Since the early 2000s, brands have come a long way from using an informational tone in their messages to now infusing them with the intelligence to gain an emotional response from their followers. Brands that are doing well on social media or any other media are not just talking about solving pain points, but are creating campaigns that are honest about their motives and deeply empathetic towards their audience.
The ‘human approach’ to marketing focuses on the aspects of a brand that the customer cares about and uses emotional intelligence as a strategy to deliver positively on marketing initiatives. In this article, we’ll list out tangible ways in which you can successfully and practically integrate the concepts of emotional intelligence with your marketing campaigns.
To deliver a human-level of intimacy with a brand, the marketers need to delve into the emotional aspects of why people buy anything.
Aspects of Emotional Intelligence
Self-Awareness
How would you truly define your brand if you had to go beyond the features and benefits of your products? The most important step in creating emotionally-driven content begins with understanding what your brand stands for and how you can consistently use your personality to communicate with your audience.
If you are struggling to understand the true essence of your brand, here are a few questions that can strengthen your awareness of your brand.
- How do people perceive your brand?
- What are your core ideas and values?
- What is your personality?
- Why do people like you?
- What issues do people have with you?
To truly understand your brand, you need to understand the gap between how you perceive your brand and how others see you. And the best way to bridge this gap is via honest surveys. You can conduct those surveys by offering discounts or other incentives for people to participate.
Motivation
Emotionally intelligent campaigns are always honest about what they are trying to accomplish with their efforts. Your goal can be anything from increasing your sales to growing web traffic and retaining customers. An emotionally intelligent campaign would try to answer the question, ‘what’s in it for my audience?’ while trying to accomplish those goals.
Here are a few questions that will help you sketch out your motivations for a campaign.
- What is your ultimate goal?
- How will your campaign help you achieve your ultimate goal?
- What is the goal of this campaign?
- How will your goals help people?
- How will you build relationships while still achieving your goals?
By understanding your motives, you become better poised to avoid possible pitfalls while executing a strategy.
Empathy
Empathy is key to understanding how people will receive your marketing and identify if they get more out of a transaction with you than you do. Basically, a good marketer uses empathy to identify how your brand can make someone’s life easier. This would allow you to tweak your motives, messages and delivery. Find out who your audience are and what makes them tick by using social media, email marketing and customer support and other channels to survey large groups.
A few questions you can answer to make sure you are empathetic are:
- Do you understand your audience’s beliefs, desires and fears?
- Does your campaign address these emotions?
- Is your campaign respectful to them?
- Is your use of empathy sincere?
By filtering out the inconsistencies, self-interest and other aspects that will annoy, interrupt or offend, you can make your audience feel acknowledged and respected. They will respond positively and will start trusting your brand.
Personality
Every successful brand has a personality and a voice that is human. By using the right social skills, you can make your brand personality come through while communicating with your audience instead of making it a faceless, business transaction with your customers. If you look around at the people you like and try to understand why you like them, the underlying reason would be emotional intelligence and how they interact with you.
Here are a few questions you can ask yourself to make your brand’s ‘human voice’ shine through.
- Do you have a clear personality? What is it?
- Is your personality authentic and rooted in truth?
- Do people like your personality?
- Does your personality come across in your messaging?
- Do you listen to your audience or just talk?
Creating a personality for your brand makes it easy for you to stay disciplined and consistent across your branding and marketing. Ensure that you double-check your communications before hitting ‘publish’ or ‘send’ and ask yourself if the message is human-to-human.
Before you rush into creating a new campaign, go through the EQ process and answer the questions pertaining to all these areas. After a while, it will become second nature to infuse your marketing with emotional intelligence.
At TOSS the COIN, we have worked extensively on campaigns that have delivered exceptional results for our clients. The best ones always have a layer of emotional intelligence to truly deliver value to a customer. To know more about our branding and campaign management services, get in touch with us now.