This week’s episode is all about bringing emotion into your marketing. As business owners it’s super important to use emotion, especially if you’re trying to be authentic and build a tribe. Your tribe, of course, are the people that will connect with you, engage with your posts and eventually become loyal customers. Throughout the episode I’m going to discuss the positives of using emotion and the difference it can make to your marketing.  

KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCAST

• Emotional marketing is marketing to your customers and audience in order to get an emotion out of them. By provoking this emotion, you encourage engagement. 
• Think about the last thing you shared on social media. Was it based on an emotion? What emotion was it?
• It is much easier to relate to someone if you feel something. 
• Not every single post needs to evoke emotion. Not only will your feed become an emotional rollercoaster for you and your followers, some things just don’t warrant a lot of emotion. 
• People tend to buy with their emotions. Even when you’re talking about a practical product, people will buy through trust. 
• The very first thing you need to consider when it comes to using emotional marketing is your target audience. If you’re trying to use emotion to build your community and sell your products, gauging your target audience wrong could catastrophic. 
• If you want to evoke and emotion, storytelling is a great tool to use. 

THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE…

You can evoke ANY emotion through marketing. From admiration and happiness to anger and sadness, it’s important you know exactly what emotion you want people to feel. 

HIGHLIGHTS YOU SIMPLY CAN'T MISS

• What Is Emotional Marketing? – 03:18
• Why Is Emotional Marketing Important? - 04:24
• What Do You Need to Consider When Creating Emotional Posts? – 10:30
• How to Evoke Emotion in Your Posts – 14:30
• Incredible Examples You Can Use in Your Marketing – 20:00

Transcript below

(00:32)

Hello and a really warm welcome to this week's episode of the podcast. How are you doing? I can't believe that we are almost, well I'm not going to say towards the end of the year, but we are obviously in the latter stages of the year. It's going so, so fast and my November is absolutely jam packed. I am talking at lots of amazing places, so if you're going to be seeing me then please please please come up and say hi and let me know that you listen to the podcast. I love meeting people. So definitely come and say hi. But yeah, it's going to be a super busy November. And before I know it, It's going to be December, which is just crazy. But anyway. So this week I am doing a solo episode. I wanted to talk about something as having a real brainstorm about what could I talk about and trying to write then loads of different ideas and things and I've decided that I want to talk about how you can bring emotion into your marketing because actually it's super, super important.

Speaker 1: (01:30)

And one of the reasons I decided to talk about this is because I've been reading Kotler's marketing book, Marketing 4.0 and he talks about the fact that it's even more important than ever for authenticity and to build that tribe. And I want to talk about tribe. I basically just mean your community of people that are going to want to come and engage with you and want to have a conversation with you and want to ultimately buy your products and services. And one of the ways in which you can start to connect to them is via emotion. And I'm really, as I was writing down all the ideas for this, it made me a little bit nervous because sometimes when we think about using emotion, we think about tactics that maybe aren't that nice. So for instance, an emotion that you could use in marketing is fear.

Speaker 1: (02:16)

And I remember many, many, many years ago, I used to work for a bank and we used to sell insurance. It's very different nowadays, but we used to sell insurance. And one of the ways in which we'd sell insurance is through fear. It would be, well, why? What would you do? What would happen if you lost your job and you couldn't pay your bills? You'd lose your house and you'd do this, and you do that, and you know, and your kids would need, and you'd start building this horrible, scary picture for them. And then they would go, Oh yeah, you're right. Okay, yeah, maybe I should have that thing. So I'm a little bit worried that talking about this, people are gonna think that that's what I'm talking about. So hopefully in today's episode I'm going to be able to give you a really clear idea about what I mean when I talk about using emotion in and how really positive it can be and also how it can actually make a big difference to your marketing and how you connect to that audience.

What Is Emotional Marketing?

