Countless people are offering the same products or services you do. It becomes so hard to stand out or be the first in your customers minds when they need your service.
But theres a strategy that you can use to gather a sizeable amount of customers; Emotional Branding.
People almost always rely on their emotions first when they want to make decisions, especially the ones regarding buying.
Thats why smart marketers are using emotional branding techniques to win more clients.
But what at all is emotional branding? How can you use it to empower your target audience to do business with you?
Ill answer these questions in this post. By the end of this article, youll find actionable emotional branding tips you can use to draw more customers to your brand.
Lets dive in.
Table of Contents
What is emotional branding?
Emotional branding simply means marketing to your target audience in a way that incites an emotional response.
It also involves forming relationships between your brand and your customers by evoking certain emotions in them.
These emotions include anger, disgust, fear, happiness, or love. When done correctly, your customers would associate your brand with these emotions and choose you over your competitors.
Why do you need emotional branding?
No matter how much we think of ourselves as logical beings, in the end, humans rely on their emotions to make decisions.
That is why marketers like saying that we buy with emotion and justify with logic.
Normally, customers dont remember the minor details (like the brand colors, logo, or fancy fonts) about a brand. Instead, they remember how the brand made them feel.
Take Coca-Cola for example. Instead of selling the benefits of drinking coke with us, they rather share the happiness that comes from opening a bottle of coke.
Even though there may be other brands that taste better than Coke, they still have the largest share in the market.
So how do you empower your target audience with emotional branding?
Smart marketers appeal to the aspirations, ego, goals, and needs of the customers. And this is what moves their customers to take action.
Now that you know how powerful emotional branding is, lets see how you can attract and encourage your target customers to choose you based on emotional response.
How to drive business success with emotional branding
As Ive said before, emotional marketing is the driving force behind the success of brands. There are four strategies your brand can use to implement emotional branding. They are ;
- Understanding your audience
- Telling a compelling story
- Creating a community
- Using the right colors
Ill explain them as succinctly as possible so that you can start using them now. Lets get to it.
#1. Know your audience better than they know themselves
It goes without saying, but how would you connect with someone emotionally if you dont know them well enough?
So the first step in emotional marketing is to get to know your target audience.
What are their aspirations and goals? What makes them tick? What keeps them up at night?
Having clear-cut answers to these questions would help you know which emotion to incite in them.
The tried and true way to know your audience is to create a buyer persona. Buyer personas are graphical representations of your target customers.
Gathering the demographic and psychographic information about your persona would help you know them well enough to address the problems they care about.
#2. Tell stories that your customers can relate to
People love stories. They want to know the journeys of people overcoming their challenges. Telling compelling stories makes your audience relate to you on a personal level.
Your customers want stories they can be empathized with, inspired by, or learn from. It can be a simple story as to how your company came to being.
You can also narrate the experiences customers have encountered when using your services. Let your stories be about things your customers can relate to.
When your story is memorable, theyd remember it. And when they do, theyll remember your brand.
Try it now and tell us how it went in the comments section below.
#3. Create a community of users
According to Maslows theory of needs, everyone wants to feel a sense of belonging. Being part of a community of people who share similar interests creates a sense of acceptance and togetherness.
And thats what you want to strive for. Apple has done a great job at that.
They have a community of loyal users who offer support to other users. No wonder Apple fanatics would go above and beyond to defend the brand from their competitors.
You can start your community of users by creating social media groups and engaging with your customers there.
Use those platforms to entertain, encourage, and inspire your users.
People would love your brand over time. After all, theyll remember the camaraderie you made them feel.
#4. Use color to evoke the right emotions
If you havent put a lot of thought into your brands choice of color, then youre missing a lot! Science has shown that color evokes certain emotions.
For instance, warm colors like red, yellow, or orange incite emotions like love, passion, and happiness.
Cool colors like purple, blue, or green make people feel at ease or calm.
Depending on the emotions you want to arouse, using the right colors can help you achieve just that.
Final takeaways of emotional branding
The bottom line of emotional marketing is to create long-lasting relationships with your customers and to make them stick with your brand for a long time.
When you find out what ticks your customers, you tell them a story they can relate to, and you create a community around your brand, youll stand out among your competition.
If you do, youd draw a lot of loyal customers to your brand as a magnet does to metals.
Guest Blogger
Robb Fahrion is a Co-Founder and Partner of Flying V Group. He is passionate about helping businesses grow using the power of the internet. Robb graduated from Chapman University in Orange, CA and currently resides in Costa Mesa, CA. Robb enjoys writing about digital marketing, helping his clients turn their dreams into reality, and he is a HUGE Mike Trout fan.
