The average consumer is bombarded daily with countless messages seeking to persuade them to make a purchase. These messages often aim to appeal to logic, which operates under the assumption that choice results from rational thought when, in reality, emotions matter a great deal.
With most of your competitors following the same strategy, how do you stand out? You may need to appeal to human emotion and employ an emotional marketing strategy to truly connect with your audience.
But before you do, you should know that not all emotional advertising campaigns are created equal. To make your emotional marketing strategy more effective, you need to understand human emotion from a consumer standpoint. That way, you can be sure that the tactics you employ resonate with customers.
So before we explore how to use emotions in marketing, let’s first dive into the human psyche and find out how emotions affect decision-making.
How Emotions Play a Role in Decision-Making
The human brain has two parts that influence everyday decisions: the rational brain and the emotional brain. Contrary to popular belief, emotion actually drives reason more than reason drives emotion – especially when it comes to consumer choices.
On Psychology Today, Dr. Peter Murray shares a few studies that highlight the influence emotions have over consumer behavior. We summarized these studies as follows:
• Consumers evaluate brands through emotion instead of using just facts.
• Emotions in advertising have more influence over buyer intent than emotional ads’ content.
• An ad’s likeability can be used to predict whether emotional ads contribute to a brand’s sales.
• Positive emotions can foster loyalty better than evaluating a brand through facts or its attributes.
The human brain is hardwired to respond to emotional cues. It’s a primal instinct that may have even played an important role in human survival. Today, marketers have harnessed this instinct by using emotions in advertising campaigns to make them more memorable, relatable and compelling.
“Marketers understand how connecting with the deeper emotional desires of a consumer can result in a loyal customer,” said Thrive’s Strategy Development Manager Jimi Gibson. “By understanding this concept, digital marketers craft messages that present information [that appeal to both emotion and logic].”
Today, we’ll teach you how to harness the power of emotional marketing and emotional advertising to positively impact your lead generation and conversion rate optimization strategies.
What Is Emotional Marketing?
So, what is emotional marketing anyway? An emotional marketing strategy employs tactics that elicit an emotional response from your target audience and connect with them. By using emotions in marketing materials, like emotional ads, you can encourage consumers to perform the desired action, such as:
• Buying a product
• Subscribing to a service
• Following your social media channel
• Signing up for a newsletter
• Making a donation
The key term to remember here is that marketing emotional appeal is “deliberate,” but it is by no means manipulative. Instead, it’s a means to connect with your target audience more deeply, leaving a lasting impression.
We’ve answered the question What is emotional marketing? So let’s go ahead and answer: What is emotional advertising and are they the same? Fundamentally, they are both the same because they apply the same strategy. Later, our digital marketing agency will share with you emotional appeal in advertising examples.
Why Emotional Marketing Works
Today, the average consumer is exposed to 4,000 to 10,000 brand messages each day thanks to the power of the internet and digital media. Yet, consumers can only recall less than 2 percent of those ads – and even fewer recipients resonate with the advertising messages presented to them. So when an appeal to logic proves ineffective, an appeal to emotion could perhaps get people to pay attention.
Certain emotions can motivate us to perform certain actions. In a piece called The Science of Emotion in Marketing: How Our Brain Decides What to Share and Whom To Trust, Buffer explores how the four basic human emotions make us respond in different ways:
• Happiness makes us want to share. When we feel joyful, we feel that joy multiplies when it is shared, which is why it is the main driver for social sharing.
• Sadness makes us more generous. The brain releases a hormone called oxytocin, which promotes connection and empathy. Research shows that those under the influence of the hormone gave more to charity than those who weren’t.
• Fear makes us feel more attached. People who experience fear want to share the experience with others or will want to cling to something. That’s why fear can stimulate people to feel more attached to a brand.
• Anger makes us more stubborn. Online, anger can make people want to stick to their convictions, which explains how anger can increase social sharing, which helps some content easily go viral.
Successfully harnessing the power of these emotions and how they can elicit certain responses from consumers is key to a successful emotion marketing strategy. In the next section, we’ll teach you how to leverage the powers of emotion in marketing for your lead generation and CRO strategy.
Harnessing the Emotions Used in Advertising for Lead Generation and Conversion Rate Optimization
1. Begin by understanding your audience.
Using emotion in marketing is very helpful in lead generation and conversion rate optimization. But to improve your likelihood of success, you must first understand your target audience. Knowing who your audience is and what makes them tick is crucial in determining how best to elicit a response that works for both you and them.
