Define Your Aesthetic
People are more likely to feel emotions towards something that they recognize. Building an aesthetic is all about coming up with a language — a visual, audio, and textual language — that defines you from other businesses.
You’re not going to get many people interested in you emotionally if you’re just another faceless business. However, if your ads can provide something aesthetically pleasing, people will want to invest in you.
6. Tell A Story
You only have to see a simple breakdown of screenplay structure to see that storytelling is baked into the human brain. Many of our favorite stories follow the same beats, arcs, and forms.
Study story structure, and you’re far more likely to resonate with people emotionally. At the end of the day, even the most mysterious and complicated stories often have old-school structures to them.
7. Interact Directly
Get on social media, so that you can interact with your customers directly. If you post quality content on social media, people will leave comments explaining how they feel, and might even DM you with questions.
Responding to these people personally and individually is key to getting through to them on an emotional level.
8. Show You Care
Do you care about social issues? Are there certain things that you do that have a positive impact on the world? Are you an honest worker in an industry that’s rife with corruption?
To reach people emotionally, let them know the good you’re doing. We understand how this could feel like bragging, but if you handle it correctly, it won’t come off as such.
9. Tell Your History
It’s easy for people to view your business as a cold, impersonal machine. This is especially true if you’ve developed a degree of success.
To humanize yourself, stay humble about your origins. Have the history of your business readily available for public consumption. Let people know just how long you took to develop, and show them every step of the way.
Just look at the marketing tactics of joy dish soap. Their site displays each year of their development, allowing you to see how they grew up.
10. Adapt
One of the defining traits of emotions is that they’re constantly changing. As developments happen in the world, shifts in culture occur, and pop trends emerge and die, people’s emotions are going to fluctuate.
Make sure you’re constantly adapting and shifting yourself along with the culture; this way, you’ll stay on top of their emotions and keep yourself relevant.
Understand Emotional Marketing
Emotional marketing is the key to turning your business from another faceless company into a brand.
If you want people to recognize your business and fall in love with it, you need to get specific about your marketing, know your audience well, make them laugh, make use of irony, define you’re aesthetic, tell a story, interact with them directly, show them you care about causes, tell your brand’s story, and constantly adapt.
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