How to Incorporate Emotional Marketing Tactics in your Next Campaign

As marketers, we know that emotions play a big part in advertising and marketing. It’s our job to create positive emotional connections between our target audience and our brand. This is essential for customer retention and brand loyalty in markets where many competitors offer similar products or services.

Think of your relationship with consumers as a friendship. Just as we pick our friends based on personal qualities, consumers engage in a similar evaluation of brands. Consumers perceive personality traits in brands just as they do in people.  

While there are several ways to establish and present a brand personality, one of the most effective is through emotional marketing. This practice uses direct emotional appeals to connect on a personal level and encourage consumers to notice, remember, share, and buy your brand.

Here are three ways to ramp up your emotional marketing tactics and create affinity with your consumers on a deeper level.

Tell a Story

Whether it’s reading a book, watching a TV show, or hearing about your friend’s day, stories are constantly being told around us. Good storytellers evoke strong emotions. As marketers, we must identify the emotional triggers for our target audience.

Telling a story lets you embody the brand’s personality in an authentic way. Strive to make the brand relatable to your audience. Create a narrative tied to a specific enduring emotion.

Use Color, Imagery, and Visuals

When creating your next marketing campaign, you’ll likely use a diverse array of media channels. This is a great way to reach multiple audiences through different touchpoints to tell your story. For instance, you might utilize video, blog posts, social media ads, and audio ads all tailored to tell the same story. With each tactic, thoughtful consideration should be given to incorporate imagery and visuals that ensure a consistent emotional response.

Varying colors and hues evoke different emotions or moods. For instance, blue is associated with calm serenity while yellow is correlated with optimism and cheerfulness. After determining which emotions you hope to evoke, your campaign color palette can be established to match (within brand guidelines, of course).              

The imagery and visuals you select are another important piece of telling your story. Visual perception and emotions are both processed in the limbic system, and the two work in unison to create one singular memory in your mind. In emotional marketing, our goal is to influence consumers’ memories to align with the brand’s personality.

Engage with the consumers

With the emergence of AI in the business world, many companies opt to have auto-generated responses to emails, social media DMs, and chat help bots. While these can save both time and money, human connection and conversation are invaluable in gaining loyal consumers who connect with your brand.

Engagement will look different based on your company’s products or services, but almost all companies can use social media and email marketing to effectively personalize consumer’s experiences. Consider adding personalized replies to social media comments and DMs to build connections and show off your brand’s personality while ensuring that the consumers’ needs and wants are being met. For example, if your company has an exuberant personality, consider playful and fun replies.

There are many ways you can integrate emotional marketing strategies. Incorporating tactics like these, can help consumers view your company as not only a business entity, but someone they want to engage with. One commonality among all humans will always hold true; we feel and desire emotions. By relying on these emotions in your next campaign, you can use this commonality to strengthen your brand!