The Importance of Emotional Intelligence in Marketing

Savvy marketers of today seek to tap into human emotions in order to make that ‘connect’ with their audience and develop long-lasting relationships. For it is an established fact that emotions play an important role in consumer decision making. Often the reason why marketing campaigns fail to hit the mark is that many customers feel the disconnect between their favorite brands and their true needs. 

Be it the famous ‘mother-and-child bond’ advertisement of Horlicks that we all remember or the humorous Naukri ad (Remember HARI SADU?)

We are sure most of us are able to recall these emotionally stirring ads even today on account of the immediate sense of connection the ad concept established in all of us. 

It was the award-winning journalist, Daniel Goleman who introduced the idea of emotional intelligence. In his book, Emotional Intelligence, he identifies five areas that contribute to emotional intelligence:

1. Self Awareness
2. Motivation
3. Empathy 
4. Self-regulation
5. Social Skills

Applying these 5 pillars of emotional intelligence to your marketing strategy can help you communicate your brand message in a way that is thoughtful, authentic, and human.

Did you know?

According to a study by IBM and Econsultancy, only 1 in 3 consumers believe their favourite brands truly understand them. Yet another study found that consumers are not as impressed with the relevance of the content they receive. Only 35% of respondents said their favorite companies sent ‘usually relevant’ emails or messages. 

Brands today have been increasingly taking the emotional route to touch the hearts of their consumers. 

Taking the Emotional Route

The power of emotional intelligence can help in coming up with marketing strategies that can reach out and strike a chord with your target audience to produce beneficial business outcomes. Marketers today need to really understand client moods, behaviours, impulses, and apply them in order to reach out to their client base.

Most of the insurance ads provoke the inner feelings in you, be it with humour or with a sense of fear to take an action whereas the soap ads will give you a soothing feel. Applying emotional cues in marketing campaigns can help your brand speak to the target audience at the right place, right time, and get to know them meaningfully on a deeper level. 

While applying emotional intelligence to develop marketing campaigns it’s good to consider the following questions:

• What are the triggers that cause a customer to look for your product or service? 

• What emotional triggers influence the requirement? 

• How will your product or service solve their problems?

• Trace the buyer’s emotional journey to create your buyer persona

Figuring out the answers to these questions can help marketers empathize with their audience and bridge the gap between what they want and what their audience wants.

Fact Check

• Backed by research by Valay Lakdavala, brand experts believe that an advertisement that was partially focused on ‘emotional content’ with regard to ‘rational content’ was twice as effective (31% to 16%) and content which was fully focused on emotions with regard to a partially focused advert did even better (31% to 26%). The reason being, the human brain processes emotions in a powerful way and remembers them longer than mere facts alone.

• According to a 2016 Nielson report, “Emotions are central to advertising effectiveness,” and ads that generated the best emotional response generated a 23% lift in sales volume.

•  Also, as per Psychology Today, fMRI neuro-imagery has shown that consumers use emotions rather than information to evaluate a brand

• Ads that convey strong emotions often go viral. A study from HubSpot revealed that the most-shared ads relied on emotional content, including happiness, friendship, and inspiration.

Brand building strategies driven by emotional connect builds brand reliability in the long term. It is a human tendency to choose products and services that have effective emotional advertising.

Demographic Research 

Quantitative as well as qualitative studies on the targeted user base not only helps in gathering insights but also helps in building and planning campaigns and offerings. 

Concept is Key

We know effective marketing solves a pain point or fulfills a need. When you bring empathy in marketing means, you’re basically putting yourself in your audience’s situation. By being empathetic, you will tweak your motives, your message, and how you deliver that message. This can result in great marketing concepts and ideas that resonate with the customer.

Driven by Great Content

Your concept needs to be driven by strong content with the goal of driving ROI. Content that inspires at every touchpoint in the buyer’s journey is the only way to make sure to address your audience at an emotional level.

Using EI in your Digital Marketing Strategy

Using emotions in your ads greatly influences the buying process of your customers. No matter what emotional aspect you pick – happiness, fear, belonging, or trust – the emotional triggers should resonate with and motivate your customers into taking action. 

We, at lessburn, have proven expertise in building results-oriented brand strategies and continually refine your campaigns for the greatest outcome. From full-scale digital marketing and advertising strategy, right through to precise execution and reporting backed by performance insights, we’ve got you fully covered with our 5C model to drive the real campaigns that result. Reach us here, let’s talk with a virtual drink!

www.lessburn.com

5C Model for Successful Digital Campaigns

Digital Marketing today, demands a strong understanding of marketing basics that can be applied digitally by marketers in order to achieve business goals. Applying robust marketing strategies, leveraging technology, reviewing and modifying marketing strategies based on performance insights can yield the desired outcomes for every business.

