Curatti

Do your customers have an emotional connection to your brand?

  • Jan Gordon

    • The Importance of Emotional Connection

    Creating an emotional connection to your brand is the way that you turn customers into raving fans that beat down doors to buy your latest offering. Appeals to emotion have been used in advertising for decades. In the digital realm, many marketers are attempting to use emotional appeals through content that connects with their readers. A large number of these marketers make the mistake of trying to build an emotional connection by focusing on the strategy itself. Creating an emotional connection to your brand is not about statistics, customer demographics, and or population trends; it is about making people feel something so strongly that they have no choice but to buy into your company and what it does.

    Connecting To Individuals, Not Consumers Or Businesses

    Digital strategist Bryan Kramer views the challenge of marketing in a very unique way. Kramer rejects the traditional B2B and B2C labels that are often placed on marketing: instead, he says that H2H, or Human to Human, is the only kind of marketing that matters. Kramer makes the argument that because of the rise of social media and Internet publishing, which promotes a one-to-many experience, the idea of a personal connection with an individual has, unfortunately, become lost. He says the challenge for marketers is to convey complex ideas in the simplest possible format.

    Kramer’s points reinforce the idea of creating an emotional connection to your brand through personal attention. When you can connect to individuals on a deeply personal level, you will have a much greater shot at being successful with fostering emotional connections to your organization. So how do you shift your focus from a by-the-numbers marketing approach to an approach that helps you truly engage with your audience? The answer lies in the art of storytelling.

    Telling Stories To Connect To Your Prospects

    Famous English author Phillip Pullman has been quoted as saying, “after nourishment, shelter, and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in this world.” For today’s marketers, Pullman’s words ring true. More than a catchy slogan, fancy logo, or well-designed website, businesses need marketing content that tells stories that have a point.

    Forbes provides a great example of a brand story that builds an emotional connection to its audience by mentioning Red Bull’s adventurous advertising campaign, including Austrian parachutist Felix Baumgartner’s Red Bull Stratos jump from just under 24 miles above the surface of the Earth. The Red Bull Stratos set the record for the highest parachute jump and made Baumgartner the first person to ever break the sound barrier without any help from an engine. In tying together Baumgartner’s jump with the Red Bull brand, the company published supporting information about Baumgartner and covered his background and preparation for the jump.

    Red Bull’s brand has always been one that conveyed adventure, excitement, and a willingness to push the limits. Instead of focusing on the statistics of key demographics that value these characteristics and using other boring marketing tools found on the same uninspired slide shows in conference rooms across the globe, Red Bull decided to show people exactly how their brand connects to these attributes with a real-life story.

    Creating an emotional connection to your brand is not always easy, and it does require some unconventional thinking on the part of your marketing team. The key takeaway for your company should be to think in terms of connecting to your prospects on an individual level of emotion, instead of trying to generalize an entire demographic into a box or characteristic. Focus on how your company’s unique offering appeals to things that affect the emotions of your customers and you will be more successful at creating an emotional connection to your brand.

     

    Images: http://www.heraldboy.com/satisfying-the-emotional-needs-of-your-customers-through-investing-in-empathy/1796/

    http://www.redbullusa.com/cs/RedBull/RBImages/000/000/802/581/photo610x343/Red-Bull-Stratos-Felix-Baumgartner-Latest-Testing-11.jpg

    The following two tabs change content below.

    Jan Gordon

    CEO at Curatti
    Top 100 #Socialmedia Global Influencer | CEO of Curatti, Publisher of #B2B #Content | Author/ Digital Marketing Strategist | http://appearoo.com/JanGordon