The One About Emotion

I want to get emotional. I want us to get emotional. On LinkedIn.

It seems as if the concept of emotion in marketing is something that B2B marketers get but also don’t get. ?

As owners of brains, we know that it takes our biological CPUs a fifth of the time to process emotions as it does factual information. We’ve felt it first-hand. (intuitively, not physically, that would be…gooey)

Yet in B2B, seemingly a land far, far away from this particular reality, few brands are designing their creatives to elicit an emotional response.

Why is the use of rational messaging in place of emotional creative such a stubbornly persistent phenomenon? Despite the latter having been proven time and again to be more effective when it comes to long-term brand building??

Especially when trying to 1. Drive brand awareness and affinity, and 2. Attract eyeballs already hypnotised by memes and dog videos in social feeds.

Creativity contributes nearly 50% to the success of an an ad, yet we see a creative deficit in the so-called creative of b2b brands, even among advertisers with the deepest pockets.?

I suspect the fear of feelings is in large part to blame.

Perhaps it’s the cognitive dissonance of budget guardians upon hearing that an effective data-backed strategy is to be fluffy. The suggestion that to win is to be even fluffier than competitors is causing CFOs to shift uncomfortably in their seats before tuning out altogether.

Ironically, those policing ROI are unwittingly blocking efforts to generate potential returns of up to 10-20x the initial investment. Continuing to do what doesn’t work is why, according to the great minds at LinkedIn's B2B Institute and System 1, over 70% of B2B ads will likely continue to generate no sales.

Given the increasing number of creatively savvy challenger brands clawing at the market share of their more established counterparts, and the nascent marketing investment arms race in b2b, isn’t it riskier to not take a ‘creative risk’?

It’s time to get in touch with our feelings

The job of marketing is to influence purchase decisions.?Emotion just so happens to be a reliable predictor and motivator of action, such as...making a purchase decision.

Emotion is an effective creative strategy, whether you sell to consumers or from business to business.

As with most things, we remember brands through feelings, not facts. And yes, even on LinkedIn. But you don’t have to take my word for it.?

To hush the naysayers from naysaying, a couple of us LinkedIn Customer Scientists dove into the data to understand if what makes the heart tick is what makes the user click.

Our working theory was that in the attention economy, a mere ‘like’ is worth less than when audiences emote with more visceral emotional reactions. On LinkedIn these reactions are represented by the Celebrate, Support and Love reacjis. (Available data pre-dates the Funny reacji - there's a joke in there somewhere...)

What we unearthed was this gem: The most emotionally engaging brands on LinkedIn drive better overall content performance, with performance uplifts seen across the board from brand to demand.

Our findings underscored what effective marketers already know: Brands leveraging emotion in their creative outperform brands that don’t.?

High mental and physical availability are the harmonious ying and yang of marketing-attributed $$$. And one can hack mental availability by triggering emotions.

To help our advertisers navigate LinkedIn for this endeavour, I visualised a map of the emotional solar system on LinkedIn, inspired by the LinkedIn reacjis & Buzzfeed's cultural cartography.

Members are emoting to content that inspires and motivates them, and sometimes simply because something’s knee-slappingly, tear-jerkingly, share-button funny - because that meme that’s gone viral is just so darn relatable.?

When members consistently feel seen, represented, connected, when they feel FOMO, intrigue, or tiny sparks of joy from your branded content, then you’ve basically picked up the Thor’s hammer of social creative effectiveness.

The best practitioners of emotional marketing are optimising their creatives for the reaction they want their content to evoke, swinging their magic hammer repeatedly and knocking up brand preference points.

So dear reader, what can you do, short of overhauling your organisation’s entire approach to content creation? If starting an internal revolution is out of the question, creating a mindset shift and cultural change in a risk-averse marketing organisation starts with taking small steps:

Step 1. Make emotion a KPI.

Step 2. Categorise & create content by the kinds of emotional reactions and sentiment you want to inspire (think beyond ad formats).

Step 3. Repeat steps 1 & 2 to wedge your brand deeper & deeper into your audience's psyche.

Step 4. Profit $$$$?

One final pro-tip: In exactly one week, the good folks at Sprout Social are hosting a panel on How to Transform B2B Marketing with Personality and Emotion

Where I will be beating the drum on doing the emotion thing, and sharing some exclusive LinkedIn insights. I'll be virtually sitting alongside my brilliant fellow panelists Tom Boston , Cat Anderson and Brad Janitz who will each reflect on emotional communications from their unique vantage points.

It's time to push back on a bad brief. ????

Collectively, we need to help divorce marketing stakeholders from being doggedly wedded to rational messaging full of facts, figures and functional benefits. And seduce them with creative strategies filled with feelings, feistiness and funny, using the one thing they'll least expect - facts & figures & functional benefits. Go figure.