Tag Archive for: content marketing
Imagine your advertising and marketing becoming 2X more effective overnight. Using emotions in marketing and branding is the key to more effective campaigns
According to Roger Dooley, emotional ads work TWICE as well as rational ads. So it’s important your campaign incorporates emotion from the start. You can deploy these emotions through copy and creative in all formats, analog and digital.
Before you create your next campaign, check in with these powerful emotions in marketing and branding. Be sure you’ve considered your strategy, both long and short term before deciding which emotion works best in your marketing.
Fear
Fear comes in many forms, and it creates a sense of urgency.
Fear also heightens any other emotion created alongside it and it drives us to make deeper connections with those we share the fear with-this is why scary movies create deepen relationships.
There are several different kinds of fear, but two common types include:
“Fear Of Missing Out” (FOMO): This particular fear tends to work well on younger people in social media. This works particularly well for items with time sensitivity.
“Fear of Isolation”: closely connected to FOMO, fear of isolation, used in connection with health products, deodorant for example: “use this so you don’t smell, because when you smell, you become a social pariah.”
When to Use Fear in Emotional Marketing/Branding:
- To drive leads
- You have a specific and actionable solution
- You have an easy, no stress way to buy
Happiness/Joy
What happens when we feel happy? You might be surprised.
It’s a fine line because if we’re too happy, we might not be motivated to purchase. But happiness DOES make us want to share. It seems good news travels fast. According to a study by Fractl these are the Top 5 emotions which drive viral content:
- Amusement
- Interest
- Surprise
- Happiness
- Delight
When to Use Happiness in
in Emotional Marketing/Branding:
- You want others to share your message
- You want to build trust and loyalty
- You can commit to happy content as a brand
Inclusion
One of our oldest motivations is the need to be part of a tribe, included in a group. For our earliest ancestors, it was a requirement for survival, today, that need is still a powerful motivator and when we have it, we feel safe which leads to loyalty.
When to Use Inclusion in
in Emotional Marketing/Branding
- To attract or retain customers
- When you can also utilize the fear of missing out
- When you have the processes and platforms to create and sustain community
Anticipation
We’re hardwired to anticipate outcomes. We’re not always right, but we are always anticipating. You can use anticipation in a couple of different ways, to attract and retain customers.
Attracting customers with anticipation typically comes with a stimuli and an outcome. The faster the outcome, the more likely we are to repeat the stimuli. Once we’re hooked on the stimuli, the outcome frequency can become variable (you might have learned about Pavlov’s dog, this is the same theory). Gamification uses anticipation brilliantly.
Keeping customers with anticipation requires a product commitment (free sample with every order) or an anticipation experience connected to the product (why subscription boxes are so popular). You can create variables in the anticipation (products, frequency) that will actually heighten the anticipation.
Something else about anticipation: it DECREASES when we’re stressed and change can be stressful. This is why consistency in branding is so very important and why big changes for big brands are big-time risks. Can you think of a brand whose big change created major negative upheaval for them?
When to Use Anticipation in
in Emotional Marketing/Branding:
- You have the willingness to keep the anticipation fresh
- You want to build loyalty and repeat buyers
- Your brand is elevated and/or lifestyle oriented
Expertise/Leadership
Making your customer feel like they’re the smartest/sexiest/most influential is a great way to get people’s attention. People love to be the most “something” of their friends and people will work to achieve this effect.
This marketing emotion is closely connected with our need for mastery and our innate value of time. Because of these two addition motivations, the harder you make it the more committed they will become to the process. It’s all about our emotional triggers again, we’re hardwired to commit more time to something we’ve already committed time to – this is the same theory behind the test drive and keeping you at the dealership during a car purchase.
Again, games do this quite well. Successful fitness trainers do this quite well.
When to Use Expertise and Leadership in your Marketing/Branding
- When you have a unique process people can move through and see improvement
- As a relationship builder, such as influencer marketing or tips and tricks your customers can use
Good luck and I look forward to hearing how you’re using emotion in your marketing and branding.
Captivation Motivations can significantly change your content strategy.
