Would you like a powerful marketing tool to level-up your marketing?

When you started your business, I bet you didn’t think that you’d have to become a late-night marketing student. Spending your evenings Googling how to market your business – so you can get more clients and pay the bills at the end of the month.

I mean, we don’t pop out of the womb as expert marketers, do we? It’s something we have to learn and something people spend years studying in college. So, give yourself some slack if your marketing efforts involve a lot more trial and error than success.

While I can’t give you that magical marketing toolkit, I can share one of the most powerful marketing tools that most people don’t know about – or know how to use – and that’s emotion.

Think about the last big-ticket item you bought, now when you bought that thing – what were you feeling? Excited, nervous, bored, FOMO, happy, hungry…

I’ll bet an emotion you felt or wanted to feel, helped influence why you bought what you bought.

You see we’re all emotional beings and what we buy is driven by what we feel.

Emotion is one of the most powerful forces when it comes to what we buy. Get someone to feel something, and you’ve got their attention. And in today’s world, attention is the new currency.

Think about a commercial, any commercial. What’s the first one that came to mind? What was it about that ad that made you think of it? Did it make you laugh? Did it surprise or shock you? Did it inspire you? Guaranteed, it made you feel something, which is why it popped into your head when I asked you to think of a commercial.

As Maya Angelou said, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

So, if you can get your audience to feel something, they’ll probably buy from you – and if they don’t buy, they’ll definitely remember you for the future or perhaps refer you to a friend.

 

So, how do we evoke emotion in our marketing?

#1 Know your audience

As with anything marketing related, it starts with having a deep understanding of your audience. If you want to make them feel happy, you need to understand what makes them happy in order to be able to evoke that emotion in them.

#2 What do you want them to feel?

Next, you need to know exactly what emotion you’d like to evoke. And as illustrated by Robert Plutchik’s “wheel of emotions” there are so many other emotions beyond the 4 basic ones, happy, sad, angry and afraid. And the emotions you want to convey need to align with your brand. For example, a toy brand wouldn’t want to evoke sadness or boredom, right? They’d want to evoke the opposite.

#3 Tell stories

One of the easiest ways to evoke emotions is to tell a story. We all love a good story. One of the very best examples I can think of is the, Always, #LikeAGirl campaign. I mean – who would’ve thought ads for feminine products could be inspirational? But what a great story they told with these ads!  For example in this ad, when the interviewer asks the young boy who’s just ‘thrown like a girl’ – “So do you think you just insulted your sister?”. You can see him come to the realisation that he had just insulted her. So powerful.

So, you see, you’ll make a much bigger impact if you create vivid narratives or stories to add to your marketing content.

You’ll make a much bigger impact if you can create vivid narratives or stories to add to your marketing content.

Customer case studies are a great way to tell a story and evoke emotions. Especially if you can narrate it as a hero’s journey where your customer started off ready for a change. Then share what they had to overcome during the process and finally, share the transformation they achieved. Hero’s journey stories are super powerful.

Another way to evoke emotion is if you have a great (emotional) backstory to why you started your business – that’s another way to stand out from the noise and make people take notice.

 

Conclusion:

In a world that’s becoming more and more about creating a connection, being able to tap into your audience’s emotions will help you create an impact with your marketing.

So why don’t you try it out today?

Find a way to evoke an emotion in your marketing content. You won’t regret it.