How to Build Emotional Connections with Your Customers
Think of a brand. How does it make you feel? Spotify makes its users feel nostalgic through its annual Wrapped feature, while IKEA makes us feel inspired.
Emotional connections significantly influence our buying decisions. They’re often the reason why we choose one brand over another or follow certain content creators. Accomplished through emotional marketing and branding, building emotional connections with your customers can help your business grow.
But how exactly do you do it? You’ve come to the right place. Here, we’ll unpack the science behind building emotional connections between brands and audiences, along with some tips to help you implement the strategy.
Targeting Customer Emotions
The average person has 400 emotional experiences each day—many of which are directed at the businesses, services, and products they use.
Consumers will naturally feel positively or negatively about your services, products, or overall brand. When seeing your business on social media, your website, or in ads, they’ll judge the colours and fonts you choose, the tone of your voice, and their overall experience.
These factors will be enough to make them identify with your brand and choose to buy from you, or not.
Before we can get into exactly how to connect emotionally with your customers, there are a few key concepts we need to consider, including:
- Emotional Branding
- Emotional Marketing
- Brand Intimacy
Emotional Branding
Emotional branding establishes an image of a brand that builds a connection between it and its customers. It’s slightly different from traditional branding, which focuses on features and benefits. Instead, emotional branding engages customers on a more intimate level.
The psychological part of emotional branding is what makes it so effective. Since emotions play such a big role in decision-making and customer behavior, if you can connect with the right customer emotions, it’s possible to establish a loyal community.
Some key elements of emotional branding include:
- Storytelling
- Authenticity and transparency
- Brand purpose and mission
- Personalization and community
- Sensory and emotional appeal
- Empathy and a customer-centric approach
Example: Adventure Kids
Adventure Kids fosters connections, nostalgia, and inspiration through family-centred outdoor adventures. Co-creators Kacey and Leslie connect emotionally with their audience by:
- Storytelling & Relatability: They showcase real family moments that build trust and authenticity and make other parents feel like they can recreate the same moments for their kids.
- Community & Shared Experiences: By inviting their audience to join in on their outdoor adventures, Adventure Kids promotes a sense of belonging.
- Visual & Emotional Appeal: Adventure Kids’ content is full of natural and bright colours. The tone of their content is joyful and exciting. This creates an emotional pull from viewers who want to experience the same with their families.
Emotional Branding Benefits
If your current branding isn’t working for you, consider switching things up by integrating some of the key elements of emotional branding. Benefits can include:
- Strong customer relationships
- An unforgettable brand
- Increase in customer longevity
How Influencer Marketing Amplifies Results
By partnering with creators who embody the same kinds of values your company does, you can better identify with larger audiences and grow your brand. The key here is choosing the right creators, and that’s where an influencer marketing agency shines.
Emotional Marketing
Emotional marketing helps to create associations between a brand and a consumer. These can be positive or negative emotions—both of which can motivate purchases.
While emotional branding hones in on brand image and identity, emotional marketing aims to trigger certain emotions through marketing strategies like ads, marketing campaigns, and storytelling.
Emotional branding plays the long game, focusing on how people feel about a brand over time, shaping brand personality and core values. Emotional marketing is more about immediate action, triggering specific emotions that motivate consumers in the now.
Emotional marketing uses existing customer data to find out what motivates consumers. So starting an emotional marketing campaign means understanding your customers better and what emotions trigger your company’s desired responses (engagement, purchases, shares, etc.)
Some key elements of emotional marketing include:
- Audience research
- Emotional triggers
- Storytelling
- Authenticity
- Personalization
Example: Marketing Greece
With the goal of strengthening Greek tourism and enhancing its reputation globally, Marketing Greece partnered with our influencer agency to create a strategic influencer marketing campaign. Four influencers were selected from a list of 100+ and flown to Kefalonia, a Greek island.
The campaign generated 245k likes and comments and an earned media value of $633k. What made it so effective?
- Authentic Storytelling: Four mid-tier and micro-influencers specializing in outdoor, travel, and lifestyle content were selected. They were chosen not just for their industry experience but also for their ability to authentically convey personal experiences.
- Immersive Visual Content: The creators produced 125 pieces of content showcasing Kefalonia’s beauty and cultural richness.
- Community Building & Interaction: The creators engaged with their followers through comments and messages, fostering a sense of community. This made audiences feel part of the experience, deepening their emotional connection to Kefalonia.
Emotional Marketing Benefits
The benefits of emotional marketing are similar to those of emotional branding. They include:
- Better customer insights
- Customer loyalty
- Enhanced engagement
- Brand advocacy
- Positive brand image
- Differentiation in the market
How Influencer Marketing Amplifies Results
Once you’ve done the research and know what emotionally triggers your target audience, working with the right influencer can help drive your message home. They can produce the kind of content that resonates on a deeper level—whether through excitement, trust, nostalgia, or inspiration.
This emotional connection strengthens brand loyalty, helping audiences connect your company with authentic experiences, values, and a sense of belonging.
Brand Intimacy
While emotional marketing is a tactic, brand intimacy is an outcome. It happens after a customer interacts with a brand several times (through purchases, consuming content, talking with customer service, etc.) and can be a product of successful emotional marketing and emotional branding.
Brand intimacy is a strong emotional connection between a customer and a brand. Some reasons why this connection is formed include:
- Nostalgia: Your brand makes them think of the good times.
- Indulgence: You offer a fun or gratifying experience.
- Fulfillment: You always deliver—and then some.
- Identity: Your customers feel like your brand represents who they are.
- Routine: Your brand or product is part of their daily routine.
- Enhancement: Your customers feel better after using your products or services.
Example: Park Distillery
Our campaign with Park Distillery matched nine influencers and their audiences with the Canadian distillery’s values to maximize reach and engagement. Some of Park Distillery’s values include a connection to nature, environmental responsibility, and community. These values can trigger feelings of belonging and trust—two very motivating emotions.
When thinking of brand intimacy, the Park Distillery campaign conveyed values that made their target audience identify with them or look forward to indulging.
How to Build Emotional Connections with Customers
How can you use all of this information to connect emotionally with your customers? Start with the following:
- Understand Your Customers: Find out exactly what your customers need and want and what frustrates them. Then, create content, services, products, or messaging to match.
- Try Emotional Branding: Create a brand identity that evokes the kinds of emotions that motivate your target audience.
- Be Authentic: Authenticity is about being true to who you are as a brand. It can help you find long-term, loyal customers who support your company and recommend it to others.
- Tell a Story: Share authentic stories about your brand. Ensure they match your brand values as well as your customers’ values.
- Demonstrate Empathy: Show that you genuinely care about your customers by listening to their concerns and responding with understanding and empathy.
- Personalize the Customer Experience: Use customer data to make your customers feel seen and valued.
- Build a Community: Whether on YouTube, Facebook, or an online forum, creating a platform where customers can interact with each other and your brand can elicit a sense of belonging.
- Give Back: Supporting social causes that are important to your customers and align with your brand values can help strengthen emotional connections.
- Partner with Aligned Influencers: Influencer marketing is a smart and strategic way to grow your audience and emotionally connect with them.
Forge Authentic Connections with MODERNSPEAK
If you want to connect emotionally with your customers, working with an influencer marketing agency can help. We’ll pair you with influencers that align with your brand values and help your brand grow.
Explore our Digital PR and Influencer Marketing services to learn more, or message us! We’d love to chat about what’s possible for your brand.