This is the second installment of a series on the seven Captivation Motivations. This installment is all about your owned media and creating a content strategy that meets your objectives while also thrilling and delighting your audience.
Did you know that we’re all ruled by a super-powerful hormone? It’s true.
This hormone dominates decision-making, especially split-second choices like the ones digital users are making every day.
Decisions like “click,” “like,” “retweet,” and more importantly, “buy” and “subscribe” are all significantly affected by this hormone.
Savvy marketing strategists have been triggering this hormone for years, some knowingly, some stumbling upon it.
You’ve undoubtedly heard of this hormone.
You’ve heard about in the context of drugs, sex, and even food.
But what does this hormone do for marketers?
I’ll get to that in a minute.
First, a little more about this hormone: dopamine.
See? I told you you’ve heard of it.
Dopamine is best known as the “pleasure hormone.”
It’s the hormone that creates the surge of euphoria that we feel after a particularly satisfying (insert pleasure here).
But, the surge of satisfaction is not actually the most powerful tool in a communicator’s arsenal.
The most powerful tool for the content communicator is anticipation.
And it turns out that dopamine is actually more aptly described as the “wanting and seeking” hormone.
Ah. Now you get it right?
It turns out that the “wanting and seeking” trigger is MORE powerful than the “satisfaction.”
This means we’re hard-wired to keep looking, keep seeking until we satisfy our wanting and seeking.
And then we’re hard-wired to do it all again.
Think for just a moment about the advantage to your content and overall marketing strategy if you can trigger this motivation.
Images can trigger our wanting and seeking. Ever seen a really great close-up shot of your favorite food and searched for how to have it delivered at lunch that.very.day?
Images of just about anything we want can trigger our “wanting and seeking” hormone.
This means you really need to think about the images you’re using in marketing and advertising, because images are incredibly key to the top of the funnel.
While we see food and sex all the time in marketing, it might be that those images aren’t appropriate for your brand.
Good news for you.
Because there’s more.
Guess what else fuels our anticipation?
Just guess.
This is super important because not all businesses and campaigns are suitable for triggering food, sex and drug urges.
Curiosity.
The brain experiences dopamine rushes when we’re curious for more information.
Think about the last Google search you did. Ever been sucked down the rabbit hole of Google and found yourself coming out of the other side 45 minutes later?
That’s your insatiable, hormone-driven seeking and wanting trigger.
That’s your brain on the anticipation train.
Our quest for information is basically never-ending.
We’re hard-wired that way, and from an evolutionary standpoint, this is a splendid thing.
Now WHAT information triggers this is the key.
This is where we circle back around to audience identification and personalization.
We’re inundated with information, so we have to be very, very clear on our audience so we understand WHAT kind of information or curiosity triggers our target audience.
Motivational triggers work on all people, but what triggers the motivation is where your marketing research and strategy comes in.
Another thing that triggers our wanting and seeking hormone is unexpected prompts that are auditory or visual.
You know what does this exceptionally well?
Your phone. It beeps, or vibrates or a message pops up and you almost ALWAYS stop what you are doing to look at it don’t you?
If you don’t, it takes an active and conscious effort on your part.
This is why my most hated and dreaded marketing tactic, pop-up messaging is so powerful.
I personally drop right out of a page when I get a pop-up because I feel like it’s insensitive to the reader, but the truth is, it works on the vast majority of people because the surprise triggers the wanting and seeking.
Novelty and unpredictability also trigger our seeking behavior.
This is why “New and Improved” works.
The Counter Intuitive Path
You’ve probably heard over and over again to simplify. The message is too long. The funnel is to long.
Overall, this is good advice.
HOWEVER, once you really understand the “seeking and wanting” hormone, your path can actually be quite long, so long as it keeps triggering curiosity and gives information in small bits and pieces, if it gives anything until it offers the solution.
Ever seen an ugly landing page that was all text that you ended up reading despite yourself?
Really awesome copy writers understand how to use this tactic in writing to move you through the process.
Interestingly enough, the more time you spend on something, the more committed you are.
So long copy, long funnels, they have a purpose and in the right situation, the right circumstance, the right audience, they work.
