When it comes to branding and advertising, many brands usually stick to raving about how great their product/service is. While assuring customers about quality offerings is certainly important in any marketing strategy, for a brand to establish a strong and enduring engagement with its customers, it has to tap into the customer’s emotions. Brands that bond with their customers on an emotional level stand a good chance of earning several resulting benefits. 

Let’s define customer emotion first.

Whenever a customer interacts with your brand in any way, they walk away with an experience. It’s this impression that contributes to developing certain emotion(s) within the customers towards your brand. They might feel joy, awe, self-confidence, hope, safety, curiosity, or any other emotion. The interactions lead customers into feeling a certain way about your brand, and this emotional engagement must happen. If your brand succeeds in inspiring emotions within the buyers, then you’ve found a way to make yourself memorable. 

When you have the right insights into your customers, you can tailor a strategy that helps in eliciting the intended emotions from them. Hence, it helps that you have thorough buyer personas ready, showing important aspects about your target customers, to guide your emotional branding/marketing strategies.

Why do customer emotions matter so much in marketing?

Wondering why is it so important for brands to appeal to their customers’ emotions? Well, emotions are powerful motivators, so much so that they often influence people’s decision-making process. If a customer has felt positive emotions upon interacting with your brand, then that’s something that will stay with them for a long time. These emotions will drive them to keep engaging with your brand time and again in the future. This not only means that they may like to buy from you again, but it also means that they may feel generous enough to share your brand’s content. Furthermore, they may also feel inclined to recommend your brand to the people they care about, with the hope of sharing this positive experience with them.

Having an emotional connection with your buyers also allows you to create a distinctive identity for yourself in the buyers’ minds. The positive emotions that customers associate with your brand could eventually become just the edge you need over your competition. Customers would stay loyal to you and would be less likely to ditch you over factors like pricing. 

Moreover, customers value experiences that are created considering them. When they see a brand that seems to be talking specifically to them and appealing to their feelings, they immediately feel a sort of attachment to the brand. Customers see advertisements all the time, but your efforts to spark an emotional connection will result in extraordinary advertisements, the kind that surely grabs the love and attention of customers.  

For a newly launched brand, that’s still finding its footing in the market, emotional branding/marketing becomes all the more essential. The competition is already there, and so portraying yourself as something different can be difficult. This is where the potential of customer emotions can be leveraged to make a lasting impression. If the brand manages to make the potential customers feel something powerful through its messaging and advertising, then it’s off to a great start. 

Given the strong relationship between customer emotions and their behavior, eliciting a positive emotional response from customers towards your brand is essential. It’d mean that you’ve made an impact and customers are now truly interested in you. 

How to capture the desired customer emotions?

Target the right emotion that works for your brand

The first step is to identify what emotional response would be the most favorable for your brand. If you’re a brand that sells products for children, then you want prospective buyers to feel a sense of delight and safety when they come across your brand. If you offer high-fashion clothes, then you want your customers to feel exclusivity. It’s upon you to figure out which emotion is going to help evoke the desired response and decisions from your customers. Remember, you’re also creating your brand perception while doing so, meaning customers will associate these sentiments with you over the long term. Therefore, decide wisely now, and then keep endeavoring to maintain the emotional connection.   

Utilize storytelling skills to connect emotionally

If you want your customers to see you as more than just a business that’s chasing profits, then you should build an engaging narrative around your brand. Without a story showcasing the uniqueness of your brand, getting your customers to develop an emotional perspective towards your brand can be difficult. Make your advertising campaigns story-oriented. To do so, you have to keep your customer persona in mind. Think of the kind of story that will be most meaningful for your customers as well as the emotions that you want customers to experience on listening to the story. Encapsulate who you’re as a brand and the purpose behind your offerings within a beautiful story. 

Use social media to build emotional relationships

Social media is excellent for keeping the audience engrossed via emotional experiences. In today’s world, people share a big part of their lives over social media. From their likes and dislikes to the ideas they support, they talk about everything on these platforms. It’s important that you, as a brand, try and become a part of the conversations that are relevant to your target audience. Share content that will help nurture the relationship with your followers, for example, impactful stories about your brand. Have meaningful dialogues with your followers, letting them know that you’re interested in understanding their sentiments. 

Summary

A branding and marketing strategy that takes into account the significance of customer emotions is going to yield rewarding results for the brand in the long run. Helping tremendously with customer acquisition and loyalty, it’s the emotional link that allows a brand to sustain its market positioning regardless of the competition. With InstaVix, you can discover the most effective branding and marketing ways that allow you to develop and preserve positive emotional bonds with your customers.