B2B marketing can often feel clinical and unemotional. We rely on numbers to drive results, often forgetting that behind every data point is a person. It’s easy to lose sight of what really gets your customers interested and excited about your brand and truly tap into their emotions. It’s also easy to think that data-driven marketing and emotion-driven marketing are two opposing ideas: one uses cold, hard analytics to target consumers and the other other tries to reach consumers’ hearts. But the best marketing fuses the two, creating emotionally appealing messages and deploying them based on careful analysis of customer data.
Here are two examples of successful emotional appeals in B2B marketing from this year:
The customer testimonials in this ad are the key to its emotional success. Seeing the face of the consumer (and her dog!) and learning about her life show how the product has positively impacted her as a person, creating a powerful marketing narrative.
The emotional power in Salesforce’s 2014 campaign lies in its catchphrase: “Welcome to the internet of customers.” It invokes the idea of different people using the Salesforce system for different things, leading the target audience to think about what their clients need, how they work, and what they’re like as people. They describe the “internet of customers” as a diverse ecosystem of businesses, all working in slightly different ways, forcing one to think about the parts of this ecosystem interact. This is a powerful image, and one that transcends a data-only marketing approach to tap into the emotions of those who receive it.
As 2014 winds down and planning for the new year gets underway, we should think about how we can incorporate emotional appeals into our marketing plans. Here are some quick ways to do so:
Create strong buyer personas. Think of the emotions of the audience you’re targeting. How do you want them to feel when they interact with your marketing plan?
Use this information to differentiate yourselves from your competitors. How is the emotion that your product or service invokes different? How is it more powerful?
Think about what happens when the business you work with uses your service. How will it impact their operations? What emotion will that create for them? How can you foster it.
What are you doing to infuse your marketing with more emotion?
Photo Credit: Joe Shlabotnik via Flickr Creative Commons
(Click here to expand)
