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Understanding Emotional Intelligence in Marketing
According to a recent study by Yahoo Finance, the Emotional Intelligence (EQ) market, which back in 2021 was valued at $8.86 bn, is projected to grow at a rate of 25.2% CAGR between 2022 and 2030. If anything, those stats clearly emphasize the importance of emotional intelligence in the market.
In a world driven by concrete stats and boardroom jargon, that is an understated fact that, if wielded rightly, can be transformed into a lethal weapon in the arsenal of modern B2B marketers. It highlights the importance of trust, connection, and emotion, which once faded amid marketers’ widespread usage of stats and logic. It once again makes marketing very much a human thing.
As a result, more impetus is being put on emotional intelligence, often referred to as emotional quotient or EQ, as a tool for persuasion. However, there still needs to be more information available on the usage of emotional intelligence in marketing. As a result, even the most adept marketing brains struggle to paint a clear picture of emotional intelligence in marketing when trying to encourage their teams to try and resonate with their audience.
If you are looking to harness the power of emotional intelligence in marketing for your campaigns, come along on a wonderful journey into the landscape of creating compelling messages, empathetic stories, and most importantly leveraging emotional intelligence for maximum business gains. Let’s look beyond persuasion by concrete numbers and understand the emotions behind every buyer decision.
Demystifying Logic & Emotions in Buyer Decision
Ask around, and you will discover that everyone thinks of themselves as a “rational decision maker,” which is incomprehensible considering how big of an impact emotion play in our everyday lives. A plethora of studies suggest that emotions are the key drivers of most purchasing decisions, both in the B2B and B2C landscape.
Thus, demystifying logic and emotions in buyer decisions will make it easier for marketers and businesses to carve their marketing strategies with emotional intelligence as an integral part, if not the centerpiece. Let’s look at logic and emotion individually and understand their collective role in our buying decisions.
Emotion Precedes Need
Emotions are potent and can easily influence any decision you intend to make in multiple ways. While excitement, fear, desire, and uncertainty influence the purchase decision by motivating or demotivating customers, emotions like loyalty, trust, and perception can incline a buyer toward a particular brand or organization for their purchase decision.
It’s safe to assume that emotions trigger certain subliminal biases and heuristics, eventually tilting your buying decision in favor or away from a specific purchase.
Thus, brands and businesses must ensure that their product, services, and the messaging around them invoke positive emotions in their target audience. By identifying and figuring out the emotional triggers of their audiences, a business can tailor their marketing messaging to resonate best with their audience and consequently attain good ROI for their marketing initiatives. An excellent example of a brand using emotional intelligence in marketing is the several “limited-time” offers on our social streams. Capitalizing on the emotion of fear of missing out (FOMO), these offers instantly trigger impulsive purchases from the customers. There are several other examples around us, and you can take inspiration from any of them.
Logic Still Has a Role to Play
While it’s easy to attribute most compulsive purchases to emotion, logic still has a critical role in every purchase, especially when it comes to business and rather expensive purchases. In order to create a perfect marketing strategy, you need to strike a balance between emotion and logic. If you are a business, logic becomes even more critical for you, as in a standard corporate setup, any purchase decision will require a buy-in from multiple stakeholders.
Thus, the key to success in creating high-impact marketing strategies is to delve deep into the psychology of your targeted audience and understand the interplay between logic and emotion in their purchase decision. This will help you build trust and loyalty with your audience, ultimately driving higher sales volume.
Leveraging Emotional Intelligence in B2B Marketing
In B2B marketing, facts and figures dominate the decision-making process. However, in the modern market, as an organization, you cannot rely on facts and figures for the success of your marketing campaigns. To establish a bond with your audience, you need to instigate meaningful conversations harnessing the power of emotions.
This makes Emotional Intelligence (EQ) a powerful tool for modern marketers. Here, we have listed some of the key strategies you can leverage if you plan to harness the power of emotional intelligence in B2B marketing.
Know your Target Audience (TA)
When researching the potential audience for your product or service, take one step further and pinpoint your audience’s emotional aspirations, pain points, and needs. This will help you connect with your audience better.
Most modern marketing automation tools such as Hotjar, Adobe Color, Brandwatch, Etc. can help you gain a deeper understanding of the thoughts and feelings of your audience, which can then be used for empathy mapping and creating better messaging. Social media sentiment analysis is also a smart way to gauge the sentiment of your audience towards your brand.
Use Emotions to Create compelling Narratives
Connecting with your audience on an emotional level is all about storytelling. If you can harness personal stories, case studies, testimonials, or anecdotes to connect with your audience on a deeper level, it will quickly get converted into tangible benefits for your brand. Also, be very careful about the words you use in your storytelling; it’s recommended to use words that invoke happiness, positivity, or elation in the readers’ minds.
Design Emotional Experiences
A compelling story is complete with visuals that evoke emotions. Thus, when leveraging emotional intelligence in your B2B marketing campaigns, you must ensure that the messaging and visuals reflect your brand story compellingly. When creating emotional experiences, you must consider every element, including colors, music, and, if applicable, even the scents. The most effective way to design emotional experiences is to tailor personalized journeys.
Be Genuine & Earn Trust
There is almost no space for fake and untrustworthiness in the world of emotions. Thus, when building your brand story, try to be as genuine as you can. This will help you earn the trust of your audience and foster healthy connections. Always be empathetic and compassionate towards your audience. Whether you are responding to customer feedback or addressing a small mistake you made, try to be as transparent as you can be. This will show your product/service in a positive light and help you gain the trust of your audience.
Emotions can be Measured
Contrary to popular belief, emotions can be measured, especially in the modern digital world, where most meaningful conversations occur online. Using social listening tools, surveys, and sentiment analysis, you can measure the emotional responses that your marketing efforts are getting.
If you feel that your marketing efforts are failing to evoke the emotion you expected them to evoke, feel free to A/B test with different approaches. Measuring emotions and harnessing them to tweak your brand messaging constantly is an ongoing process. Thus, you must continuously learn and refine your findings to optimize them for maximum emotional impact.
Summing Emotional Intelligence in Marketing aka Human Centered Marketing
With all its power and stats to back it up, logic sometimes falls short when all you are trying to do is evoke an emotion. Despite all its advancements, technology still has a long way to go to replicate human emotions and make decisions purely based on them.
Thus, if you’re catering to humans, you better carve experiences, messages, and stories that resonate with them, and that’s what emotional intelligence in marketing is all about. The good thing is that some tools and strategies can help you harness the power of emotions in your marketing campaigns, including those we have listed above.
However, if you still need help getting started in the world of emotional intelligence, write to us at [email protected], and we will have our marketing expert reach out to you to understand your need and design a solution to fulfill your need.
