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The Art of Emotional Selling: 7 Powerful Ways to Invoke Emotion in Sales and Marketing

You know those sad commercials you see late at night? The ones with the starving animals and somber music?

While those ads may turn you into a weepy mess every time you see them, there’s a reason advertisers took such a heavy-handed approach.

Research shows that emotions influence our purchasing decisions.

Ready to learn more? Keep reading and learn about the correlation between emotions and advertising, plus get seven tips on how you can invoke emotion through your marketing.

1. Let’s Get Visual

As the old saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words.

Visuals are often the best way to portray emotion, as they have over text-based marketing.

For one thing, visuals make a message more tangible. What’s more powerful: Reading about a group of starving children in Africa or seeing a photo of them?

The photo would make the situation more tangible, without a doubt. While reading about the group of children could stir emotion, seeing them and putting faces to the situation makes it more real.

Also, your message is more likely to stick with consumers through a visual medium. One study suggests that our brains remember up to 95% of a message when watched, compared to 10% when read.

By conveying your message in a visual medium, you’ll not only make the situation more real to viewers, but they’ll be more likely to remember your product or service afterword.

2. Have Your Product Take a Backseat to the Message

A great way to convey emotion about your product or service is to create a narrative around it.

Take the Coca-Cola Christmas adverts with the polar bears, for instance. On paper, there’s little reason why the campaign should work.

The interesting thing about the polar bear campaigns is that they don’t center around delicious, bubbly soda at all. Instead, these commercials tell short stories about spending time with loved ones, going on adventures

But by evoking emotions like togetherness, belonging, or holiday joy, Coke’s annual ads do a great job of selling the product.

In essence, the commercials are less about the product and more about the emotion that the product enhances.

It’s also a great way to tug at customers’ heartstrings. Notice how the vitality science cat cancer website talks first and foremost about pets, not the product itself.

3. Target Customer Pain Points

Empathy is one of the most important feelings in emotional selling. Today’s customer wants to feel understood. If you can’t empathize with the customer, you run the risk of driving them off to a business that can.

To relate to your customers, understand why they’d use a product or service like yours in the first place.

What about your business makes their lives easier or solves a problem in their lives?

If you don’t already have this information, this is a wonderful opportunity to poll your customer base. Ask open-ended questions about why they would or wouldn’t choose your product and what you can do to make their purchasing decisions easier.

4. Humanize Your Brand

Today’s social media-driven world brings businesses some important advantages. Companies have the opportunity to use their presence to the differentiates them from the competition.

And, though differentiation is a big advantage of branding, it isn’t the only one. In fact, it may not even be the most important one.

What’s truly wonderful about branding is that it allows you to humanize your brand.

Customers no longer have to feel like they’re interacting with a cold, corporate entity, but instead can feel as though they’re talking with a friend.

Use this to your advantage whenever possible.

Be friendly, down to earth, and approachable. Use warm language and respond directly to your customers.

People are more than happy to form relationships with brands. But only if they feel like a brand has values that align with their own.

Once you’ve aligned your views with your audience’s, you’ll establish a sense of community that encourages retention and interaction that can help your business grow.

5. Publish Powerful Testimonials

When all else fails, do the selling for you.

Testimonials provide your customers with a platform to speak about how your business has enhanced their life for the better.

What’s more, testimonials are a way to establish credibility.

The overwhelming majority of your future customers will look up information on your brand. When doing so, 84% of people will value customer reviews or testimonials as much as a friend’s opinion.

6. Watch Your Language

Think back to the first time you read your favorite book. A well-crafted narrative played a role in your enjoyment of the story, but so did the author’s deliberate use of certain words.

No matter how old we get or how sophisticated we think we are, words have an astonishing amount of power of our emotional state.

Using powerful, action-driven language throughout the sales process can inspire your audience to take action.

Say you’re having a sale, for example. An ad that simply states ‘One-day sale: All products 10%-20% off’ isn’t as eye-catching as, ‘Wow! Massive one-day sale, today only! All products up to 20% off. Act now for major savings.’

The former merely informs. The latter also informs, but descriptive words like ‘massive,’ ‘major,’ and ‘wow’ bring a sense of excitement to the text.

As you start to craft your campaign, be careful about choosing how you word things. Your word choice can either excite or bore your audience.

7. Get Colorful

Have you ever thought about what it means when someone is seeing red? Or if a friend is feeling blue?

Colors have a strong association with emotions, even if we don’t always realize it.
Color psychology is an entire area of study dedicated to how colors elicit emotion, especially in advertising.

A more somber advertisement may use a black and white color scheme, while an ad attempting to elicit feelings of joy may use warm colors like yellows and reds.
It’s a fascinating phenomenon and it isn’t one you should ignore.

Invoke Emotion for a Better Marketing Experience

Emotion is such a powerful tool when used well. Consider ways in which you can invoke emotion through your marketing and you’ll be sure to notice a greater level of audience response and credibility.

Looking for other great ways to grow your business? Check out these five that you’ll want to try.