Emotions play a huge role in how consumers make decisions and relate to brands. If you want to attract and retain loyal customers for your small business, you need to create a marketing plan that targets specific emotions that resonate with your audience. In this article, you will learn how to do that in six steps.
The first step is to define who your ideal customers are and what motivates them to buy from you. You can use tools like surveys, interviews, or online analytics to collect data on their demographics, preferences, pain points, and goals. This will help you segment your market and create buyer personas that represent your typical customers.
Personas allow you as a marketeer to put yourself in the customers shoes, it should provide you with enough insights to understand your target’s emotional triggers, behavior cultural and social considerations. Once you can immerse yourself in their situation you can make smart and informed decision as to how you can market your brand and products/services.
The next step is to decide what emotions you want your marketing messages to elicit in your target market. You can use the emotional wheel model, which categorizes emotions into eight basic types: joy, trust, fear, surprise, sadness, disgust, anger, and anticipation. Each emotion has a different impact on consumer behavior and loyalty. For example, joy can increase satisfaction and referrals, fear can create urgency and action, and trust can build long-term relationships and loyalty.
All of the above emotions can fall into two main buckets, fears & desires. It is always good to address both of these areas to maximize efficiency. Even when the product is a happy product one can leverage fear to a positive effect for example the fear of missing out FOMO.
The third step is to make sure that the emotions you choose are consistent with your value proposition, which is the unique benefit or solution that you offer to your customers. You need to communicate how your product or service can help your customers achieve their desired emotional state or avoid their undesired emotional state. For example, if you want to evoke joy, you can highlight how your product or service can make your customers happy, delighted, or amused.
If a proper brand strategy was conducted the value proposition should already be aligned with and built upon the basic needs of the customer. This is one of the reasons spending time and money on building a solid brand strategy upon which a marketing strategy can be crafted is essential to long term success!
The fourth step is to choose the best channels and formats to deliver your emotional marketing messages to your target market. You need to consider where your customers spend their time, how they consume information, and what kind of content they prefer. For example, if you want to evoke surprise, you can use channels and formats that are unexpected, novel, or interactive, such as social media, videos, or quizzes.
The fifth step is to use specific elements that can trigger and reinforce the emotions you want to evoke in your marketing messages. These can include words, images, colors, sounds, stories, testimonials, or symbols that appeal to your customers' senses, memories, or values. For example, if you want to evoke trust, you can use words like reliable, honest, or guaranteed, images of smiling faces or handshakes, colors like blue or green, or stories of satisfied customers or experts.
In the promotional branding industry, leveraging emotional triggers is crucial for creating a memorable brand experience. Customized tradeshow gifts, for instance, can serve as powerful symbols that resonate with the recipient's sense of appreciation and belonging. By embedding your logo on items that align with your audience's values, such as eco-friendly products, you not only reinforce your brand's message but also establish a deeper emotional connection. This strategy turns ordinary promotional products into impactful advertising tools that continue to evoke positive emotions long after the initial interaction.
The final step is to track and analyze the results of your emotional marketing plan and make adjustments as needed. You need to use metrics that reflect the emotional response and engagement of your customers, such as feedback, reviews, ratings, shares, comments, likes, or conversions. You also need to test different variations of your marketing messages and see what works best for your target market and your goals.
Emotion is not a marketing objective. It is a communication objective and thus only a subset of marketing. A marketing plan covers pricing, distribution, customer data and other such internal facing tasks too. So it would be inaccurate to aim for an emotion while building the overall marketing plan. Having said that, while building your communication, it's a great idea to add the emotion you'd like that comm to evoke in the brief itself. Communication that evokes any emotion, especially a positive one, connects with the viewer and is remembered and shared more.