Emotional Marketing Strategy: A Powerful Tool for Branding Your Business
According to Robert Plutchik who constructed the Wheel of Emotions in 1980, the eight primary emotions are joy, trust, fear, surprise, sadness, disgust, anger and anticipation. Paul Ekman formulated six basic emotions: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise. As a digital marketer, you must master skills to build ad campaigns based on these emotions. Emotional Marketing not only helps you to create a loyal customer base for your business, it even makes them brand ambassadors for your products or services. Being digital marketing partners for many reputed clients our experiences taught us that emotional advertising is the easiest way to build and retain customers’ brand loyalty. We found out that the more substantial the emotional content of an ad, the more traffic it will generate who will later convert as your customers.
Building curiosity
People love watching ad videos with a short story that creates suspense or throws a puzzle with a question and answer pattern. Such attention grabber images or videos excite people to share with others. Tips to develop the best curiosity gap is a catchy and unique headline giving them a clue of what is next? Ask your audience a question, introduce a few lines of a fascinating story and let them guess about what the climax is? Since it created a curiosity gap prompting readers to click the ads to know the answer. Such methods yielded us more clicks, shares and social media fans. Sharing is the best way of advertising.
Power of Joy
We also learned that all emotions do not give the same output. When we worked for an NGO we tried reaching out to the audience with a few real-time sad story videos and images, though our analytic reports showed good View Through Rate (VTR) of the videos, there was no good number of likes or shares of such contents. That is, it is not as easy as to sell a product or a service to the customer using negative emotion when compared to selling it triggering their positive feelings. People whose mood is happy, joyous are more likely to extend help to others than the people who are made to feel depressed, angry, sad etc. So we reworked by capturing the natural moments of joy and satisfaction of donors and emotional feelings of the receivers and added these happy elements to similar stories with a tagline “helping double your happiness. “
Negative Marketing Concept
Negative Marketing is the most robust influencer among all the emotional marketing methods. Negative marketing acts as a tool to establish a connection with the customer at ease. For this, first we Identify pain points or something that a customer hates, and we let them know that we hate it too. It grabs their attention and deeply seats in the minds of customers, such an approach strengthens customers’ positive impression of a product or service. Negative Ad’s, A study by researchers at Stanford GSB and Tel Aviv University discovered that small doses of mildly negative information — a so-called blemishing effect — might strengthen the consumer’s positive impression of a product or service. Therefore it is essential to make your online visitors feel genuine, that is where your online marketing success lies. Focus on triggering emotions with dialogue rather than delivering information.“The best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing,” said the famous “Marketoonist” Tom Fishburne. Strong emotions in advertising may drive us to make an expensive purchase or donate money to a cause.
Power of colors on emotional ads
The psychological principle known as the Isolation Effect states that an item that “stands out like a sore thumb” is more likely to be remembered. Adopting this fact, we have chosen orange colour for the call to action button with white colour text and its opposite colour that is blue for the background, reportedly there was a rise in enquiries of about 15% after the changes made in the combination of colours, previously call to action button was in gray colour with black colour text, A point noteworthy here is that whenever the colour of icon, text or the image is in contrast with that of the background colour, visitors were able to quickly recognise the icons or images and also were driven to take up the action or recall an item far better. Remember to choose appropriate colours for your infographics, call to action button or lead collection pop – up because, researchers found from the study called Impact of Color in Marketing that, 90% customers made judgments about products based on colour alone (depending on the product). Orange stimulates appetite, and it corresponds to healthy food. Green symbolizes nature, growth, freshness and fertility. Moreover, green indicates safety to advertise medical products. Hence we chose these two colours to advertise nutritious herbal products to our clients. There are three categories of these products
- Low-calorie sugar control energy drinks
- Weight loss food supplements
- Healthy alternatives to snacks.
Three different web pages hold these three nutritional products lists. Therefore we picked the orange colour for the web page containing energy drink products for sugar control, here orange is selected to tell users that our products are affordable and energetic. And for the weight loss products page, we choose green to communicate to users that these weight loss products are farm fresh, with no added preservatives. For the third page, i.e., for healthy alternatives to snacks we allotted a combination of orange and white colours, white conveys transparency and cleanliness that means you are not hiding anything from your customers. Bright colours, happy people sparks positive emotions in the minds of the people, they relate your brand with the colours you select for your product labels, company logos, web pages, banners and posters etc. We already discussed that happiness is the key to an emotional marketing campaign.
Social proof theory
Social proof is a tool that drives traffic to your site, increases trust in your product or service guiding them to take up CTA that aids in lead generation. Out of the list of social proofs available
- expert social proof
- celebrity social proof
- user social proof
- wisdom of crowd
- wisdom of friends’ social proof.
We picked user social proof as a tool for our clients who are into food and entertainment industries for branding and lead generation. Similarly, the wisdom of crowd social proof methods suited our graphic design and real estate companies. The reason being simple, if I am out on vacation with family or friends, I would surely search for the best restaurants near me. Good ratings, reviews and testimonials from other users acts as a key in positioning the restaurant at the top position in search engine page results. Likewise, the wisdom of crowd social proof builds trust in the audience because the statements like “Created a million websites for corporations“, “ Constructed dream homes for one lakh customers” automatically makes you famous in the minds of the web visitors.
Conclusion
Outlined our experiences and learnings on emotional marketing strategies derived by working with multiple clients on their projects. Hence it is recommended that curiosity and joy are most preferred strategies w.r.t. Emotional marketing concept. Choosing proper colours enhances client’s trust in your brand and triggers sales efficiently.Be careful while promoting any brand using negative marketing principles. Pick the social proof tool that is apt for your area of business.
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