Use Emotional Responses to Motivate Your Target Audiences

“They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel.”

Use emotion, not just language, to make your message resonate with your target audiences. Once your business speaks to your audiences’ emotional responses, you can motivate actions from social media sharing to repeat purchases to referrals. As an article from SEOPressor explains:

Evoking emotion is a way of tapping into motivation, a way of bypassing pure logic alone, and a way of demonstrating that your brand cares about things, that it has a personality and a ‘human side’. It makes the brand more relatable and easier to trust. All this will result in more shares, more enthusiasm, and more engagement from your audiences.

Consider these four ideas for motivating emotional responses in your target audiences:

1) Solve the pain points of your target audiences

Michael Karp of Copytactics in his post “How to Identify Your Customer’s Pain Points” explains the 5 whys method for finding your customer’s pain points:

• You determine what your audience is going through, what they’re struggling with.
• You prove to them that you understand it.
• You genuinely care about their problems and want to help them.
• You start with a surface-level issue they need solving, and you ask them “Why?” five times to pull out the pain points associated with it. (Kind of like when you were a kid, asking “Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?” to annoy your parents. Same deal, but with a much more profound purpose.)

Karp recommends doing internet searches and following the social media updates of representative members of your target audiences to learn about their pain points. Then figure out how you can address these. Whatever your product or service provides, you are ultimately offering a solution to a problem (even if it is entertainment to alleviate boredom). Unfortunately, the “solution” may get lost in your enthusiasm over your product or service — 5 cool widgets, 6 whizzes, 7 gizmos. Yet what do all these things do to alleviate problems your target audiences have? Once you understand the pain points of your target audiences, you can begin using content on your website, blog, social media and videos to evoke the emotional responses of reminding these audiences of their pain points and then how your product or service solves these pain points.

2) Use the power of visual images

One way to trigger the desired emotional response in your target audiences is by the use of strategic photos and videos. Authors Patrick Renvoise and Christophe Morin in their book NEUROMARKETING discuss how the primitive part of our brain responds better to visual images than words. This is because visual understanding preceded language understanding by some hugely unimaginable time period. Apparently this is why a photo captures our attention in ways that words cannot. Of course, even with the most emotionally engaging customer-facing outreach, companies have to work to make themselves stand out in a 24/7 streaming environment. One very effective way to do this is with providing captivating streaming content. Click here to read our post on using visually impactful digital signage to make your streaming content stand out.

3) Employ emotional responses to create authentic connections

Your audiences want to feel you are sincere in your understanding of their pain points and other concerns. You can share articles on social media that mirror the concerns of your audience and demonstrate your sincerity. An article from Social Media Examiner says:

Connecting with your audience is one of the most basic ways to increase your social media engagement. This neuromarketing tactic makes use of the emotional reaction that’s triggered when people feel connected to you. When people feel close to you and can relate to you, there’s a great chance they’ll engage with your company.To form an emotional connection, you need to start interacting with followers in a meangingful way.

4) Engage in storytelling to improve memory

Using storytelling to improve memory is a well-known strategy. We humans can remember a story about how gluten-free muffins are made better than we can remember a list of the gluten-free ingredients. Rachel Gillet of Fast Company explains this phenomenon of the impact of storytelling:

When reading straight data, only the language parts of our brains work to decode the meaning. But when we read a story, not only do the language parts of our brains light up, but any other part of the brain that we would use if we were actually experiencing what we’re reading about becomes activated as well. What this means is that it’s far easier for us to remember stories than the cold hard facts because our brains make little distinction between an experience we are reading about and one that is actually happening.

Combining emotional response words with storytelling often means the whole is greater than the parts — or in other words, you get more bang for your buck. Choose from the above four ideas to create emotional connections with your target audiences. And visit enplug.com/request-info to request a free demo of how Enplug’s digital signage can create authentic connections with your target audiences. To read more check out the SEOPressor article, the Social Media Examiner article, the Fast Company article, and the Copytactics article. The book NEUROMARKETING is available on Amazon. *** Enplug digital signage software was co-founded by CEO Nanxi Liu and CTO Tina Denuit-Wojcik in 2012 to enable organizations to use customized real-time streaming content to create engaging external and internal communications.