Why Your Content Needs Emotion
the only emotional response you should avoid is boring your audience to tears.
Beyond this, your content must evoke an emotional response to win customers & drive conversions.
What kind of content makes you tick? Is it the kind that forces you to consider the advertisement’s scenario in your own lived experience? The kind that elicits feelings of fear, joy, excitement or sadness? Or, is it the boring and factual kind that makes you say, “oh, yeah, that’s interesting” before forgetting the tedious ad and its corresponding product once and for all?
Well, I know which kind of ad will have me making the conversion and that will always be advertisements appealing to emotion. Given that emotional advertising performs twice as well (31% to 16%) to simply rational advertising it’s easy to see why taking the time to develop and refine an emotionally intelligent digital campaign is a key factor in creating unprecedented online success.
And, believe me, I’m a “professional copywriter”, and I can tell you that there is plenty of boring drivel out there. This is the kind of drivel where the copywriter, creative director, social media manager, whoever, didn’t bother to put themselves in the consumer’s shoes and create something emotionally captivating.
Unfortunately, digital marketing is made for the masses, and there are millions of business owners out there who don’t know the difference between exciting, emotionally-charged content, and the kind that just gets typed into Google Docs without any thought like a hyperactive child on a piano.
But you must find the writer who loves their job and wants to help you succeed. Yes, there is nobility in wanting to help the world’s business owners create content that amplifies their brand and drives conversions. Your noble writer will have a perfect understand of these reasons as to why emotional content is crucial for digital campaigns:
1. Emotional content drives engagement
I am going to think back to the last advert I saw that resonated with me. Done, it was an Instagram ad from the boys at Swag on the Beat. In the Kit Kat ad, one of the duo was heading home on a Melbourne tram, wearing a Kit Kat jack on top of a jack that matched the tacky green, yellow and black and pattern of Melbourne’s public tram network.
Suddenly, the duo’s other half spots him on the street, sprinting onto the train to engage with the other who, obviously, just wanted to “have a break”. Thus, he hurriedly covers himself head-to-toe in the green, yellow and black jacket to camouflage himself with the seat behind him and avoid the dreaded heading-home-bump-into-moment.
Now, I didn’t rush out to buy a Kit Kat, as I’m 32 and can’t go around eating Kit Kats all day, but I was sure to send it to a couple of mates who got the joke. Because, I absolutely hated running into people before and after work on Melbourne’s public transport system. I would even wait down the other end of the platform until I could rush onto the train and put my head down until we arrived at my stop.
Now, that’s not a diss on anyone I might have willingly avoided, I would have done it to my best mate if it meant 30 more minutes of me time on a busy day. The point is that I got it: we all need to “have a break” and that break could be from chatting with people in public when you might just want to listen to your favourite audiobook or something.
Given that advertisements with emotional appeal drive a 23% increase in sales it’s easy to see why creating emotional content is essential for business owners across the globe. You can’t just create content with facts and even if you tried you would have to add some connection to the fact to make it appeal to our human sides.
2. Emotional content conveys authenticity & promotes loyalty
Because we simply can’t engage with the sad, fun or fear-filled facts of life without some authenticity to convey them. Without advertisements appealing to emotion, we would simply be looking at facts on a screen, something that does little to evoke an emotional reaction.
Advertisements that appeal to emotion show that there was a fun, creative and likely handsome individual behind the content, and not some machine regurgitating facts into dull drivel. Despite what they keep telling us, people still want to see human-generated content, and it still makes a big difference when it comes to the likes of Google ranking your website in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
What’s more, the likes of AI-generated content is unable to convey authenticity, as AI is unconscious and unable to resonate with their client on an emotional level in order to create emotionally-intelligent content. Therefore, the last thing you want is for your brand to convey the exact same messaging as your AI-dependent competitors, you will simply never stand out.
What’s more, brands with emotionally-intelligent content experience a 15% increase in customer retention, confirming the fact that such content promotes customer loyalty. This is especially so in the digital marketing era, where social media has bridged the gap between brand and consumer, essentially making the marketing process a social situation.
It’s commonplace for even some of the world’s biggest brands to directly engage with their customers through the likes of Instagram. Therefore, consumers want to feel like they can trust the brand that is engaging with them in ways that television couldn’t allow. Once they feel that the brand has won their trust they will likely reward the brand with their loyalty.
3. Emotional content is incredibly memorable
Our emotions play an intricate role in our ability to remember what we see and hear. They have an ability to register our sensations and index them as memories. These memories can cover our whole emotional spectrum and both good and bad memories still resonate with us when it comes to advertising.
The last thing we want to see is content that doesn’t resonate with us. We are humans with a huge range of emotions and if an advertisement is unable to play on those emotions then it is an advertisement that has been very poorly done. The same goes with your digital marketing campaign as it should contain information that is fresh, engaging and instantly-memorable.
You want your customer to remember your brand and the only way to do that is through creating content that creates a memory. You won’t get that anywhere, and you need to do your research to find creative directors, copywriters, social media managers and more who are renowned for creating the content that your customers will remember when it comes to making that ultimate purchase decision.
Of course, you can always create your own web copy, as you too are a human being who knows what kind of advertising will evoke a response. The most important thing is to put yourself into your customer’s position and ask yourself, “what would I want to see if I was reading this blog, listening to this podcast, watching this TikTok?” and then the ideas will come rushing in.
But, of course, you probably don’t have the time to do that, and like millions of other business owners need the expertise of a dedicated professional with the skills to make your target audience laugh, cry and laugh again, all on the way to making your brand far more memorable than your wet blanket competitors.
