Love is a powerful force, and it’s on the minds of many as we approach Valentine’s Day. Humans are emotional beings, and many of our decisions are heavily influenced by our emotions whether we realize it or not. Advertisements are designed to bank on this fact. When people buy a product or service based on an ad, they give an emotional response to the ad itself. Marketing, as a whole, is an industry based on appealing to the emotions of consumers. Consider some savvy small business marketing ideas for Valentine’s Day that focus on emotion and heart.
How to Use Emotions to Market Your Smart Business
Getting more return on your advertising investment means examining the emotions behind your marketing push. There are several tried and true techniques to effectively gain more customers.
Understand Your Customer
The first thing that you need to do to understand your potential customers is identify your target audience. Who are the people who buy your products or services? What are they like? What drives these customers to find your website and buy your products or services? What makes these people tick? It’s important to put yourself in their shoes, so you can understand what motivates them and what kinds of ads are the most effective for each situation. To do this, put together a complete profile of these customers. Interview them, put out surveys and visit the websites that they visit. Read the magazines and blogs in which they are interested. This helps you understand what customers feel and what emotions inspire them to take action.
Appeal to Customers’ Emotions
Instead of beginning your sales pitch with information about your product or service, focus on the reader. Use a conversational tone to draw people into the content. Then, write about the problem that they have. Do this in an emotional and understanding way. After this, give them hope that you have the solution to their problem thanks to your products or services.
Establish and Maintain Emotional Connections
You don’t just want to hook someone for a single sale, you want to establish a connection with your customer that keeps this person coming back for more. This can be done by keeping in contact with customers after you make the sale. This shows that your company cares about more than just making money, but about your individual customers. Customer service after the sale adds value to the experience. Accomplish this by following up with the customer to make sure the product is still working for them. Your excellent customer service practices help you stand out from other companies that market similar products.
Share Tips and Stories
A great way to help establish an emotional connection with your target audience is to share personal stories. This brings in people who actually use your product or service and it changed their lives. Another great person to feature is someone with a direct connection to the company. The owner would be ideal in this circumstance. Have the owner talk about his or her reasons behind starting the company. Maybe the owner had the same problems as the people to whom you’re marketing and he or she wanted to come up with a solution for everyone. This helps people empathize with the owner directly, and that leads to people who want to support the owner.
What Emotions Do You Use?
Human feelings are based on four key emotions, and these are the ones that are used most in advertising. These emotions include happy, sad, afraid/surprised and angry/disgusted. Happy is definitely the most popular emotional tactic in advertising as this helps the audience associate the company with something positive. Sad is a hard emotion to get right because you don’t want to make your audience so sad that it immobilizes potential customers. You need to provide a solution to inspire action. Fear is a good emotion to use to create a sense of urgency. Anger is most often used to get customers to support a cause, but also must be done right. You need to help the audience feel like they can do something instead of making them feel helpless.
Love Is In The Air
We are incapable of completely eliminating emotions from our decision-making process. Emotions make us human. With love in the air as Valentine’s Day approaches, many people may be in a sentimental mood. By using emotions strategically in your marketing campaign, you can inspire action to lead to more success with your business.
Get Communicative and Sociable
One of the best ways to show the love is to be communicative and sociable. Write a blog entry that relates your products or service to Valentine’s Day. Reach out and touch others by sharing it on social media. Make comments on Valentine’s Day posts shared by your connections.
It’s important not to overdo it because people don’t like to feel manipulated. This will have the opposite effect of what you’re hoping to accomplish. Once someone is turned against your company, it’s almost impossible to win them back. By knowing your audience well, you increase your chances of having a marketing campaign based on emotions that work in your favor.
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