How do you get someone to do something? You make an appeal to their emotions. If you can evoke a feeling or emotion in a person, that's a powerful thing, and they're much more likely to listen to you. If you can do this in your business's digital marketing, your target audience may be like putty in your hands.
Creating a marketing or advertising campaign that appeals to your audience's emotions is much easier said than done. Let's walk through a few emotions that make people want to buy, and how you can work to evoke those emotions in your marketing.
1. Happy
If something makes someone feel overwhelmingly happy, he or she wants more of that feeling. Studies have shown that positive posts are shared and engaged with much more often than negative ones, proving that people enjoy feel-good content.
Associating your brand with smiling people having a good time or people using your product/service to create an improvement in their lives is a great way to make people happy when seeing your content. Happiness is also associated with instant gratification. If your content and your marketing campaigns are making people happy, they want that feeling to continue. They don't want those endorphins to go away.
So they're going to click the purchase button to keep their happiness going and be excited about your product making its way to them, so they can be happy just like the people in your marketing.
2. Sad
There aren't a lot of times that you want to make someone feel sad. However, for non-profits and companies that work to make a social difference, evoking the feeling of sadness in people is a great way to get them to take action. Content and ads that are inspirational or moving are increasingly popular, and they work.
If you're looking to make a real connection with your audience and get them to take action that can make a difference in someone's life, creating content that shows sadness is another's life or creating a cinematic tragic video can really help with your campaign.
3. Fear
Fear is another emotion that can cause someone to take action now. This also works well for non-profits and businesses trying to create change. Showing people what can happen in the future if they don't take action now can be frightening, and a lot of companies take advantage of this type of marketing ploy.
This type of tactic is used by many non-profits, like ones who are trying to get you to stop smoking, trying to prevent drunk driving, working to prevent climate change, protecting endangered species, and much more. People are afraid of a future that is different than their present, so a fear tactic can certainly work in your business's favor.
Another newer way to evoke this emotion is with "FOMO," or "fear of missing out." This has gained popularity with Millennials and Gen Z who care more about experiences than things. They never want to miss an invite to something cool. If you can create a FOMO effect with your audience, you'll be able to generate even more sales and event attendees.
4. Belonging
Everyone wants to feel like they belong to something, whether it's a movement, a group of friends, or some type of community. If you create a feeling of belonging when someone uses your product or service, it can be really powerful for your audience. Creating a community feel surrounding your business can seriously improve the overall feeling and emotion toward your business/brand.
You can use your marketing or advertising campaigns to create the feel of a community, or you can use online resources to create an actual community surrounding your business. By creating a Facebook Group or Slack Community, you can cultivate a place where your customers can actually communicate with other customers and with your business directly.
5. Anger
Anger is another negative emotion that many businesses tend to want to stay away from. However, like sadness and fear, it can also evoke the actions you want, if done correctly. For example, it makes us angry to see an injustice happen to someone, and it makes us want to do something to stop it. Humans want to share something that makes them angry.
So how do you go about inserting scenes and messages that strike a chord with your audience's emotions in a way that makes sense for your business, and doesn't turn people off from your product/service?
Start with a customer profile.
To make sure you correctly identify with the emotions of your target audience, you need to know with absolute certainty who your audience is. If done incorrectly, you can evoke the wrong emotion, causing mistrust and negative feelings about your business.
Focus on your audience's pain points.
What is it that makes your audience feel things? What do they care about most? What do they want to change? What makes them smile? Who do they want to help in life? Focus on these pain points when pinning down your marketing messaging. You need to find something that your audience genuinely cares about, but you also need to make sure it makes sense with your product/service.
For example, a tampon company creates a #LikeAGirl campaign to focus on how misleading that phrase has become, and how to rewrite it in a way that focuses on female empowerment. An environmental company creates frightening and disturbing images and graphics of what the world could look like if we don't take action on climate change. A company that targets moms shares a campaign focusing on children's emotions.
Find something that your audience cares about that still relates to your business and use that in your marketing messaging to appeal to emotions. Contact us to learn more about how to improve your overall messaging in your digital marketing.
Written By: David Carpenter
