Emotion is the ultimate marketing cheat code.
We talk a lot about emotion in marketing, but how do you effectively tap into it?
When I mention “emotion,” I’m not just talking about bringing people to tears or highlighting the emotional benefits of your product. It’s about making people feel something as they experience your message and brand, so they listen, engage, remember, and trust.
The more you can evoke it, the better your results will be.
→ Emotion makes your message more engaging and irresistible. Our emotions evolved to help us respond to threats and opportunities—so naturally, they grab our attention.
→ Emotion makes your message more memorable. When something triggers an emotional response, our brain’s emotional processing center (the amygdala) and memory storage (the hippocampus) work together. This means we pay more attention and remember better.
→ Emotion is crucial in decision-making. Want to win over customers? Make them feel emotionally connected to you. Emotion helps persuade, influence, and build trust.
There are two main ways to infuse emotion into your content:
1. emotionally address rational topics Take a logical message and deliver it with emotion—use humor, nostalgia, storytelling, passion, surprise, or empathy. For instance, make a logical argument funny, nostalgic, or surprising.
2. rationally address emotional topics. Talk about emotionally charged topics in your industry from a logical perspective. Express your opinion on issues that evoke your audience’s fear, doubt, hope, excitement, or frustration.
Remember, emotion doesn’t need to be challenging to implement. It just needs to fit into one of these two categories.
Whether you’re adding a sprinkle of emotion to a rational argument or hitting the heart of a topic directly, everything you publish should evoke emotion. And it will work.
