Developing And Testing An Emotional Content Strategy ( Review )

Greetings dear readers!

As a digital psychologist and marketer, it’ll be a hackneyed phase for me to say "emotions control everything".

I can boldly say I, directly and indirectly, preach the gospel of emotional targeting, against the logical strategies that many firms tend to employ.

And without evoking emotions, content is dead on pre-arrival and arrival!

Every type of content should have an aim to stir a particular emotion from people, else it loses its essence.

Content Marketing strategy cannot survive without any emotional inclusion. This post would be a guide to building a great content strategy that wields the needed emotions in order to resonate with your market.

Every decision we make is mostly emotional in nature. People do not really but features but value( I know you’ve heard that a billion times).

We buy feelings and experiences( not necessarily about the specs)! Most times, get we buy is simply;

The feeling of love for oneself, safety, relative importance amongst peers, relevance, etc.

So, in the end, we’re buying emotional value better value of ourselves.

EMOTIONAL TARGETING AND RESPONSIVE DESIGN (THE GAP)

Simply put, emotional targeting is the act of Positioning your brand to meet the emotional needs of your target market.

We do this through in-depth research on what their needs and wants might be, what is the industrial need and standard operations, etc.

Conversely, when marketers want to enact strategies to get the market’s heart, they should take note of the pitfall called "Responsive Designs".

Yes, responsive design can be viewed to be a slight pitfall.

Most of the site visits nowadays come from mobile. The need to be mobile responsive cannot be overemphasized.

Since we’re striving towards ease of use and elimination of frictions in operations.

However, there is a big challenge!
Even as the Chunk of traffic stems from mobile visitors, there is hardly any platform that addresses the specific behaviors and emotional needs of mobile visitors.

Because marketers are thinking "Desktop first", there is a 270 percent gap between conversions on desktop and on mobile.

Yeah! That big a gap!

Over the next 5 years, were still going to experience about 480 percentage surge in mobile visitors/traffic.

If the average user checks their mobile devices 150 times /day, why do we still have such gap? Why are we not capitalizing on mobile in majority of our emotional approach. The answer cannot be far fetched!

When we’re on mobile ,we are multitasking, we are too relaxed,(who wouldn’t be?),we act differently, we feel not too safe converting on mobile(transactions in general). This is why people on mobile need a specific user journey on mobile.

Due to the way people take mobile, statistics have clearly shown that we have only 2 seconds to convert someone. This is where emotional triggers come into play!

THE 4 MAGIC STEPS TO FOLLOW
Talia Wolf gives 4 basic steps in developing an emotional content strategy.
It’s pretty much 3, but the fourth one happens to be the testing itself.
1. Emotional competitor analysis
2. Emotional SWOT
3. Building the content strategy, and 4. Testing

Emotional Competitor Analysis

This is the study of our competitors and the industry as a whole.

What emotional message is being spoken?

How are they saying it? Is it being targeted enough? We do the competitor analysis in order to;

A. Understand where the market is emotional, and
B. Understand where we fit in.

The Steps:
Step 1: Pick 10-15 firms in your industry. They don’t necessarily have to be like you or be in direct competition with you. Pick firms that is also Targeting your market directly or indirectly.

Step 2: Break down their Analysis into 4 of their main practices. In terms of ;

A. Messaging; What are they saying on their landing pages?

B. Colors; What color or combination of colors do they employ?

C. Image; How do they use images to their advantage and positioning?

D. Emotional Triggers; There are over 200 emotional triggers. Which one are they employing guess why?

Every industry focuses on few unique selling proposition. Some brands may be designing their content without a knowledge of what they are doing.

Others simply follow trends, while some use the rule of conventional rule of thumb.

After analysing the 4 points of Interest, we need to ask ourselves , " Do we need to be different or well follow the pattern the rest have layed?".

EMOTIONAL SWOT

Here we'll be doing the emotional SWOT test. The SWOT is an acronym that stands for Strength, weakness, opportunity, and threats a firm has in its industry.

An emotional SWOT is to analyze the brand and people's view about the industry and also how the brand is being perceived.

With this knowledge, they can plan general content well.

We’re trying to get our SWOT not from the conventional way but from an emotional standpoint.

Strengths: These can be trust, reputation, integrity, Skill, uniqueness, etc
Weaknesses: It can come in form of poor positioning, lack of distinction from other brands, etc.

Opportunities: This can be Offering variety, new ideation, new niche, etc.

Threats: It can be in the form of difficultyn use, lack of empathy for your offering, unpopular brand, etc.

To get the emotional SWOT of your brand or industry you can use polls, surveys, etc.

We should try to get the information preferably from our Target market in order to get a more accurate conclusion instead of assumptions.

When it comes to content marketing, It is wise to focus on the market's emotional appeal instead of on analysis of prices, tech features, specs, etc.

EMOTIONAL CONTENT STRATEGY

The emotional content strategy is here to answer for the SWOT. We should your the SWOT to work on every of our content. From copy, design, landing pages, funnels, etc.

How do we want people to feel? Since there are tons of triggers to use we could align them here.

But remember: it must be in line with the SWOT already done.

The last one is testing ( it analysis the metrics used to know if it converts well or not)

This is my 10th entry for the CXL mini degree in digital psychology and persuasion am currently enrolled. The cxl institute has amazing courses to help you navigate any digital marketing career.