Why brands should tap into emotions when telling their story
Emotional psychology has been around in marketing forever; well before it was a buzzword. Using emotions to connect with your audience is a tried and tested method and a marketing tool that you should be sharpening. Here’s why.
95% of our cognition or understanding comes from our subconscious, or our ‘emotional brain’, which has an immediate response to stimulus and tells us how we feel about it, even before we rationally process it.
Emotions drive connections
Your emotional brain is what stops your thumb in its tracks to watch a video or look at an image when you’re scrolling through social media on your phone. It’s what evokes your connection to a brand, even before you remember why you like the product.
Consider this: do you prefer Apple or Microsoft?
You’re likely to have an instant preference before you even start to rationalise your choice. Perhaps Apple invokes perceptions of sophistication, innovation and prestige, even before you remember that you simply prefer the user interface.
Once you have an emotional connection and you’re interested in what a brand has to say, your logical brain steps in to progressively process the information. Decisions are still mostly made by the emotional brain, however.
Emotional connection is the first step to building a customer relationship
As a brand, making an emotional connection with your audience is often the first step to building a relationship with them and ultimately getting them to buy. And there’s proof that tapping into emotions works: 31% of advertisers reported significant profit gains with emotional campaigns. That was almost double that of rational campaigns.
But how do we form emotional bonds with our customers? The most effective way is through storytelling. Think about the last video that grabbed you long enough to watch it. What did you feel? Did it make you laugh? Fill you with empathy? Or were you awestruck?
Take a moment to watch this story and consider what emotion it conjures up for you:
It turns out that the top emotions that appeal to people in content are awe (25%), laughter (17%) and amusement (15%). But they’re not the only ones. They’re followed by joy, surprise, empathy, anger, and sadness.
But before you go throwing the net wide to tug on every emotion at once, be warned: your customers won’t respond well to being taken on an emotional rollercoaster throughout one piece of content. Your content strategy should cover a range of emotions, sure, but limit each individual piece to just one.
Want to see another example of emotional storytelling in action? Check out this video:
Ready to start connecting with your customers through emotional storytelling? We can help.