How to Leverage Emotion in Your Content Marketing Strategy

I have been working in the marketing field for the past 11 years. In all these years, I have come to realize, one thing is that you have to go the extra mile to boost your sales.

Marketers follow various methods to drive their sales. But every marketing strategy is carefully based on what your customers think.

To be a successful marketer and boost your sales, you need to first understand the psychology of your buyers.

What I mean is the behavior of the buyers are influenced by certain emotional triggers. I am sure you understand how emotions affect humans.

Marketers leverage the power of emotions to lure buyers to their website and make sales.

Every decision made by the consumer is backed by emotions. This is why it is important to understand psychology and human behavior. That’s the key to success in any business.

Every human being, including you and me, have the same emotional triggers. Once we figure out these psychological triggers, we can craft powerful digital marketing strategies to boost sales.

Speaking of emotional triggers, I am not asking you to get your customers angry. Driving them emotionally means doing it positively and not the other way round.

To help you out, I am going to show you how different emotions work with customers. We will make marketing strategies based on these emotions to get the most out of it.

Here’s what you have to know about emotionally driving your customers to increase sales.

What is emotion?

Before getting into the details, let me first explain what emotion is. This is just to give you a better understanding of the topic that we are going to discuss in the next section.

As human beings, we are driven by different types of emotions. These emotions have a strong influence on our daily lives. It influences the way we live and interact with others.

To put it in the right way, we are ruled by these emotions. Every decision we take and the choices we make are influenced by our emotions. This applies to every single soul in this world.

Emotional triggers can be words, people, opinions, situations, or anything else that can provoke an intense emotional reaction within us.

The most common emotional triggers that we all experience include:

  • Happiness
  • Anger
  • Sadness
  • Fear

As a marketer, we need to leverage these emotions to get more customers to buy from us. Understanding your customers is important.

Why use emotions in content marketing?

Now coming to the main question, why use emotions in content marketing.

Since the beginning of marketing, marketers have been leveraging emotions to sell their products and services.

Why shouldn’t they?

After all, it’s the most effective way of getting customers. Once you learn the art of leveraging emotions, you can get as many customers as you want.

However, that doesn’t mean you will use it negatively or exploit your customers.

In the marketing world, that’s a big no, no.

You see human beings are emotional creatures. Our decision-making ability is based on emotions.

So, if you try to reach your content to your audience through a rational approach, chances are that it will fall flat.

This is why expert marketers leverage the power of emotions for generations. They use it to leave a strong impact on the customers.

Even if content marketing is not used directly to sell products, it helps you to generate sales.

There are many marketers including me, who use content marketing to educate the audience about the products and services we offer. This is one of the very important aspects of content marketing.

However, people won’t come and purchase things from you just because you are educating them about your product and services. You need to do something more than that.

If you think product features and specs will make it happen, then you are wrong.

They will make a move only when you can convince them that your product will help them solve a problem or guide them to reach their goals.

This is where you need to pull the strings of emotions. Emotions play a role greater than you can imagine when it comes to buying decisions.

People are very much emotional about their problems and they will continue to look for a solution for them.

As a marketer, you must convince that your product and service is the solution they are looking for. You can optimize your digital marketing campaign by using emotions.

After all, the emotional connection with your customers helps you to sell better.

Six Marketing Strategies To Leverage Emotions To Drive Sales

In this section, I am going to give you six marketing techniques to leverage emotions to boost your sales.

Take note of these pointers to benefit your business.

1. Fear 

Fear is considered to be one of the most powerful emotions. You can leverage the power of fear in your sale in different ways.

The best way to do it is to create the fear of missing out on something or FOMO.

In this digital world, people feel FOMO more than ever. Here are some statistics to prove my point.

Majority of social media users believe that they need to monitor their social accounts regularly because they are constantly living in fear of missing out on something.

They are so much affected by it that it’s affecting their buying behaviors.

Now the question is how to use this emotion in your marketing strategy?

I would suggest you create ads, video and email campaigns for your website and social profiles that are time-sensitive.

For example, you must have seen many of the marketers running a flash sale for the next five hours. This type of marketing strategy causes buyers to act fast so that they don’t miss out on the sale.

A good example is Zulily.

They target busy moms, offering items like baby clothes and baby accessories at significantly reduced prices for a limited period of time.

The fear of missing the sale will make busy mums purchase immediately from the Zulily website. This will fulfill their business goals.

You can also try other ways to create fear based on the type of products and services you offer.