Perform a thorough analysis of your target audience. If you’re unsure how to do it, employ an experienced digital marketing company or seek the assistance of digital marketing experts who can do it for you. What’s important here is that you are able to identify their pain points or preferences, which you can use later in determining the best emotions used in advertising that resonate with them.
2. Find the right angle by learning from these emotional marketing examples.
The next step is figuring out how to reach and elicit a response from your target audience. Generally speaking, there are five major psychological triggers that you can use. Here they are with some real-world emotional advertising examples that succeeded in marketing emotional appeal.:
• Sense of Belongingness
Everyone has a need to belong to a certain group. Campaigns run by sports and fitness brands are some of the best emotional advertising examples by using ads that satisfy this basic psychological need. But in particular, Apple’s Get a Mac campaign was masterful in making consumers want to be in the Mac group.
• Fear
Emotional appeal through fear can lead to great results but can quickly turn disastrous if not used correctly. But the World Wildlife Fund’s Stop Climate Change Before It Changes You campaign is one of those emotional marketing examples that succeeded in leveraging fear by showing the devastating effects of climate change.
• Guilt
An emotional appeal that stirs feelings of guilt could be one of the most effective ways to get leads and boost your CRO efforts, as people are more easily influenced by things that make them feel guilty. Some exceptional advertising examples of guilt include the Juicy Juice campaign about child nutrition and Edeka, a supermarket brand in Germany that wants you to come home to your family.
• Trust
Among all emotions used in marketing and advertising, trust is arguably the most powerful trigger, especially for online transactions. That’s why brands employ emotional advertising techniques. These include using customer testimonials, customer reviews and sharing personal testimonials to their ads for CRO. Some excellent emotional advertising examples include Fitbit and Nature Made.
• Sadness
Negative emotions like sadness can evoke a sense of empathy and compassion, as we mentioned above. They help drive awareness for various social issues like hunger, poverty and violence, among others. But when using sadness as a trigger, it’s important to strike a balance. Making it too light won’t make an impact, and making it too sad might make your audience upset. Here’s a perfect example from Jollibee, a restaurant chain in the Philippines.
3. Use emotional marketing examples to create campaigns that resonate with your audience.
When you understand your audience and know what emotions to use, you should apply that knowledge to start generating some leads. Using the emotional appeal in advertising examples shown above, you can start creating your own campaigns through the following techniques:
• Brand Storytelling
What is emotional advertising without storytelling? One of the best ways to appeal to your audience’s emotions is by engaging them through storytelling. People love hearing stories that keep them engaged with lovable characters, exciting plotlines or relatable themes. Whether you’re writing a blog or creating a video, telling a story that gets them riled up or makes them empathize with the story can bring your brand to life and inspire action from your audience.
• Sensory Marketing Through Creative Design
Sensory marketing and emotional marketing go hand in hand in eliciting emotions from your audience. Visually, the use of color psychology can enhance the emotional appeal of your marketing tactics through the creative use of different colors. For instance, blue can induce a calming effect while red causes stimulation. Sound also plays a significant role in sensory marketing. Complementing your visuals with the right music creates the right mood and enhances its emotional appeal further.
4. Authenticity is key.
Emotional advertising and marketing appeals directly to your audience’s human emotions. When looking at our emotional marketing examples earlier, you’ll see they all have one thing in common: they’re authentic, which is key to a successful emotional marketing campaign. You can’t appeal to your audience’s emotions while faking it because they’ll see right through that.
“Businesses need to realize that a potential customer is considering their company because they are, [above all], seeking a solution,” said Gibson. “Let them know they are important and you have a sincere desire to help them and you’ll be doing better than the majority of your competitors.”
Conclusion
Emotional marketing is a tricky yet effective strategy to apply to attract more leads to your business. Emotions are powerful triggers that can inspire action from your audience. Understand them, tell an engaging story and be authentic in your appeal to draw them in and turn them into paying customers.
If you’re unsure about how to apply the principles behind the emotional appeal in advertising examples shown in this guide, talk with digital marketing experts or a trusted digital marketing company like Thrive that offers digital marketing services. Experts can help you weave emotions into your marketing strategy and successfully attract and boost your CRO efforts.
As a client-centric digital marketing agency, Thrive can help you harness the power of emotion marketing to boost your lead generation efforts. Our digital marketing experts take the time to understand your target audience to successfully integrate emotions in advertising so you can generate results that matter through our digital marketing services. Give our digital marketing agency a call at 866-908-4748 or drop a message here to learn more about how our digital marketing services can help you.
