Buyers are bombarded with countless marketing messages every day. From ads to ABM campaigns to informational content marketing. The noise they have to weed through is real. It’s hard to capture an audience’s attention. But, emotional marketing is one powerful strategy that can help companies break through the noise. People – including B2B buyers are driven by emotion. Brands can create lasting connections, drive engagement, and ultimately boost their bottom line by tapping into that.
What we’ll cover
- What is emotional marketing
- The power of storytelling
- Consistency across channels
- Measuring success
- Overcoming fear and risk-aversion
- The role of understanding the target market
- Future importance of emotional marketing
What is emotional marketing?
Emotional marketing can forge deep, meaningful connections with buyers by appealing to their feelings, desires, and aspirations. That could include:
- wanting to get promoted
- being worried about getting fired
- the constant state of being overworked and needing to fix that
Marketing that draws on emotion seeks to create a strong, positive association between the brand and the customer’s emotional state.
As Bill Harper, Chief Creative Officer at BrandBoss HQ, explains on an episode of “Marketing, Demystified,” “People choose emotionally and justify logically. The problem is that companies try to skip that emotion part because it feels fuzzy to them.”
The power of storytelling
At the heart of emotional marketing lies storytelling. By crafting compelling stories, brands can create shared values, experiences, and aspirations. These stories help to humanize the brand, making it more relatable and memorable.
Jenn Mancusi, CEO and co-founder of Growgetter, emphasizes the importance of strategic storytelling: “I think people talk about storytelling and have been talking about storytelling for the last several years that I think it’s become a little bit of a buzzword and maybe has lost meaning in some ways.”
To create effective emotional marketing campaigns, businesses must first understand their audience’s needs, desires, and pain points. By conducting market research and gathering consumer insights, brands can identify the key emotions that drive their target audience’s decision-making process.
As Bill points out, “If you understand what this segment is struggling with, then you can tell a story that reflects how well you understand that, and that’s the game-changer for brands that become super successful.”
Once a brand has identified the emotions it wants to target, it can begin crafting marketing messages that speak directly to those feelings.
Read next: Humanizing Brands for Competitive Advantage – a chat with Emma Borochoff
Key elements of a story
To truly leverage storytelling for emotional impact, marketers must master the key elements that make stories compelling and memorable. Here’s how to do that, according to storytelling expert Paul Smith on “Marketing, Demystified:”
Structure
Paul recommends following an 8-question story structure:
- Why the audience should listen
- When and where it took place
- Who the main character is
- What they wanted
- The problem/opportunity they faced
- What they did about it
- How it turned out
- The lesson learned and call-to-action.
“If you answer those eight questions in that order, not only will a story emerge, but you’ll have gotten their attention and driven behavior change,” says Paul.
Emotional Engagement
Incorporating dialogue, explicitly naming emotions (“she was angry”), and describing the physical manifestations of emotions (“she started yelling”) allows the audience to infer and empathize with the characters’ feelings.
“Humans don’t make purely rational decisions – we decide emotionally then justify logically,” Paul said.
Element of Surprise
“Great stories have a surprise somewhere that serves a pragmatic purpose of making the story more memorable,” explains Paul. “When someone is surprised, there’s a release of adrenaline that physiologically improves memory formation around that event.”
By purposefully crafting stories with a clear structure, emotional resonance, and elements of surprise, brands can create authentic emotional marketing narratives that truly connect with their audiences.
Consistency across channels
To maximize the impact of emotional marketing, consistency across all channels is essential. Whether it’s social media, email, or traditional advertising, the brand’s core message and emotional appeal should remain constant.
However, this doesn’t mean that every channel should be used in the same way. As Bill emphasizes, “Every channel is just a channel. Period. Please, just hear me. It’s just like tools. Tools are tools. A screwdriver is appropriate when you have to put in a screw, and a hammer is appropriate when you need to put in a nail.”
The key is to adapt the message to the specific channel while staying true to the brand’s overall emotional narrative.
Measuring success
One of the challenges of emotional marketing is measuring its effectiveness. Unlike traditional marketing approaches focusing on metrics like click-through rates and conversions, emotional marketing’s success is often more difficult to quantify.
However, as Bill points out, “At the end of the year, you’re going to see 25-30 percent growth over what your expectation was minimum in that first year. And the reason is, you’re going to watch all the boats rise, website traffic is going to lift, conversion is going to lift, and bounce rate is going to drop like you’re going to see lift everywhere.”
By tracking key performance indicators across various channels and comparing them to pre-campaign benchmarks, brands can better understand how their emotional marketing efforts are impacting their overall business goals.
Look at your account-based marketing emails. Are people responding to the emotional emails over the more logical ones?
Read next: 7 steps to start: How to do account-based marketing
Overcoming fear and risk-aversion
Despite emotional marketing’s proven effectiveness, many companies are hesitant to embrace this approach. As Bill explains, “99.9% of the business leaders and 100% of the investors behind them are terrified because they’re just convinced it won’t work.”
This fear often stems from a lack of understanding about how emotional marketing works and a belief that it’s too risky or expensive.
By educating business leaders about the power of emotional marketing, marketers can help overcome this fear and risk aversion.
“Every business has the opportunity to do it; you just have to make the decision to do it,” said Bill.
The role of understanding your target market
To create effective emotional marketing campaigns, businesses must understand their buyer. By gathering insights into their target audience’s needs, desires, and pain points, brands can craft messages that truly resonate on an emotional level.
When businesses want to skip this step, Bill says: “I roll my eyes at them. That cost is not even one employee. Like, are you kidding? This is the thing that’s going to be the catalyst to millions of dollars in growth.”
The future of emotional marketing
With increased competition in industries, emotional marketing will only become more important in the years to come. By creating authentic, emotionally resonant campaigns that speak directly to the target audience’s needs and desires, brands can cut through the noise and forge lasting connections. And most importantly, stand out from the rest.
To succeed in the future, marketers will need to focus on creating integrated, multi-channel campaigns that leverage the power of emotional storytelling. Understanding your buyer, crafting compelling narratives, and maintaining consistency across all touchpoints, brands can create emotional marketing campaigns that drive engagement, build loyalty, and ultimately boost their bottom line.