Developing & Testing an Emotional Content Strategy

Hi there,

I’m back with more reviews on courses from the CRO minidegree by CXL Institute.

This week I show you how to develop and test your Emotional Content Strategy.

Week #6

Course Name: Developing & Testing an Emotional Content Strategy

Instructor: Talia Wolf

Total Time: 25 minutes

In this course Talia Wolf walks us through her 4-step framework that explores the emotional triggers and behavioral principles which shape our customer’s?decision-making process.

Let’s get started.

What is Emotional Targeting?

We like to think of ourselves as rational creatures who think logically, but in reality, most of our decisions are emotional.

We buy with emotion and justify our decision with logic. That’s how it invariably plays out.

Worldwide brands have been using emotion to sell for many years.

They don’t talk about the product; they talk about the emotions.?

For example:

Lego - You don’t buy a product; you buy emotional value. It’s all about the pride children feel when they build something. It’s all about how happy they are when they see what they’ve created.

Or ‘Sony’ – their advertising says nothing about features or screen resolution. Instead, they make you feel like you are in the midst of an entire movie experience, even though you are actually sitting in your living room at home.

For them, it’s all about how you feel while using their products.

That’s how offline brands work. They’re all about understanding what customers are looking for emotionally.

Emotional Targeting for Mobile:

How do online brands work?

The problem with online brands is that they mostly talk about pricing and features and not about emotions.

Most people ‘live’ on their mobile phones. Most of the time landing pages are viewed on mobile. However, marketers think mainly about designing landing pages for the desktop and let responsive design handle the formatting for mobile phones.

But responsive design kills conversions. ?No one addresses the specific emotional needs of mobile visitors.

Studies show that there is a 270% conversion gap between desktop and mobile.

Mobile web traffic keeps growing. We’re likely to see a 480% increase over the next 5 years.

People don’t feel safe converting on mobile.

That’s why we need to create design meant for mobile phones. ?All we have are 2 to 3 seconds to convince someone and that’s the reason we need to start using emotional triggers.

Emotional Competitor Analysis:

How do we get to know our customers better so that we can create better funnels for them?

Here’s a 4-step framework we can use to create meaningful A/B tests which help us understand our customers better.

1.???Emotional Competitor Analysis

2.???Emotional SWOT

3.???Emotional Content Strategy

4.???Testing

We look at this framework from the perspective of the online dating industry.

Let’s start with Emotional Competitor Analysis.

As opposed to regular competitor analysis where we focus on the products and features of our competitors, with emotional analysis we look at the emotional side of things.

We select 10-15 of our competitors and grade them according to the following:

Message – what is their main messaging strategy?

Color – color can say a lot. It is important that we know what color they use and why

Image – the image is the first thing users see when they hit the landing page and hence, it’s important we understand what our competitors are trying to say via their landing pages

Emotional triggers – how are our competitors making their customers feel?

Tip: these competitors needn’t be our direct competitors. They can be doing something completely different but still targeting our specific customer segment.

We don’t have the time to look at 15 competitors else we’ll be here all day, but we can look at 3 of them.

For example:

‘Zousk’ says “Trust Us”. We are the biggest in the online dating space and we will help you find your match”. They use the color brown which symbolizes trust. Their image and emotional triggers they use all speak about trust.

‘Match’ on the other hand focuses on ‘closeness’. It makes you feel that you can find someone right around the corner.

The color they use is blue, which symbolizes trust. Their image is of people which symbolizes hope; hope that it will be easy for you to find your match with so many singles around.

Speaking of competitors, it might not make sense to blindly follow them. We might need a completely different strategy.

But how can we find that out?

By doing an Emotional SWOT.

Emotional SWOT Test:

Doing this helps us understand what our customers feel about us and about the industry we’re in.

We want to find out what are our Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.

Take the example of eHarmony, a popular online dating site.?

Their Strengths are that since they’re well-known, people trust them. They trust that eHarmony will give them the results they’re looking for.

Their biggest weakness is that they’re like everyone else. Nothing on their mobile landing page makes them stand out from the competition. The page is all about “Free” instead of trying to form an emotional connection with their audience.

Now, if you look at the entire online dating industry, there’s huge Opportunity because there’s so much variety.

But there are threats as well…

It’s hard to find a date.

Everyone looks and sounds the same. No one particular player really manages to stand out.

Also, a lot of people tend to think they’re above finding a match online. They feel they deserve ‘better’.

In addition to making educated guesses, run polls and surveys on your website, interview your customers and people in your office to learn more about the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats they see.

Emotional Content Strategy:

Now that we’ve done our SWOT analysis, we need to decide how to counter the Weaknesses and Threats using an emotional content strategy.

Our emotional content strategy should be to tell them that:

“We are not like everyone else”.

We also tell our customers that “they are not like everyone else and that they deserve the best”.

Lastly, we tell them that we will easily find them a perfect match.

These three messages counter all our weaknesses and threats.

You might be surprised to learn that there are 223 emotional triggers that can be used on a landing page. You won’t need all 223; you’ll only need a few. So make sure you choose more than one.

We want to make our customers feel exclusive and at the same time want them to feel that our solution is smart and simple.

Testing:

The next thing to do would be to test. Here is a framework we can use to brainstorm our test hypotheses.

First, we write down the different types of emotional triggers we want to test.

We then talk about:

The elements we need to use to portray these emotions

The words we can use to express these emotions

The visuals and colors we can use to portray these emotions

Let’s start with our competitors’ emotional triggers.

We know that our competitors use emotional triggers like hope, trust, and simplicity.

The elements we can use on our landing page to express these emotions could be images of many people instead of just couples. This will show variety and will give our customers hope that there are lots of single people out there.

We can also put up testimonials as a form of social proof that our customers like and trust us.

The words we can use to portray these emotions could be “safe”, “secure”, “join”, “success”, “many”, “simple”, “easy”.

We can put these words together to form sentences like “Join many people who are using this platform and find success”.

We could visuals that show many people or just couples having fun.

The colors we can use are blue and oink which symbolize trust and hope, respectively.

Now let's look at our emotional triggers:

We want to make our customers feel unique, smart, simple and exclusive.

We use elements like testimonials and scientific studies to show that our solutions are smart.

We use words like “unique”, “you”, “potential”, “simple”, “fun” that put the focus on the customer instead of on ourselves. We make our customers feel that they have potential and that using our solution is simple and fun.

The visuals we use could be success stories, authority symbols, pictures of power couples and celebrities.

The colors we can use are orange, blue and green.

Orange symbolizes fun. Green represents fresh and new. Blue stands for trust.

Putting all this together provides our designer with a brief and they can then get started on designing the landing page.

The results we get tell us what which of the emotional triggers are working and which aren’t working so well.

?Conclusion:

A short and succinct course that takes us on a journey through our customers’ minds and shows us what we need to do to connect with them emotionally.

Appealing to our customers’ rational mindsets often won’t work. We need to make them feel unique and special. We need to make them feel that there’s hope and that they can trust us to present them with a solution that is simple and fun to use.

What I liked about the course:

The emphasis on designing landing pages for the mobile phone was spot on. The 4-step framework did a good job of showing us how to analyze our competitors’ messaging, helped us understand what our customers thought about us and our industry and how to develop our emotional content strategy.

I found the information packed into this short 25 minute course to be immensely valuable.

What I didn’t like so much:

Nothing. I loved this course.

That’s all I have for this week. I’ll see you again next week with another review.

Till then, stay safe!

Sincerely,

Ryan