For example, you sell home video security systems. In this case, you can create an ad showing how your products can save their house from a home invasion.

Below is a good example from Ring.com

This will help you create fear in the minds of the customers. They may come to believe that their current home security system is not enough to prevent a burglary. As a result, they will come and purchase your product.

So that’s how you can use fear to draw customers to your website. First, consider the product and services you are selling and then think of the best way to use fear.

2. Greed

We are all greedy by nature, wouldn’t you agree? So why not make the customers greedier to buy your products and services?

Think of the times when you saw the offer Buy One, Get One and made the purchase. Why did you do so? Out of greed.

Here’s a great example from the Amazon website:

Just because a person is driven by his/her greed, doesn’t mean the person is bad. It’s just that they want more of something and unless they get it, they will not be satisfied.

It’s not only the buyers but even we marketers are greedy. Don’t we want more customers all the time?

You see the more, the merrier.

As a marketer, you should take advantage of this to make more sales.

Here are some ideas using which you can tap this emotion.

  • You should offer items at discounted rates. No person doesn’t love to buy discounted products while shopping.
  • You can also try the BOGO (buy one, get one) technique to lure more customers to your website.
  • You should try to come up with more such ideas to use the power of greed in your buyers.

3. Belonging

We all have a strong desire to belong to something. It can be anything, a group, community, social network, etc.

No matter what you call it sometimes customers buy a particular product or service because they want to show a sense of belonging.

The need to belong is very powerful and you can make good use of it in your marketing strategies.

What I am trying to say is that you should use your brand to establish a community among your buyers.

Every customer buying from you has something in common. Your work is to figure out these commonalities to create a community.

This will help you to create a sense of belonging to drive sales.

For example, your company sells bodybuilding products. Your customers are buying from you because they have something in common.

They know the things that are important for bodybuilding, the enhancing supplement they need and so on. You can create a forum where your customers can share their personal stories. This will build a sense of community in them.

Below is a good example of this concept from bodybuilding industry:

The website hosts a community of people who all share the common goal of online fitness.

4. Build trust

If you want to play in the long run then earning the trust of your customers is very much important.

People buy from you because they trust your products and services. If trust is not there, they will simply move on to some other brand.

The best way to earn trust is by using a customer loyalty program.

Loyal customers are likely to make more purchases from you. But you need to be completely transparent with them.

Things like hidden costs and extra fees destroy the trust of your buyers.

When your customers buy from you, they trust you with their details like the card number. Unless you are successful in convincing them that your company is trustworthy, they will not make a move from their end.

You need to take appropriate steps to keep your customer’s information protected. You should arrange for a secure checkout process, easy access to customer service and also provide free returns.

Once you earn their trust, it will be much easier for you to boost your sales.

Starbucks is a perfect example of this program in action. In order to earn loyalty points, you must order or pay with the Starbucks app.

5. Guilt

Guilt is yet another very powerful emotion you can use to drive your sales.

You need to create marketing messages that will make the customers feel guilty.

For example, charities use this technique in their ads to make you guilty over an evening meal or glass of beer.

Not only charities but even other brands in the industry can use guilt to get more sales.

Below is a good example of a guilt ad that was used by Scoro to advertise their productivity hacks.

The ad makes you think if you’re really contributing enough.

6. Remove frustration

Frustration is not the emotion that you want to associate your brand with.

You need to make sure that your customers have a smooth experience with your brand.

For example, if they are trying to buy a product from your site, they should be able to do it without any hassle.

Similarly, you should also provide them with dedicated customer service so that they can complain about their grievances.

A brand that fails to provide all of this to the customers, fails as a brand. That’s because this leads to frustration and you end up losing customers.

All successful brands out there take necessary steps to give their customers wonderful shopping experience with them. You should do it too, to get more customers to your site.

Conclusion

From the above discussion, we know that emotion plays a big role in driving sales. As a marketer, you need to leverage emotional triggers in your marketing strategies.

The marketing strategies or techniques you make should be based on the type of product and services you are selling.

Using emotions to sell your products is not wrong unless you are influencing your customers in a negative way or exploiting them.

If you can use emotions the right way, you can do wonder for your brands. It will not only get you more customers but will also increase your sales.

If you are new in the marketing world, you should learn the art of leveraging emotions in your marketing strategies. Now that you know the common emotions to trigger, it should be easier for you to create your marketing campaigns.

You can even take ideas from other brands, how they are doing it.

If you found this article useful, then do let me know in the comments.

If you want to boost your sales then you should try out these strategies.

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