The choices you make aren’t as rational as you’d like to think. Your emotion plays a big role in influencing your decisions. This emotional factor is perhaps the reason why most people prefer Coke over Pepsi despite the latter winning blind tasting tests. That’s exactly why you should use it to an advantage and tap into your customers’ emotions for marketing your brand and products. And what better way to do this than through influencers?
And what better way to do this than through influencers?
Several facts prove how influencers are a great way to reach out to an audience and form an emotional bond with them. According to Nielsen , 83% of consumers trust recommendations from people they know. Acumen also found that over 60% of people across all age groups would try a brand or product that has been recommended by a YouTuber. The reason behind this is that they trust those people and have a positive attitude towards them. They’ve formed an emotional connection, and they feel like they can relate to them.
Emotional Bonds and Consumer Behavior
Before we get started with how influencer marketing and consumer emotions are intertwined, let’s take a look at how emotion plays a role in consumer behavior. According to Antonio Damasio, a neurology professor at the University of South California, emotion plays an essential role in almost all decisions. Psychology Today published an article regarding his findings, which are documented in his book Descartes Error.
Damasio says people associate certain emotions with previous experiences. They then use these emotions to give value to similar experiences they face later on and then make a decision based on those emotions. According to the article:
- fMRI neuro-imagery reports shows that customers primarily use emotions rather than information when evaluating brands. Emotions may refer to anything from personal feelings to experiences. Information constitutes factors like facts, features, and brand attributes.
- An ad’s content doesn’t have as much influence on a consumer’s intent to buy as compared to their emotional response to the advertisement. The difference between the impact of emotional response and ad content is at the ratio of 3:1 for television commercials and 2:1 for print ads.
- Emotion likeability plays the biggest role in whether an advertisement will increase sales for a brand. This means if someone views an ad and experiences positive emotions due to the ad, it’s highly likely that they will make a purchase.
- The influence of positive emotions on a consumer’s loyalty is far greater than that of trust and other brand attribute-based judgments. So even if you find a brand trustworthy, and you feel their product has great features, chances are you won’t buy from them if you associate negative emotions towards the brand.
It’s clear that a brand is only as good as the consumer’s mental representation of the brand or product. If this representation is only made up of certain attributes like features and pricing, the consumer doesn’t have any emotional links towards the brand that will influence their preference and action. Positive emotional content in the mental representation will not only encourage sales, but also drive loyalty.
8 Successful Influencer Marketing Tips with Emotions
Understanding how emotions play a role in consumers’ purchase decisions is only the first step. Now comes the hard part – getting customers to connect with your brand and products on an emotional level. This is where influencers come to play. The importance of influencer marketing is evident in all aspects of a brand’s performance such as conversions, engagement, and brand awareness. It’s equally effective in creating an emotional bond between consumers and brands.
People might have never heard of your brand, but they know certain influential individuals. They’ve identified with them, trusted them, and formed an emotional connection with these personalities. So you can make the most of their influence to get consumers to associate positive emotions with your brand.
Here are a few tips and ideas to help you out:
1. First, know your audience.
This is a crucial step before doing any kind of marketing, much less emotional marketing. If you don’t know your audience, how will you know what kind of content they’ll respond to best? How will you know which emotion to target to elicit the best, most valuable response for both them and you?
Before deciding which emotion to weave into your marketing, conduct some serious target audience research. Like any marketing effort, you want to elicit an emotion that resonates with their pain points or general desires and dreams. Researching your audience will better inform your marketing decisions and save you precious time and resources.
2. Lead with color.
This might seem like a simple strategy, but it holds more influence than you think. Like I explained above, color and emotion are closely tied … in more ways than one.
Color actually plays a major role in evoking emotion. Have you ever walked into a room and immediately (and inexplicably) felt some type of way? This is called color psychology, and a wide variety of businesses and organizations use it. Therapists paint their offices to calm their patients, football teams choose jersey colors that excite their players and audiences, and movie producers design the color scheme for posters and trailers that elicit feelings of fear or surprise.
The same goes for brands. Consider the Coca-Cola red or Starbucks green. The color red evokes strong feelings such as love, excitement, and joy (as well as anger and warning). In the case of Coca-Cola, red portrays positive, friendly energy.
On the other hand, the color green is often associated with harmony, balance, nature, growth, and health — all components of the Starbucks brand and “green” movement.
3. Forget big influencers.
The bigger the influence, the more exposure your brand gets. This is where a lot of marketers go wrong in choosing influencers for their brand. This is because exposure doesn’t automatically help you create emotional bonds with consumers. If you’re looking to just create brand awareness for the time being, top influencers may be a great idea.
