Emotional marketing plays a massive role in your business’s marketing campaigns, perhaps more than you realise. Every advert or commercial you see has been specifically designed to invoke an emotional response. What someone is wearing, their facial expressions, how they talk, the phrases they use – all of this makes consumers feel a certain way. In this article we discuss how you can Increase Sales by Making an Emotional Brand Connection.
You’ve probably heard the phrase “you’ll never get a second chance to make a first impression”, right? Well, it’s true. Psychologists Janine Willis and Alexander Todorov revealed that it only takes a tenth of a second to form an impression of a stranger.
Emotional branding is about creating an emotional connection in that split second. By doing so, a brand can step out beyond the rest of the crowd and build a loyal and dedicated fan base.
This, in turn, can increase sales and increase your revenue.
Table of Contents
Colour Psychology
A whole raft of research suggests that colours impact a persons’ emotions. They do this by setting off physiological and behavioural responses.
Colour psychology often differs between genders, invoking different emotional responses in men and women. Let’s have a quick look at popular brands and their dominant colours:
- Facebook – blue
- Coca-Cola – red
- Twitter – blue
- Pinterest – red
- BBC – red
These brands didn’t choose their colours by luck or coincidence, they were chosen because they signify values or elicit emotions that are appropriate to that brand or its products.
Image source: https://neilpatel.com/blog/how-colors-affect-conversions/
For example, red is associated with excitement, passion, anger and love (depending on the context) and can stimulate appetites.
Ever wondered why so many fast food joints have red logos? Colour psychology is why.
Example one:
Loreal’s website is primarily aimed at women. We know from Neil Patel’s colour psychology chart that women prefer the colours purple, blue and green.
Their website offers plenty of purple tones, as well as well thought out white space to accentuate their call to action (CTA) buttons.
They also touch on ideas of luxury and technological capability with blacks and greys.
This website has been cleverly designed to invoke an emotional brand connection.
Example two:
Blue is a firm favourite for both men and women and creates a sense of trust, peace, loyalty and order. Blue is commonly used to invoke the feeling of serenity.
It’s used by Facebook because it supports its values of trust and transparency.
This explains why blue is the dominant colour used by money and payment systems and banks. It’s there to remind you that the business you’re looking at can be trusted with your money.
Storytelling
Storytelling enhances the listener’s memory of a story. It engages the entire brain, including the amygdala, which is where memories are stored.
So it comes as no surprise that marketers use storytelling in order to make an emotional brand connection.
This infographic – created by One Spot – details exactly how storytelling can help you increase sales through emotional marketing. When you combine quality, story-focused content with the right distribution channels and some subtle retargeting, you’ll create a powerful connection with your ideal customers.
Social Proof
Plenty of brands rely more on word-of-mouth marketing than any other method. Take Airbnb as an example; their main source of revenue comes from people booking rooms, apartments, and houses.
People are more likely to book rooms if they believe others have enjoyed a good experience. 70% of consumers will read a product or service review before committing to a purchase, relying on social proof from others.
Social proof marketing is all about building trust. We’re more likely to form emotional connections with people and things we feel close to. That closeness might come from shared values; it could come from the recognition that others in your network like or approve of something.
Companies that use social proof marketing often put their faith in their customers to leave reviews and testimonials or offering real-life stories and use-cases.
Are you more likely to stay in a hotel room that has lots of positive reviews, or one that has no reviews at all? Better still, are you more likely to stay somewhere your friend said is great, or somewhere no one has been before?
Whilst social proof is more of a long-term solution, here is a selection of great social proof WordPress plugins you may want to consider to help you along.
I recommend using WordPress.org to make the most out of WordPress’ plugins. You can easily do this by choosing a great WordPress hosting provider who offers free WordPress 1-click installations.
It’s simple to sign up and could offer the increase in sales you’ve been looking for by making an emotional brand connection with your consumers.
Tone of Voice and personalisation
Customers who have an emotional connection with a brand have a 3x higher lifetime value. One of the best ways to get that emotional response is to personalise your content so consumers feel you’re engaging them in a one-on-one conversation.
Sadly, most consumers don’t expect brands to offer a personal experience. Part of personalisation is addressing people with the right tone of voice.
When your brand speaks like a person who’s having an everyday conversation, you’re halfway there.
The other half? Well, that’s things like offering tailored content based on previous likes and purchases, addressing by name, sending birthday gifts and other things besides.
Plenty of big players like Spotify have been finding ways to increase their sales by making an emotional brand connection. In 2015, Spotify debuted its weekly mixtape playlist.
They described it as “like having your best friend make you a personalised mixtape every single week”. In the first few months of its release, Spotify’s weekly mixtape playlist had over 1.7 billion streams, which is a pretty big endorsement of their approach.
Conclusion
Emotional marketing is far more effective than the typical corporate approach. Consumers shouldn’t feel like they’re being told to buy a product, they should feel like they’ve got a genuine emotional connection with your brand and that your products or services meet their personal wants or needs.
Emotional connections are at the heart of human responses. We’re designed to be emotionally connected to things, and that includes the brands we love.
Marketing that appeals to human nature is more likely to increase sales because it feels natural, useful and genuine.
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Author bio
Georgie Peru is a Content Contributor for UKWebHostReview. She is passionate about sharing her enthusiasm for technology through her content writing work, with a mission to help others learn and understand what makes the digital world so s