Speaker 1: (03:08)

So hopefully it will be a good one. So let's start talking about what is emotional marketing? Well, it's basically marketing to your customers and your audience and trying to get an emotion from them so that it helps them remember or share or interact with your post or your marketing. So it's basically just trying to provoke something from an emotional side from them. And this can be any emotion. It can be admiration, anger, anxiety, craving, and the calmness, love, fear, sadness, reminiscing, intrigue. It can be any one of those emotions. And really what I would suggest is if you're trying to go for an emotion, you'd go for kind of the more stronger ones. So you wouldn't perhaps go for slightly annoyed. You would go for angry, you wouldn't go for, okay, you'd go for either really happy or really sad. So you're going to wonder why am I talking about making people angry and sad through posts.

Why Is Emotional Marketing Important?

Speaker 1: (04:12)

But bear with me and let me explain. But first let me talk about why this actually works and why it's really worth considering whether you are posting anything on social media or doing your marketing and you're bringing in any emotion at all. So there's a couple of things I want you first to think about. What was the last thing you shared on social media? Now when it comes to Facebook, I'm not a very big sharer, so I don't actually share a lot of stuff. I will retweet stuff on Twitter, but that's just how I use my, my own personal Facebook. But I want you to think about what was the last thing you shared or the last thing that someone you follow shared. And I can pretty much guarantee it was something based on an emotion. So it was either something through pride, something that made them angry, something that upset them, something that pulled on their heartstrings, something that was absolutely rolled around the floor laughing.

Speaker 1: (05:05)

It was something that made them react in some kind of way. So first of all, that's one of the reasons why you really want to be using emotions in your posts because if someone looks at a post and has a non feeling about it, it's kind of one of the worst things we can do because they're not gonna do anything, whether it's good or bad, positive or negative, we want them to react in one way or another. Also think about when you were told the story by someone or I try and liken it back to when I was at university doing my marketing degree and I have two different lecturers. One was a statistician. Now even just saying that word is a bit full on and I used to go into his lessons and I swear to goodness I couldn't have repeated a single word that he said because even though I was listening, it just didn't go in because it was all facts and figures and processes. And then I would go into another lesson called service marketing and they would talk about how to market a service. So if you're a hairdressers or a, I don't know, beauty salon or whatever it might be and or a restaurant. And they talked about all the different things that you would have to do and consider if you're a service. And what was really interesting is she used to tell stories and I could listen to her stories over and over and over because they would sort of obviously react with me in one way or another. I'd sit there and think, that's interesting. That's funny. That's sad. That's good, that's not good. Whatever those kind of emotions were that were coming up for me, I remembered it because you remember those details.

(06:40)

I often get people speaking to me when I do go and do events and they will remember things like, I have a daughter because I talk about it. My husband's in the military. They do remember these things cause we remember the personal stuff. It's really hard to remember the kind of really facty type stuff. But we do remember the personal stuff. So again, that's why the emotion stuff can really, really work. And also it's much, much easier to relate to someone when you feel something. Like I said, if someone's scrolling through your posts and see a post from you and they don't feel anything, then that's going to be really, really difficult to try and build that relationship and build that community and have some kind of engagement with them. If they just look at that and they're like, nah, not bothered either way. And to back this up, there is this amazing quote, which I am going to do a terrible job at remembering who it was said by, but basically it was something along the lines of, you might forget what someone said to you, but you'll never forget how they made you feel.

Speaker 1: (07:38)

Is that right? I think I've said it right, but yeah, you get my drift. So we remember the emotional things. Remember how we feel about things. We don't always remember these facts and figures. Now, my telling you that every single post you've got to do on social media has to include some emotive thing. No, not necessarily. Because quite honestly if you're talking about, I don't know, Oh, I can't even think off the top of my head. But if you're talking about selling houses, it might be really difficult to try and get something in every single post that is creating some emotion. Also, you don't want it to be like an emotional roller coaster as someone looks through your feed where they're like, Oh, that's so awful and that's hilarious. Oh my God, I'm so angry about it. So again, it's not necessarily about that either.

