Emotional marketing uses emotive cues like happiness, joy, trust, and power to connect with customers and build brand loyalty.
Shoppers tend to favor brands that share their values, while companies who use emotional marketing are more effective at creating brand loyalty.
1. Make Your Customers Feel Special
People make purchasing decisions based on feelings, not logic, which makes emotional marketing an effective tool to build loyalty by tapping into specific feelings like joy, anger, sadness or fear and creating an intimate bond between consumers and products.
Not all feelings are created equal, so marketers must craft their messages carefully in order to maximize impact. Joy may include feelings such as delight or fulfillment while fear can include anxiety or urgency.
Positive posts tend to draw more engagement and shares, so try sharing feel-good aspects of your business that encourage engagement and shares. For instance, this could include showing customers that your company offers flexible schedules, promotes family time or supports healthy initiatives; or sharing behind-the-scenes photos/video of employees enjoying their work – this gives customers a sense of pride and belonging while potentially expanding the reach of your marketing campaign.
2. Create Meaningful Connections
Brand loyalty can quickly form when consumers’ values and aspirations align with those evoked by brands, especially when companies employ emotional marketing techniques targeted specifically at specific demographic groups.
One credit card tailored specifically to appeal to Millennials saw its product usage and new account growth increase by double-digit percentage increases within one year, while one major retailer’s decision to refocus merchandising and marketing on its most emotionally connected customers led to triple-digit percentage sales growth over just one year.
To establish these connections, marketers must thoroughly understand their audience. This requires conducting in-depth research into the pain points and general goals and dreams of specific demographic groups. By creating persona templates from this research, marketers can better identify emotions that will resonate most powerfully with this audience, otherwise their marketing campaign may come across as unauthentic or off-putting.
3. Make Your Customers Want to Share
Emotionally engaging marketing campaigns that speak directly to your target audience are an effective way to build brand loyalty. Understanding what drives them forward requires creating buyer personas; this will give a clear view of your ideal consumer and their needs.
Emotional marketing allows you to create unforgettable content – be it videos or social media posts that touch upon an emotional theme – that leaves lasting impressions with target audiences, prompting them to share it among themselves.
Google utilizes their company culture to connect with audiences by sharing behind-the-scenes photos of employee family life or promoting work/life balance initiatives. Customers tend to align themselves with brands whose values match up with their own, so using marketing strategies that appeal directly to customer emotions may increase customer loyalty and customer retention.
4. Help Your Customers Feel Good
Brand loyalty can only be established through cultivating emotional connections with customers, which explains why so many brands strive to evoke positive feelings like happiness, joy and excitement in their marketing efforts.
Positive associations between consumer purchases and the services they use help create an emotional attachment and pride when using it. Content that elicits these emotions tends to get shared more frequently and seen by viewers than other forms of media.
An emotional component to your content can help build brand loyalty, encouraging customer advocacy and giving your audience the feeling of belonging in a community. Companies like TOMS focus on cultivating this feeling among their customers with social media campaigns such as One Day Without Shoes to foster this feeling and by building one global community through their products.
Promote a sense of belonging with your employees through a company culture campaign that highlights family life or health initiatives. Keep in mind that emotions exist on a continuum – just making small adjustments can alter them dramatically.
