We as people, we all like to think we are smart. We look at a given situation, way up the odds, and make a rational decision based on all of that information but neuroscientists have proven time and again that we don’t make most of our decisions with our logic brain. We make most of our decisions with our emotional brain and that is connected to how we feel about something. When you are speaking with your audience they are analyzing a million things and they’re getting a good feel for the message that you’re putting out there and they are making their decisions based on that good feeling. Essentially, what we all do is we all make decisions with our heart and we justify with our head.
This isn’t just a hypothesis either, we’ve come across a lot of research that highlights the fact that when the emotional part of the brain is incapacitated then people who survive those incidents have trouble making decisions. They cannot make decisions or emotional connections and without that, decision making is lost. That further emphasizes and proves the point that we rely heavily on our emotions to make our decisions.
How to Inject Emotions
If you’re in business or branding, you’ll have come across this idea before. You’ll have read some books or read some articles that have told you that if you want a brand if you want to connect with your audience then you have to do that through emotion. You know that already but how do you then use and that or define an emotional branding strategy that you can use to connect with your audience. That’s what I want to go through in this article. I want to give you the steps that you can use and take into your own business so that you can connect with your audience, identify the emotions that you need to use, and you need to leverage within your branding and your messaging.
Define Their Goals
Your audience is on a journey. They are coming from somewhere and they’re going somewhere else and that goal and where they’re going is what you need to uncover. You need to uncover what it is that they want to achieve and why they’re going there. This might be a goal in and of itself or it might be a smaller goal part of a much larger goal but you need to identify the goals; where they’re trying to get to, what they want to achieve, and why they want to achieve it.
Define Their Challenges
On route to this goal that they have set in place, there are going to be some kind of challenges or obstacles otherwise it’s not a real goal. I mean you don’t just set a goal and achieve like that because without those challenges there is no sense of achievement. You need to understand of course what their goal is but what challenges are standing in their way. One of these obstacles or maybe more is something that you can help them directly with and that will be related to your core offer that you put in front of them. But they will have other challenges as well. They might have 10 0r 20 even 100 other micro challenges in and around the major challenge that you solve and if you understand all of those challenges, you can step into their shoes and understand what has them thinking about this goal and what’s standing in the of this goal. You can get a feel for that journey and understand them and that’s what will set the tone for your connection with them later on.
Define Their Desire
This is where we’re getting down into that emotional connection. You know that they have a goal that they want to achieve and you know they have some challenges standing in the way of them achieving that goal but they’re looking beyond those challenges and that’s where their desire comes from. They have a desire to achieve that goal and that desire makes them feel something. Uncovering what that goal is and what desire is attached to that goal and what emotions are connected there. Understand what drives them towards that goal and what does life looks like on the other side of achieving that goal.
Define Their Fears
Along with their desires for achieving that goal, there are also fears of not achieving that goal. Of course, you want to look at the brighter picture of what life looks like at the end of the rainbow but it doesn’t always end that way. That is the fear that lives inside your audience and they will associate some images and some ideas with that fear and not overcoming those challenges. You need to understand what those fears are; how is that going to impact them living with those fears on a day-to-day basis and how is it going to affect them if those fears are realized both immediately or in bigger pictures. There are business and marketing strategies out there that use fear-mongering to scare people into doing something but I’m not referring to that. I’m talking about understanding what they’re going through in trying to achieve their goals. There is a fear that lives inside them along with those desires and when you understand that fear, you can use that to resonate with them.
Connect With Understanding
At this stage now you’ve gone through the first four steps and those first four steps are about getting the information that you need to understand what your audience is going through and at this stage in step five you have that full picture. If you’re able to take that and show them that you understand how they feel about achieving those goals then that will help to resonate with who they are and what they’re going through. This step is all about understanding them and giving them that empathy.
Leverage Story
The story is an effective way to inject emotion into your messaging and your brand. We all love story and I’ve done an article on the story before. I’ll leave a link at the end of this article but we do love story and we gravitate towards story because it’s in our DNA. It’s how we’ve passed the information on from generation to generation for millions of years. We naturally gravitate towards story and if you’re able to leverage storytelling within your messaging that is a great way to inject that emotion and if you do that effectively they will gravitate towards what you have to say.
Leverage Vulnerability
This tends to be kept for personal brands because there is a person behind this actual brand and that person is real and has vulnerabilities. This needs authenticity behind it. You cannot go out there and try to put fake vulnerability out there. It goes against what vulnerability is but mostly with personal brands you have somebody who has overcome a challenge and has achieved something and then they go back to help other people to go through that challenge and they can use the vulnerability that they had in facing those challenges and it’s potent. If you’re able to use it with authenticity, it can connect with people who are in that moment at that time trying to overcome a specific challenge and vulnerability. If you have a personal brand and you understand the challenges that your audience is going through then show them that you weren’t always perfect and that understand the pain they went through because you went through it too. That is a powerful way to connect emotionally by using that vulnerability.
Most modern brands today have many touch points and each and every one of those touch points is an opportunity to connect emotionally whether you’re putting out a social post or you’ve got an email automation sequence you’re putting out an advertisement on Facebook or you’re creating some website copy, every single one of those touch points is an opportunity to connect emotionally and what you have now is a step-by-step process that you can use to unpack the emotion that your audience is going through. If you follow these steps and you unpack those emotions then you have a powerful tool to use when creating content for every single touch point.
https://read.cash/@Jeffsmith/brand-storytelling-is-the-future-of-marketing-964ee001
Good way to fully utilize emotional branding