Emotional Marketing – The Emotional Campaign

It's time to put SEO and search expertise down for a second and take a few moments to reflect. No, this isn't a meditation session for online marketers. This is about learning how to use the most powerful tool known to mankind. It's all about emotions – an essential element in any content marketing campaign.

How it Works

It’s a simple fact of consumer psychology. Brand loyalty is much more a question of emotional attachment than it has to do with cold product facts. Did you buy that six pack of Coca-Cola after reading the ingredients, for example, or after watching the comforting advert with the Christmas polar bears? The more you can reach out to your customers’ emotions, the greater chance you’ll have of enjoying their loyalty.

Target Audience Triggers

For emotional marketing to work, you have to know your target audience well. Why do they need you? Once you know what motivates your consmer base, you can use this to guide your emotional trigger campaign. This means ensuring your customers associate your products with the state-of-being they want to achieve. If you’re marketing a dating site, for example, pictures of happy couples and successful love stories will be significantly more effective than tales of woe and broken hearts.

No one Likes to Be Alone

Brand loyalty ensures that consumers feel like they’re part of something. Oftentimes a product isn’t purchased, rather a lifestyle choice. Targeting your content to address a shared experience can also help in securing this feeling of belonging. Try and connect your product with appropriate common experiences. Remember, too, that long-running successful campaigns can even reflect on their own past successes and target entire generations in one campaign.

Keep It Positive

Mostly.

Provocative content and articles which arouse feelings of anger and rage are bound to go viral. Making your readers angry is a strategy to be used with extra care – remember it’s important that customers associate your products with positive emotions. Before you go out provoking your readership, you have to ensure your customers won’t associate your products with these feelings of rage. Make sure your products are offered as the solution to the anger.

Happily Ever After

There’s nothing quite as satisfying as a happy end. Sadly, not everyone will stick with your content to the end – no matter how emotionally provocative it might be. With this in mind, make sure your emotional marketing campaign combines the right words with the most appropriate pictures. And here, it’s important to emphasise the pictures have to be appropriate. Pictures of kittens are cute, but unless you’re selling cat food, you should probably find something more suitable.

Emotions are a powerful tool and should be a part and parcel of every online marketer’s content strategy.