Customers don’t always make decisions based on careful consideration of a product’s features or benefits. Sometimes, it’s the story of your brand that drives the sale or an emotional connection that makes them go with their gut.
Emotion plays an important role in purchasing decisions. Building an emotional connection in marketing helps create trust and engagement with your customers. This, in turn, boosts long-term loyalty. With the power of emotions like happiness, empathy or nostalgia, you create memorable experiences that help increase your conversions, sales and customer retention.
It is said that 70% of consumer decisions are emotion-based, including brand preference. Yet emotional connections in advertising and the art of storytelling seem to be in decline as brands increasingly favour a purely data-driven, automation-heavy approach.
If devising marketing messages that resonate with your target audience feels like a lot of guesswork, Anchor Digital can make the process much clearer for you. A Brisbane-based full-service creative marketing agency, we approach creating an emotional connection in marketing with an analytical, data-driven strategy.
Why Building Emotional Connection in Marketing Is Important
While traditional marketing is about promoting the features and benefits of a product, emotion-based marketing focuses on crafting a brand identity and telling stories that elicit positive emotions. Positive brand experiences are built on emotions, and stirring up the right or wrong ones can make or break the success of a campaign. Focusing on an emotional connection in marketing isn’t just a short-term strategy, either. It’s also an approach you need to take if you want to keep your existing customers around.
The benefits of emotion-based marketing include:
Building emotional connections
Emotion-based marketing gives businesses the chance to humanise themselves, becoming more relatable by sharing their stories and values. This creates a deeper sense of understanding and trustworthiness.
Enhancing brand loyalty
When customers form positive associations with brands, they’re more likely to stay loyal over time and in the face of increased competition. It can even make them more ready to forgive minor missteps in the future. Of course, you have to understand the thoughts, feelings and motivations of your desired customers before you can create this level of connection.
Driving customer engagement
The more personally invested customers become in a brand’s story, the more likely they are to become part of it. The emotional connection compels them to talk about, share and recommend your content.
Enhanced customer satisfaction
Appealing to customers’ emotions makes every stage of the customer journey feel more personal and enjoyable. Emotion plays a major role in user experience (UX) design. By implementing storytelling, humour and your own unique personality into the interface that users engage with, you create experiences that influence the decision-making process in a positive way.
You don’t have to be a massive corporation to create a strong emotional bond with customers. Even small brands can tell stories, showcase their empathetic sides and understand what their potential customers are looking for.
A good campaign needs to incorporate emotional motivators as well.
Defining Emotional Motivators
Sometimes, we all want to feel important. Or chase a thrill. Or feel hopeful about the future.
We’ve all heard of influencers. However, emotional motivators can make the customer feel like they, rather than a social media celebrity, are the focus of attention. It’s no surprise that emotional motivators are so important for an emotional connection in advertising and marketing.
Emotional motivators are particular customer behavioural patterns—like the desire for feelings of excitement or importance—that drive purchasing decisions.
When Harvard Business Review realised the companies they were working with understood customers’ emotions were important but didn’t have a standardised guide to motivating factors, they set out to create one. Working with experts in social science and anthropology, HBR identified more than 300 emotional motivators. These included the desire to stand out in the crowd, to feel confident about the future, to experience thrills and to savour a sense of freedom.
Understanding the role emotional motivators play in creating an emotional connection in marketing is only the first step. Different products inspire and motivate customers in different ways, and not every motivating factor applies to your brand. That’s why it’s important to conduct in-depth research to find out what your customers are looking for and how you can appeal to them. Gathering both quantitative and qualitative data will help you understand the motives behind both their passion and their pain points.
Building Emotional Connection in Your Marketing Strategy
Here are some tips for how your own brand can build an emotional connection in marketing:
Understand your target audience
It’s important to focus on what’s important to your target audience: their joys and passions, goals and challenges. Conducting in-depth research into the data and behaviour of your demographic through analytics tools and surveys will give you a strong starting point.
Tell your stories
The right kind of narrative can take readers into your world and create a lasting emotional impact. Harnessing the power of storytelling means understanding what kind of stories your target demographic wants to hear and how you can resonate with them.
Show your authenticity
Being honest in your messaging and transparent in your business practice helps to showcase your brand identity and authenticity, as well as build your authority. Good storytelling, consistency in your messaging and values and a customer-centric approach all help to show the world how genuine you are.
Demonstrate your empathy
Empathy goes a long way in business and in life. In marketing, it means the potential to put yourself in your customers’ shoes and understand their needs from their perspective. You can demonstrate empathy by using language that your target audience will understand and connect with, demonstrating an accurate understanding of the challenges they face.
Share your values
Build a connection with your customers by focusing on your shared values and the things that unite you. Whether your values are caring for the environment, compassion, honesty or anything else, you can demonstrate this consistently through your messaging and communication.
Show your social impact
These days, your ethics and approach to sustainability matters to a lot of customers. You can display your commitment to renewal resources, partner with charities and relief efforts or even make activism part of your brand.
Use visual elements
Strong original visuals add another dimension to your storytelling and evoke a powerful emotional response in a matter of seconds.
Nurture your leads
While it’s important to attract new customers, retaining your existing ones makes a bigger difference in the long term. Regular customers should receive personalised communication from you.
Connect with community
Getting involved with local not-for-profits, clubs, or events can go a long way to building trust with the people of your area and making a name for yourself.
Build Your Brand with Anchor Digital
As a creative agency in Brisbane, Anchor Digital can help you get clear on who you are and what you have to offer and find the right audience for you to share that with. We’ll help you know and represent yourself better, so you have the tools and the blueprint for creating an emotional connection with your target audience.
Your creative assets need to reveal your brand identity, and the Anchor team can help you achieve this with our creative services. We’ll help you develop an authentic and compelling brand identity and make sure every brand element, from your logos to your colours, reflects you at your most genuine. We’ll also find out what kind of people would benefit most from your brand and work with you to create an emotional connection through advertising with them.
Storytelling is an essential part of connecting with your audience and an art form that has existed throughout the ages. But in the age of the Internet, a new approach is needed that helps you stand out from the crowd while building your brand authority in your field. Anchor is a content marketing agency that can help build your brand through websites, blog posts, social media posts, press releases and more. To find out more, contact the Anchor team.
