Building an emotional connection with your audience
Having an emotional connection with your audience is an opportunity to create new value for your brand, making you more than just a product or service – but something they will want to talk about with their family and friends.
Building an emotional connection can start with the smallest gestures, like outstanding customer service, and range to more strategic communications, like fully-integrated campaigns.
It doesn’t matter what form it comes in – as long as it has an emotional impact. After a major bank introduced a credit card for Millennials that was designed to inspire emotional connection, use among the segment increased by 70% and new account growth rose by 40%.
What can you do to create these emotional connections with your consumers?
1. Be human
Imagine you’re at a party, and a guy (let’s call him Barry) is talking at you, not to you. There’s no indication Barry knows that you care, but off he goes anyway like a robot stuck on the ‘speak’ setting.
When you don’t pay attention to your audience, this is how your communications come across: robotic and empty. And you don’t want to be like Barry, saying everything, but nothing worth listening to, do you?
Behind every great brand is a person or a personality, and when consumers see this personality, it humanises your brand and makes you more relatable to your audience.
In other words, stop seeing your audience as numbers and speak to them as people.
Ad Council – Love Has No Labels
You can take it one step further than speaking to your audience like humans. You can beautifully remind them that we are all just humans – like Ad Council did here when they addressed issues such as diversity, homophobia and racism.
Remember the undeniable human truth, in this case: Underneath all of our differences, we are all just bags of bones trying to make our way in the world.
2. A good story can change the world
Relating to a character in a story is what makes films so gripping for us to watch. It might sound selfish, but we’re vain by nature. So it makes sense we draw up positive similarities between ourselves and the characters we see.
Stories emotionalise information – they make information relatable and accessible to many. Especially so when the characters are as badass as Bertha.
Mercedes Benz – Bertha Benz
Stories have been passed down the generations for thousands of years, it’s how we pass down lessons and values.
Information + Emotion + Relatability = Shareability
3. Show interest
Relationships between brands and consumers have to be a two-way street. Remember Barry? Thinking about sitting down for a chat? Didn’t think so.
Bodyform – Womb Stories
Look at this comment left on a Bodyform video from 2019.
Bodyform saw this (and many other comments) and found that ‘44% of women feel that staying silent about their experiences has damaged their mental health’.
So, (in true Bodyform fashion), they tackled the taboo head-on and created a campaign that shows real-life situations and the unspoken truths about matters of the womb – they took their understanding of the consumers’ pain points, anxieties, and motivations and turned them into a campaign with depth.
To make an impact on your audience, you first need to understand what is going on in their lives. Pay attention, and get yourself an actionable insight that works.
This was a comment left on their new campaign video.
4. Don’t be afraid to be vulnerable
Building an emotional connection doesn’t have to address social issues or the lack of discussion around things that affect half the population – it’s a tool we can use to celebrate too.
P&G – Best Job
We know that being an Olympian takes years of dedication and hard work, but we rarely think about it when watching the events.
What about the failures, retries, and the touching dedication of the athletes and their families?
By showing the side of the Olympics we don’t usually see, P&G created the perfect opportunity to showcase their products and the part they play in the lives of families all over the world.
5. Be open
Coca-Cola – Open Like Never Before
Coca-Cola’s whole marketing message is based around happiness, making moments of your day better by sharing a Coke.
This one, though, required the knowledge of when to stay quiet, and after a marketing radio silence amid the pandemic, Coca-Cola finally came back with this powerful message.
With George The Poet, they listened to the world around them, and channelled it into a piece of poetry that ignites hope in the viewer, encouraging them to “be ‘open, like never before’, think differently, embrace change, and better appreciate what was perhaps previously taken for granted.”
If you want something to say, start by listening.
For an emotional counselling session between you and your audience, get in touch.