The Emotional Advantage: Crafting Content that Connects
by Micaela Kamp
Capturing attention in today’s digital landscape is more challenging than ever. With less than 3 seconds to get someone to stop the scroll and pay attention, traditional marketing techniques fall short in creating a lasting impression.
Enter emotionally driven copywriting.
By leveraging emotions, brands are able to create compelling and resonant messages that stand the test of time. Learning to harness the power of emotions can be your company’s superpower, enabling you to enhance engagement, build brand loyalty, and drive higher conversion.
What exactly is emotionally driven copywriting?
Emotionally driven copywriting is the art of tapping into your audience’s desires, fears, and aspirations instead of solely presenting facts or features. When done well, this type of copy evokes an emotion or reaction from your key audience, which greatly increases the chance they will take the action you want them to take.
From happiness and joy, fear or anxiety to trust and belonging, any emotion can be used to evoke action from your audience.
When people connect emotionally with your message, they're more likely to remember it, share it, and take the desired action. This translates into the following benefits:
Increased Engagement: Content that resonates emotionally is more likely to be shared, commented on, and liked, enhancing your reach and visibility by:
Capturing Attention
Encouraging Interaction
Fostering Discussions
Building Brand Loyalty: Customers who feel emotionally connected to your brand are more likely to remain loyal and advocate for your products or services. This happens because emotionally resonate copy:
Creates Emotional Bonds
Enhances Customer Experience
Establishes Trust and Credibility
Higher Conversion Rates: Emotional appeals can effectively drive higher conversion rates through the following ways:
Motivating Action: Emotions can serve as powerful motivators, compelling audiences to take desired actions.
Reducing Decision Paralysis: Emotional appeals simplify decision-making processes by connecting products/services to the audience's core values and desires.
Improving Persuasion: Stories and messages that resonate emotionally have been shown to be more persuasive overall.
Crafting Emotionally Driven Copy
Before starting to write, it’s critical to deeply understand your audience’s emotions, desires and pain points.
This means understanding exactly what your people are feeling beyond the day to day frustrations, and leaning more into why these challenges are something they care about. To directly (or indirectly) understand this about your audience, you can use surveys, social media monitoring, and customer interviews.
What you uncover should be translated into an in depth persona that has a strong ‘Empathy Map,’ which outlines customer motivations and feelings throughout the sales journey. This will give you a guide on how to ensure your message connects effectively at every stage.
Since we are focusing on crafting copy, it’s important to be mindful of your word choice. Here are a few considerations to keep in mind when choosing the right words for your message:
Focus on ‘Emotionally Charged’ Language: Use words that naturally evoke emotions relevant to your message.
Include Sensory Descriptions: Incorporate descriptions that appeal to the senses to make your copy more vivid and immersive. This allows your audience to really visualize the story you’re building.
Focus on the Framing: Decide whether to highlight benefits (positive) or consequences of inaction (negative) based on your goals. Knowing the framing going into writing your copy will ultimately help you focus on which emotions you’re evoking from your audience.
Consider Audience Expectations: Match the tone of your word choice to what your audience finds relatable and trustworthy.
Adapt to Context: Adjust formality and style according to the medium and purpose of the copy. For example, you shouldn’t utilize ‘salesy’ copy during educational moments and vice versa.
While words and storytelling are powerful, finding the right image to pair with your copy can make or break a message. Your choice of image or video should reinforce and enhance the emotional message of your copy. Allow your viewer to see themselves in the visual and allow the copy to describe the feeling of what they’re seeing.
Color psychology can also help make an impact to get your message across. Utilize colors strategically to evoke specific emotions and reactions. The colors you choose should align with your goals or highlight specific emotions, not fight against them. (HubSpot has a good breakdown on color psychology and how to best use it to your advantage.)
Practical Tips and Best Practices
Here are a few foolproof formulas that work drafting emotionally compelling copy:
BENEFIT because FEATURE: This formula is exactly as it’s written. Lead with the benefit to show the desired outcome to the reader, following it up quickly with the feature of your product that makes it possible.
AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action): This formula ultimately translates into: Capture attention, generate interest, build desire, and prompt action. This is a good template to use when thinking about planning out copy on a landing page or in an email.
PAS (Problem, Agitation, Solution): This formula is relatively simple: Identify a problem, agitate the pain it causes, and present your solution. It works well as lead-in hooks on landing pages as well as email or advertisement copy.
Example:
Problem - What is causing pain for your audience?
Do you feel tired and sluggish throughout the day, no matter how much coffee you drink?
Agitation - How can you really make them feel or lament over this pain?
Low energy makes it hard to focus, be productive, and enjoy time with family or friends. Relying on caffeine and sugar only gives temporary relief and leads to crashes later on.
Solution - How can I solve this? What can I do to fix it?
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'Stealing' Phrases from Customers: This isn’t a formula, but more so a way to repurpose the words of your audience into copy. This isn’t just the practice of using direct quotes, but rather, incorporating phrases and language used by your customers into your copy. This approach makes your content more relatable and demonstrates that you understand and value their perspective. This type of copy works really well as headlines or subject lines.
Example:
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Headline Examples from Review:
Mistake-Proof Makeup for Every Complexion
Polished Perfection Made Easy
Conclusion
By understanding and strategically leveraging emotions, you can increase engagement, foster brand loyalty, and drive higher conversion rates. As you integrate these techniques into your marketing, remember that authenticity and understanding your audience's emotional landscape are key to making this approach work. Your audience’s pain points and feelings will change overtime, meaning your copy and approach to connecting should too. Continually test, learn, and refine your approach. Building in moments to refine your assumption will ensure your copy captures attention and builds lasting relationships and drives meaningful results for your brand.
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RevUp Capital Director of Growth Platform Micaela Kamp is an accomplished growth marketer and content architect with 8+ years of experience helping early stage companies share their stories. Over the years, she has used her ability to question everything and a belief in storytelling to build strong foundations for scalable growth for founders.