Most companies spend a lot of time, effort and money to tell their story. But they can’t connect with their audience. The reason is simple: they’re not engaging with their emotions.
The average person is exposed to as many as 10,000 brand messages every day. You need to stand out and connect to your audience in order to share your brand’s story.
Every one of us has an emotional relationship with a product or a service. We feel good about it, we feel bad about it, or we feel nothing at all.
If you want your company to have a successful marketing campaign, you need to understand and engage the emotions of your clients.
A great example is the campaign for “Dumb Ways To Die” from Metro Trains Melbourne. The catchy song and memorable characters engaged people into sharing the video across social media channels worldwide. Of course, it helped that the campaign was for a great cause too: safety around metro trains.*
Let’s face it. In today’s world, sharing a company’s story has become the norm. What hasn’t become the norm is how to do it well.
Roughly 95% of people are visual learners. That means that when you share information with someone, chances are 95% of the time they will remember more if you show them a picture or video than if you tell them something in words.
Pictures and videos allow us to convey emotion, which is one of the most powerful ways to engage with an audience. Emotion moves people and has the ability to change their beliefs, perceptions and behaviors.
So, why aren’t more people tapping into this? Why isn’t emotion always used when sharing a company’s story?
We all have a story to share. It’s part of what makes us human. And whether we like it or not, storytelling is a skill that can be learned and improved upon.
The problem is that most of the time, the way we tell stories isn’t very effective. Whether you’re sharing a personal story at a dinner party or presenting your company’s story in a boardroom, how you tell your story has the power to move an audience or leave them unmoved.
Why Emotion Is Important In Storytelling
The reason why emotion is so important in storytelling is because we are innately emotional beings. We feel before we think before we act. We make decisions with our hearts and then try to cover them up with our heads.
But what it all boils down to is this: If you want to make someone feel something – fear, anger, love, empathy – you have to first make them care about what you have to say. And making someone care about what you have to say requires an emotional connection between yourself and your audience.
Humans are emotional beings. When we think of the best stories ever told, the ones that stay with us, it’s always because they stimulated an emotion in us.
The most memorable marketing campaigns of all time did not just tell us how great a product was. They made us laugh, they made us cry and they made us feel something.
When you’re writing or creating content for your brand, your goal should be to engage your audience through emotions in order to create a lasting impact. Here are four ways to do that:
The theory of “emotional contagion” suggests that we catch the emotions of those around us. Emotions are contagious. One of the ways this occurs is through mimicry, or the automatic copying of another’s emotional expressions, vocalizations, postures and movements. So if I smile at you, chances are you’ll smile back at me. This happens on a conscious and unconscious level, so you might not even realize it’s happening.
Anthropologist David Matsumoto suggests that as a result of this process people begin to look alike when they spend time together. According to Matsumoto: “The more time people spend together, the more similar their smiles become.”
So what does all this have to do with marketing? Plenty! It means that if you want your customers to buy from you and your employees to stay motivated and engaged, you’ve got to engage their emotions first. Here’s why:
Emotions are contagious. The more positive emotions you convey in your story, the more likely your audience is to engage with you in a positive way. Positive feelings create positive memories, which can lead to long-term customer loyalty and happy employees who stick around for the long-haul.
The human brain is designed to respond to stories. It’s the way we’ve evolved over time – it’s what makes us human.
Scientists have been able to prove that the brain responds more strongly to a good story than just facts alone. This is because our brains are hardwired through evolution to respond to stories. It’s our instinctual survival mechanism.
So, how does this apply to your company or organization?
Your customers and clients are people with real emotions – and they want to engage with someone who understands them.
Businesses can create a strong emotional connection with their customers by telling their story in an engaging way, rather than just listing facts about their products or services.
When you tell a customer about your product or service, be sure to focus on how it will benefit them specifically. What problem does it solve for them? How will it make their lives easier?
If you want your customers to feel something, you need to create a story that resonates with them on an emotional level (but don’t forget the facts).
In the late 1980s, when we first got word processors, I was working at the publishing house Faber & Faber. The publishing industry had been working with typewriters for a hundred years, and it was still adjusting to the new technology. When people started handing in manuscripts written on computers, editors would print them out and mark them up with a pen, then give them back to the author to input the changes.
Eventually someone had the bright idea of giving authors access to the same word-processing software as the editors. This was considered a significant advance. But it was still an awkward process: authors would get a floppy disk from the publishers, enter their changes on their own computer, then take it back to get a new floppy with the next set of changes. It was like having your teeth cleaned by someone who lived across town and didn’t have a phone.
The only problem was that when you looked at what you’d written on screen, it looked different from what you’d written on paper. It looked less good somehow. You could see why when you printed it out: there was something about ink on paper that made things look more real than they did on screen.
The reason we were so attached to ink on paper wasn’t because the technology
