Emotional Marketing: The Ultimate Guide

If you’re paying attention to brands’ ads lately, most of them stir up our emotions. Every single ad you see or watch is heavy on emotional marketing.

It’s not a mystery that we buy based on emotions. Our emotions play a huge role when it comes to our purchasing decisions.

Here’s a test you can do right now: Of all the mobile phone brands, what did you choose to buy and use? Why did you decide to buy it? How did you decide to buy that particular make of mobile phone?

Whenever we make purchasing decisions, say a mobile phone, we’re largely influenced by others’ emotions, too. When you come across personal reviews about a certain product, you will find either how happy or disgusted a person was with his purchase. If you’ve read several complaints about the product, chances are you won’t buy it at all!

This is why big brands nowadays focus more on developing their brand loyalty and maximizing their customer engagement. People do their own homework now before they make any purchasing decision. And it’s only smart for brands to invest in emotional marketing as well.

What is emotional marketing?

Emotional marketing is a type of advertising or marketing effort that triggers emotions so customers will remember your brand, share and buy your service or product. Oftentimes, emotional marketing tells a compelling story to connect with their audience in a human and more personal way.

For emotional marketing to be immersive and engaging, it needs a medium that the majority of the consumer base has quick access to. These could be social media, videos, billboards, podcasts, digital advertising, and physical materials such as products’ packaging and merchandise.

How does emotional marketing work?

According to Inc., every customer’s purchase decisions stem from a change of his emotional state.

What does this mean? Before your customer makes his final purchase decision, he might feel a single or a number of emotions. Once these emotions interplay, this changes the customer’s emotional state – which leads to his final purchase decision.

There are six emotions present before a customer makes a purchase decision: pride, fear, envy, shame, altruism, and greed. Mix any of these emotions altogether and the purchase decision is sure to happen.

Take note though that any marketing or advertising effort may not succeed by focusing on one marketing or advertising effort alone.

How to do emotional marketing right

To make your emotional marketing efforts successful, you need to consider your customers’ beliefs system that influences their current emotional state.

What does your customer’s belief system have to do with his purchase decision? If you sell organic plant-based food products, your customers are likely advocates of green living, sustainability, and veganism. On the other hand, people who do Paleo and Keto diets may have mixed emotions about buying from you.

What this means is, as a marketer, you need to research well. Don’t second guess emotional marketing and rely on your gut instincts. You need to know your customer’s emotional state and the beliefs he uses to weigh his buying decision. The more you do research about your customers, the more you get their emotional state. Not only that, you’ll be better your emotional marketing layout.

Storytelling as your emotional branding tactic

Storytelling is one of the most powerful marketing strategies to date. When you use storytelling for your brand, you connect with your audiences’ emotions and personally relate with them. Over time, you gain credibility and trust among your audience.

If you don’t know where to start with storytelling, you can use actual comprehensive positive reviews from your customers. You may also add your customers’ personal stories about your brand on the website.

Other brands make the most of their “About Us” page by sharing their own personal story of how their brand started.

Again, if you are serious about brand loyalty, you need to put in all your customer-centric efforts and always try to leave a positive impression on your audience.

Key takeaway

As a marketer, it’s still important to focus on the product or service’s features. However, the feelings and the benefit your product or service gives are also crucial to your emotional marketing’s success.

The success of emotional marketing boils down to two things: trustworthiness and genuineness. When you put effort into your customers’ emotion(s) and weave it into your advertising and marketing strategy, you will get nothing but customers that resonate with your brand the most.