81. Grow Emotional Engagement with your Customers

Many marketing messages are going unheard because they aren't connecting with their target audience on an emotional level.

As you prioritize emotional connections within your content creation, you’ll see the benefits of engagement, customers will listen, and they’ll take action moving forward down the customer and buying journey.

Transcript

Welcome to The High Performance Marketing Podcast, a show focused on helping entrepreneurs and small business owners connect with their ideal customers using simple marketing and quality content. I'm your Marketing Guide, Ali Garbero.

When I began my career in sales I focused a lot on selling the logical. I focused on the numbers and data that made the purchase a smart decision. I’m not implying people don’t need logic to make a decision, but if you’ve ever heard the saying:

Logic makes you think, emotion makes you act.

Then you understand that you need both - and that of the two - emotion will get people to move forward.

So when it comes to your marketing, how can you actually make your voice heard when you’re dealing with a number of challenges, including market saturation, and a whole bunch of generic or irrelevant marketing messages that fail to reach their target?

On today’s episode of the podcast, let’s dive into how you can create emotional impact in your writing so you engage your audience and make your content memorable. Why?

Because that’s how you get seen and heard and ignite your audience's emotions to inspire them to move further down the customer or buying journey.

First, creating compelling content that ignites your audience's emotions and inspires them to take action starts with knowing your audience.

Spend a little time researching pain points. What do they need? How do they respond to different emotions?

For example meme content generally invokes laughter, humor, or relatability. This kind of content would cause your audience to laugh.

Next, use dialogue in your content.. You might share a review that says “our client james was so happy he worked with us.”

Or you might decide to create a short dialogue. The first is a car salesman, the other is the customer and it would go something like this:

“When James called our dealership, he spoke to Jessica our salesperson and said “I’m interested in the xyz car but I have to keep my monthly payment at $400 a month.” Jessica responded “of course James, we deal with all kinds of budgets, and since you’ve expressed that your monthly payment is one of the most important factors in buying a car today, we are happy to honor that budget.”

A dialogue allows people to connect with the individuals they’re reading about or watching so that they experience the emotions themselves.

Another example of how to use dialogue in a simple way is how car company Ken Garff does it. They have billboards everywhere and one looks like this

It has an image of a mouth one one side that said them. On the other side there’s an image of an ear and it says us.”

That’s such a simple way to create dialogue because driving down the highway at 90 mph you read that in just a few seconds, you hear that dialogue you started envisioning all of the times you’ve walked into a dealership where no matter what you said they simply didn’t listen.

This leads me to an additional point - create relatable characters or individuals in your content creation. For example let’s say you’re writing an email - take a moment to describe a client you worked with. Instead of saying something like “our tech leaders are glad they invested in our software.”

You could write “Bob was tasked with overseeing an IT team of 6 techs. His workload was well beyond his capacity to handle causing him to work 12 hour days, and blow through lots of mountain dew. Bob’s weight and blood pressure both suffered. Bob was relieved when he selected our services to offload much of his IT tickets.

Now I know that sounds lengthier and less concise than just saying Bob the tech leader is