There are many marketing techniques to attract customers’ attention. One of the most frequently used by marketers is emotional branding.
This strategy is popular among marketers because of its ability to tap into the customers’ emotions and convince them to buy the product or services offered.
What is emotional branding?
Emotional branding is a marketing technique that appeals directly to the customers’ emotions, needs and aspirations. Brands use these emotions to build relationships with their customers and provoke them to perform the desired action.
In short, paiyakin, patawanin or give them that warm feeling within when they think about your brand.
Why is emotional branding important
and aspirations. Image from Unsplash
Emotional branding is the effort to trigger emotions issued by marketers to their audience. The simplest example is when promoting a horror film, of course the producer and filmmaker will create a trailer according to expectations of the viewers, which is to feel scared.
The making of the trailer is one of emotional branding examples, which aims to instill fear in anticipation of the release of the full film. Emotional branding usually capitalizes on happiness, sadness, fear and anger.
Why should you apply emotional branding strategy:
- Your brand or product will be easier to remember
- Your content can go viral
- It can inlfuence the consumer’s decision-making
- It can inspire your audience
- It helps increase brand loyalty
If done right, emotional branding has the potential to build good relationships with your customers. This will affect brand loyalty, customer loyalty and brand authority.
Alro read: 6 Ways to Engage Your Customers and Keep Them Loyal
How to effectively use emotional branding
Image from Getty Images
You don’t need a big budget to launch effective campaigns that can tap into your customers’ emotions. Here are some useful tips:
Know what triggers your customers emotionally
The first step in your emotional branding strategy is understanding what makes your customers tick. Focus on what motivates or excites them. Your brand messaging must resonate with your customers and prospects so they will engage with you.
Create an interesting narrative or storyline
People love a good story. Create a storyline that your target market can really relate to. Highlight their challenges, pain points and daily concerns. Express how you understand their dreams and aspirations, and then, in a very suble way, show how your product or service will help them overcome those challenges.
Think about those memorable McDonald‘s and Jollibee ads. You didn’t mind watching the entire films because you can either relate to the stories or you find them entertaining.
Take advantage of social proof
After launching your emotional branding campaign, capitalize on user-generated content, like good reviews about your business or their reactions to your story (about how they were able to relate to it).
If your campaign was successful enough to trigger such reactions, use them as social proof to sustain your strategy and attract more customers.
so you can attract more customers.
Create personalized customer experiences
People don’t like generic messaging, to make sure your emotional branding strategy is effective, you must make customers feel as if you’re talkng directly to them.
Gather data about your customers like their gender, age, location and interests. And then check their purchase history with your store or popular products that tend to get a lot of good reviews. Then use these information to customize how you communicate with them to entice repeat purchase and brand loyalty.
Check out these Email Marketing Tips and Strategies to effectively communicate with your customers.
Use color to trigger emotions
According to studies, color plays a big role in psychological marketing tactics. A popular example can be found is in fast food restaurants.
Jollibee and KFC use red in all buildings and elements, such as seats, menus, cashier screens, to their packaging. This is because research reveals that the color red can trigger hunger pangs in consumers, making red a valuable asset for both restaurants.
Learn more about What Your Brand Colors Say About Your Business and how they create an emotional trigger among your customers.
Respond to critical issues and customer concerns
Customers need to feel valued and cared for. That’s why it’s important to respond to their issues or concerns regarding your product and service.
Reply to their messages, take steps to resolve their issues and appease them by offering something to make up for their bad experience. No one is perfect and it’s natural to make mistakes. What’s important is acknowledging your shortcomings and assuring the customers that you will fix the problem.
Your customers would appreciate your honesty and you’d be surprised how forgiving they can be when you reach out to them personally.
Here’s our tips on the Best Ways to Respond to Negative Customer Reviews
Benchmark of emotional branding success
Image from Getty Images
After understanding the meaning, benefits and how to apply emotional branding, next step is to know the benchmarks for success.
One of the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) is Emotional ROI, which means measuring how effective the strategy was in triggering the desired emotions from the target market.
Measuring the emotional state and feelings of consumers will provide you with a deeper learning about your product. Here are some metrics that can be a benchmark for assessment so you can have a high emotional ROI.
- Attention – Is your product or brand recognized by your audience?
- Engagement – Did your marketing efforts create engagement and is there two-way communication with your audience?
- Sentiments – Does the audience display positive, negative or even no feelings toward your product or brand?
Speak to your consumer’s heart
So that’s emotional branding. It’s about speaking to your consumers’ hearts instead of their brains. Because based on studies, 95% of purchasing decisions are emotional, whether consciously or unconsciously.
The key is knowing who your target customers are, gathering data about their behavior and pain points, and then creating a narrative that hits straight to their hearts.
One thing to keep in mind though is being authentic and making sure that your brand lives up to its promises. Love your customers and they will love you back.