To promote a brand’s value and cultivate genuine and sustained interest around it, we at lessburn, think, create and execute differently. Over the years, we have delighted our clients, by coming up with boundary-pushing marketing campaigns that have hugely gone successful. 

The main catalyst for lessburn’s continued success is adding ‘Secret Marketing Sauce’ that makes our marketing campaigns distinctly unique and successful when compared to other similar campaigns. 

So we want to reveal the recipe of our Secret Marketing Sauce and the ingredients that go into its making. We call them the 5Cs that drive the Digital Marketing Success.

Concept

For any successful marketing campaign, the concept is ‘key’. We, at lessburn, always believe in placing the consumer as the main focus in all of our digital marketing campaigns. We achieve this by anticipating and understanding the needs and wants of a customer. Our marketing campaigns are backed by solid market research and are purely customer driven, thereby delivering maximized value than competitors. 

“Emotional Trigger always makes a quick conversion”

Understanding the real need of the target customers plays a vital role in customers’ engagement with the Ad campaign. By going for concepts and creative ideas that trigger emotional responses, we leverage emotional intelligence, to come up with narratives that are authentic and connect with the audience emotionally and have the potential to go viral.

While promoting a SaaS based company called iCliniq, a virtual hospital where the target audiences can reach out to Doctors virtually for medical second opinion at affordable cost anytime and from anywhere, we targeted the audience with a slogan “Get your health issues resolved at home”! As expected, it was a hit especially during the COVID lock down delivering the results in their user acquisition metrics. 

Creative Design

Strategic creative design fuels the successful results that we achieve for our clients. By thoughtful usage of design theory and principles, grids and ratios, layouts, customer psychology and color theory, and the skillful use of font and type to pull elements together that will reinforce a message and build brand loyalty. Our expertise and experience goes into building effective visual designs that will ensure creatives that stand out from the competition and attract potential customers and clients to your business. 

During the 2019 Diwali season, we were massively working on promoting bijili Crackers – a cracker selling e-commerce platform’s digital campaigns with a target of acquiring 2500 customers minimum. Our Creative designers were artistically molding each design considering the target audiences’ taste to deliver a better engagement.

Yeah, we all had the happiest party as we acquired more than 5000 customers doubling the client’s expectations!

Content

There simply is no other way to put this – ‘Content is King’ 

Content is arguably the most important part of any digital marketing efforts. Content not only helps build trust and connect with your target audience, but also acts as fuel for your other marketing techniques. And that is why at lessburn, super-effective content forms the base upon which our digital marketing strategies are built.

We realised that we could do magic with our words as we partnered with The Chennai Silks  –  a chain of retail textile shops in South India. While majorly working on branding their products on social media, we pulled their target audience into our kingdom of powerful words through videos, gamifications, polls and many more thereby eventually increasing the footfalls into their stores. 

Campaign

For any marketing strategy — digital or not — you need to know who you’re marketing to. With this in mind, the team at lessburn has time and again come up with effective campaign strategies for our clients. Our practical outlook and out-of-the box approaches have resulted in high ROI marketing campaigns. We make sure that we get the demographics and target audience right in order to build effective digital marketing campaigns around them. Buyer personas, demographic and psychographic data, choice of platform (social, owned, paid etc)  are key aspects that drive our strategies. 

To shift the gear from neutral to full-throttle, we partnered with SGA Cars to promote SKODA in the target Kongu region. As per their tag line “Simply Clever” we promoted the campaigns encouraging the audiences to take a test drive through lead generation and email campaigns. And yes, our strategy accelerated the plan, making 4000+ hot leads selling 300+ cars per month burning less of their capital investing on traditional marketing strategy.  

Conversion

Our favorite way to measure the effectiveness of a marketing campaign is simple: measure the amount of direct sales revenue the campaign produces. Marketing campaign effectiveness can be measured by many different metrics – Cost Per View, Cost Per Signup  etc. These depend on the context and goal of the campaign. But the one metric that’s so important is whether the campaign changed the target audience’s behavior: did it change a perception, cause an action or drive an engagement? And more often than not, lessburn’s campaigns have succeeded in that aspect by triggering leads, sales, traffic and improved brand awareness.

“We always target to slice your Time, Effort and Budget into half, making 2x RoI”

Differentiate your Digital Strategy

With the business and technological landscape constantly evolving, Organizations today have a tough time trying to determine how best to distinguish themselves when planning their digital marketing campaigns. We understand that when it comes to Digital Marketing Strategy, there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ template. It is always better to have a road map in place, highlighting the actions and the strategies to achieve marketing goals over a period of time. lessburn can help you grow your business better with Marketing Strategies that organically improve your digital presence.