When you’re looking to form emotional connections, however, you need to focus your efforts on mid-level niche influencers. They could be bloggers or YouTubers related to your business with good engagement and fan following. Unlike big influencers, mid-level influencers often have the time to engage with their audience. For instance, a food blogger may be of much greater help than a celebrity chef in promoting your online grocery store.
Some may even find the time to answer each and every question fans raise. So influencers in smaller niches may have a much better ability to connect with audiences on an emotional level. This means you should be prioritizing relevance over mass reach. When you’re searching for the right influencer for your brand, look for higher engagement levels instead of large social following.
Tyson Foods reached out to mommy bloggers and launched a “Play with Your Food” campaign over the 2012 holiday season. The idea was to have these bloggers share pictures and posts about Tyson chicken nuggets decorated in a holiday theme. As a result of this campaign, they managed to get 8.8 million impressions, which exceeded their goal by 70%. By Christmas time, the company had managed to empty their stock of chicken nuggets.
4. Reward brand advocates.
In marketing, anyone can be an influencer. So you don’t have to limit yourself to well-known personalities. People who are already customers with your brand and love your products are useful brand advocates. Brand advocates are those people who love what you’re doing and do everything they can to positively promote you without any expectations. They may not always have a huge social following, but they have friends and family who could just be your next customers.
You can implement these advocates into your influencer marketing by rewarding them. This will make it much easier for them to share their love for your brand. You could provide these advocates with exclusive offers or feature them on your blog or social media. Even the smallest of gestures could encourage them to promote your brand even further and give them a reason to rave about you.
It could be something simple such as sharing a photo taken by fans related to your brand or product. Take the example of Yorkshire Tea , for instance. The brand often shares images sent in by fans and manage to generate plenty of engagement on their Facebook page.
5. Tell a story.
Storytelling is a surefire way to connect with your audience. Whether through sadness, anger, passion, or excitement, stories are easily relatable and shareable, regardless of the makeup of your audience.
Proctor & Gamble’s commercial titled “Thank You Mom” aired before the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. It features many famous Olympians and the stories of how their mothers supported them throughout their athletic careers. Since mothers are a large part of P&G’s target audience, the commercial is perfectly positioned to both tell a resonating story and market their products.
Another heartwarming piece of emotional marketing is MetLife’s commercial “My Father is a Liar”. It chronicles the life of a young girl and her father, who’s attempting to get a better life to care for his family. The commercial closes with the tagline “A child’s future is worth every sacrifice,” which positions the ad to connect with MetLife’s target audience: parents and families who’d do anything to provide for their children.
6. Create a movement or community.
Using emotional marketing to establish a movement or community around your brand taps into a few different psychological triggers. The bandwagon effect it creates keeps people intrigued by what the crowd is doing. Also, feelings of camaraderie, acceptance, and excitement can create a sense of loyalty to your brand.
TOMS does a great job of crafting this sense of community. When you purchase a pair of TOMS, you not only help someone in need, but you also join the TOMS community. You now belong. The marketers at TOMS enhance this community by promoting activities like “One Day Without Shoes” and encouraging their customers to use hashtags when sharing images.
7. Inspire the impossible.
Aspiration isn’t quite an emotion, but the process of feeling inspired definitely brings out many emotions: elation, joy, excitement, hope … just to name a few. Aspirational campaigns are powerful because they tap into a dream, goal, or vision that your audience longs to reach. To successfully target aspiration as a marketing approach, businesses should understand how their product helps their consumers reach those lofty dreams and desires.
Red Bull executes this approach well through their “Red Bull Gives You Wings” campaign. Their commercials feature intense moments where real athletes are achieving their goals and dreams. These ads also associate Red Bull with feelings of elation, excitement, and hope that, one day, you can reach your dreams, too.
8. Project an ideal image.
While some advertisements tap into how we’re currently feeling, others elicit emotions that we’d like to feel. That’s the goal behind projecting an ideal image through your marketing. Great marketing explains how a certain product or service can solve for a pressing problem. Great emotional marketing uses emotion to convince consumers that your product is not only the right solution, but that you can also feel great using it.
Brands like Old Spice use the “ideal image” to their advantage when marketing their hygiene products. Their iconic “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” uses humor to insinuate that you (or your man, ladies) could be as handsome, accomplished, and suave as the actor in the commercial … all by purchasing and using the Old Spice product.
Over to You
Weaving emotion into your marketing and advertising is a surefire way to attract, resonate with, and encourage your audience to act. Think of emotional marketing as the secret weapon you never knew you had.
To successfully put emotion in your marketing, all you need to do is know your audience and know which emotions would resonate most. Align these with your overall marketing goals, and your emotional marketing efforts will be some of your most effective.