Speaker 1: (08:20)

It's also not just about trying to get them have that one same emotion. Now you might be really good at doing the funny stuff or you might be really good at doing the sentimental stuff, especially depending on what your business is. However, sometimes you do want to try and mix it up. So you are doing different emotions for different things. And then lastly, the other reason why emotions are so good is because we tend to buy with our emotions. So even when it's a very practical product, we tend to buy with our emotion through trust. So if I go onto Amazon and I want to buy a wire from my phone or something really non emotive, then I'll obviously look for things like trust to make me feel better about making that purchase. If I buy something like, Oh this is so sad, but if I buy like a notebook it's because I love it and I think it's beautiful and I like how it makes me feel that I've got that notebook.

Speaker 1: (09:12)

If you are buying a house again that might be down to, you know that will come through emotion in the end it might be, yeah, I'm looking for these practical things. But you walk in there and you have a feeling about it and then things like you might buy something because you are so frustrated and angry about your problem that you've got that actually that's why you want to buy that thing. So the emotion may not be about a buying the physical product. So the other day I bought, I have real trouble sleeping sometimes and I bought some magnesium and buying magnesium is not like the most exciting thing in the world. I don't get super excited and all emotional about, Oh wow, I'm going to buy it magnesium. But when I do get emotional about and what is an emotion is I get so frustrated that I can't fall asleep.

What Do You Need to Consider When Creating Emotional Posts?

Speaker 1: (09:56)

So for me through the frustration, I then buy the product. So like I said, I want you to kind of think about next time you're buying something as well, what's the emotion attached to that? And it might be emotion of giving, it might be through sort of reminiscing, it might be a craving, you know, there's so many different emotions. So I want you to try and keep as wide in terms of your mind, thinking about that and thinking about your business. So if we want to start talking about doing some of these more emotive type posts, what sort of things do you need to consider in order to do these? Well, the very first thing you need to know is you need to know your audience. So this is well. Do you know what I mean? I'm so sick of saying this, but see, you're probably sick of hearing it.

Speaker 1: (10:40)

But this is so, so important on everything in marketing. And honestly I couldn't urge you enough to go back and listen and I can't remember the episode. I'm going to put it in the show notes. So go back and have a look at the episode where I talk about how to create your perfect avatar, i.e. Your perfect prospect and definitely do that if you haven't. But it's so important to know your audience because if you are trying to use emotion to sell your products and services or to engage with people and you gauge your audience wrong, it could be catastrophic. You could put something out there and you could have built this really lovely community and people who are following your page and liking your stuff. And then you put an emotional thing out there or you put something out that you think they're going to resonate with in one way.

Speaker 1: (11:27)

And actually you've got them completely wrong and they resonate in an entirely different way. Now obviously some people, emotions are completely to ourselves. There's some people will react one way and some will react another way. But generally if you know who you're talking to and you know your audience, you're going to know what would wind them up and what they'll relate with and what they'll engage with. So obviously bear that in mind when you're thinking about trying to bring some level of emotion into your posts. So let's say for instance that I had a predominantly young male following. I don't, by the way, but let's say I did for me to start posting emotional stuff about what it's like to be a mum and a, an a, you know, entrepreneur or how awful I feel about leaving my daughter for two weeks when I head off to California and all this sort of thing.

Speaker 1: (12:14)

It's just not gonna resonate. It's just not gonna hit home. And in worst case scenarios, it might end up actually alienating your audience. So I definitely want you to think about who is it that you're talking to and are they likely to relate to this in the same way or in the way that you're expecting. Okay. The next thing I want you to think about is it really helps if you're telling a story. So trying to evoke an emotion is really difficult if there's not a story behind it. So you're going to know in your business and when I give you some of these examples, what kind of stories you can tell, but often, funny enough actually the episode that's just gone out as I'm recording this was the one about fear, episode 85 I think. And what about fear and getting over it and doing actions and that sort of thing.

Speaker 1: (