We can help you nail the optimal digital strategy that facilitates growth. Want to know how? Let’s Talk then!

Strategies for Businesses to Re-invent Digitally, post COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought about one of the greatest disruptions of society in modern times, upturning lives and livelihoods. Millions across the world are quarantined and thousands of lives have been lost as World Governments are engaged in a full-blown war against the pathogen. To add on to the woes, the pandemic has dented the global economy, bringing industries and businesses down on their knees. Across sectors, companies have shuttered with little or no hope of revival in the near future. Several businesses are staring down at huge losses. Sudden and dramatic changes in circumstances brought about by COVID-19 and its impact on everyday life is something we all would be dealing with for quite a long time in the future.

In the face of such a global crisis, businesses must consider the severe and long-lasting impact, the pandemic may have on their bottom line. These are extreme times for nearly every marketer. According to WARC, Shutdown of retail, disruption of food supply chains, huge corrections in the stock market, and a staggering unemployment rate. 

With the gradual easing of lockdown rules and countries taking baby steps to open up economies, businesses need to take a long, hard look at their marketing strategies in order to come up with a revival roadmap that would suit a post-pandemic world.

It certainly isn’t Business as Usual for marketers. Ad spending is down by double digits. While re-thinking marketing strategies and making decisions on advertising campaigns, businesses need to take into account changing consumer behaviour and impact on individual industries, right from manufacturing to supply chains leading up to point of sales. Consult a strategic Digital Marketing agency like lessburn to plan your campaigns and the selection of the precise target audience ahead to foresee a better result!

Analyse Changing Consumer Behaviour

Consumer buying habits are likely to be affected as disposable income went down, bringing down people’s intent and inclination to spend with it. Businesses need to factor in how buying habits of their target audience may change as a result of the current economic downturn by looking at online marketing data and quickly adjust campaigns as needed.

Leverage SEO and Digital Marketing

Digital marketing and digital ads in general just have such an advantage over traditional, physical ads that require space, materials, and limited resources. 

With working from home emerging as the new normal, there is an increased online presence of people, both in terms of work and personal use. The traffic on the web is up but there are fewer advertisers. This means ads are cheaper.  In other words, there has been an increase in ad inventory across several platforms. As a result, cost per thousand impressions (CPM) has decreased across platforms, especially as many businesses have cut down on their marketing spend. But going by numbers, as per Neil Patel, the ROI of paid ads have gone up from 31% to 53%. with a 71% increase.

Businesses, rather than just focusing on short term advertising gains, need to consider taking up the services of a Good Marketing Agency, powered by data analytics, market research and digital technology, that can offer marketing strategies highly curated to the challenges at hand. This can help them achieve both short-term and long-term goals and build value by connecting the brand with the right people, with the right messaging and at the right time. Optimised content marketing can also help focus on customer experience and customer retention with interactive content and personalization, making more impact by harnessing the power of digital marketing. 

Boost Consumer Engagement

People spending more time online present an ideal opportunity to boost your brand’s social media engagement. Great social media will not just help you engage with your customers – it can build up a virtual community at a time when normal interpersonal contact is minimised.

Businesses need to double-up on social media to build relationships with new and existing customers. As customers are looking for ways to stay connected despite everything that’s going on, Social media can be the perfect platform for brands to engage with customers and create opportunities for now and into the future. 

Revamp Marketing Strategies 

As the impact of COVID-19 continues to unfold, businesses need to keep a close eye on the changing consumer behaviours and impact on individual industries to ensure they stay on top of the game and are able to tap into new opportunities. 

Here are a few pointers to get you started:

• As online traffic increases steadily, businesses can reach their target users better by investing more heavily in digital, and direct mail advertising over in-store, face to face advertising.

• Compassion in advertising would ensure that brands remain in a positive light with their clients. A compassionate approach to advertising will ultimately find favour with consumers, leading to long-term trust, satisfaction, and loyalty.

• Now, more than ever, brands need to approach all of their marketing, social media presence included, in an intentional way. It is worth considering the benefits of content marketing and search engine optimisation (SEO) and a website revamp at a time like this. Good content can build up an organic presence, with strong SEO using good keywords, backlinks and authoritative, relevant content helping it increase in ranking. 

lessburn – Here to Help 

A Growth Consulting Firm Specialized in

Business Information Services & Digital Marketing

Our team at lessburn can tailor a digital marketing strategy to meet the demands of your business as it strives to re-emerge in good shape while the economy recovers. We could assist you in fine-tuning and restructuring all your current and future marketing campaigns to best fit the needs of your brand and consumers, as close to real-time as possible. If you are looking for support during these challenging times, please reach out to us at wecando@lessburn.com to learn more.

Above all, Team lessburn urges everyone to be as safe as possible and exercise utmost care, during these challenging times.