In A Nutshell:
Here it is in a nutshell, for fast and motivational results: trigger the wanting and seeking hormone.
Make your audience curious.
Lead them down a path that satisfies in bits and pieces.
Experiment with what triggers curiosity in your audience, experiment with the strength of their curiosity with funnel length.
Triggering the “wanting and seeking” hormone is the very premise behind free information in content marketing and the internet in general.
The Pursuit of Pleasure Captivation Motivation is tied closely to how we internalize rewards as well. The next post in this series will be all about rewards, the kinds used in promotions, so stay tuned.
About the Captivation Motivations:
The Captivation Motivations are all built around what I call our “other 90%” of our brain. The part of our brain that is the oldest and most developed part of our brain.
I didn’t make up the Captivation Motivations, I’ve been studying them and their effects since 2009. I’ve been testing them in my strategies and tactics, reading and writing about them.
Simply put, these motivations are not some flash-in-the-pan-do-what’s-trendy-now strategy, these are strategies which trigger reactions from the oldest part of our brain. Over the last few years, more and more has been understood about these motivations. But one thing is clear: despite the fact that these motivations developed in the earliest days of humanity’s survival of the fittest experiences, these motivations are very much alive and well today. What triggers them in the modern world is just different than what triggered them in our earliest evolutionary days.
PS: If you’re really interested in this topic, I suggest you read some of the academic works by Kent Berridge; he’s done some really amazing research on the topic.
When your building content, you’ve got to remember not to be blinded by the demographics. Sort of. To explain: last we I talked about how you shouldn’t be too blinded by demographics in social media, because, people like to talk to other people, not marketers. Building content that attracts customers and clients is about putting yourself in their shoes.
What to Consider When Building Content
Guess what? The same is true of content. If you’re building content, you should build it to attract the kind of people you want to do business with. I don’t mean the demographics of the audience, I mean the characteristics. Consider what inspires your ideal audience. What brings them into your world and shows that you can relate to them? One of the readers of last week’s post, Gwen, made a salient point: she wants to work with other women-owned businesses, so she supports women businesses in her sharing and tweeting. Not exclusively, but it’s definitely a focus. But what Gwen does very, very well is communicate in a tone that’s likely to attract professional women. She is supportive, positive, and warm in her tweets and engagements. Women are likely to be attracted to that type of communication so she naturally attracts more of the type of business she wants with that tone.
Dress for the customer you want
But again, it isn’t about demographics, its about attracting the type of business you want. Communicate to your potential clients like they communicate with their peers. It’s the same philosophy of dressing for the job you want. It’s one thing to know who your audience IS, it’s another thing to know who you want your audience to BE. Dress for the audience you want. And that’s what we need to think about in our communication with our audience. If you aren’t sure what I mean by that, take a step back, start a listening campaign. Start watching what your ideal customers talk about, what they share and who they share it with. Start tracking your clicks on your posts – which of your posts created action? Which were reshared? You’ll learn a lot from your audience if you dig a little deeper.
When you create content, think about what your ideal customers would like to see and in what format they’d like to see it. By content, I don’t just mean blog posts, and Tweets and Facebook updates, I mean all content. Content can be expensive to make, so make it worth your while. Consider companies who are creating infographics. They know that infographics are easy to read quickly and easy to share: perfect for our attention-deficit social media community. But other companies create white papers, they are trying to attract decision-makers who have the time and budgets to dig into info deeper. Using video is extremely powerful, when you consider who will be viewing the content (I’m still not clear on who this Bollywood-Planned Parenthood video was trying to say and to whom), but a video that speaks to your audience in a way that they can relate? Powerful stuff. Me? I create blog posts that are conversational in tone, occasionally take a risk and encourage some creative thought-I like people who can appreciate that tone, I work well with them.
And that’s really the point. When you stake your ground and create a strong voice, you may not attract everyone..but you will attract those people who you wish to attract and work with. At the end of the day, its more important to find the people who have the characteristics of people you work well with.
What are the characteristics of your ideal clients?
Photo Credit (Creative Commons) http://www.flickr.com/photos/uggboy/
