How to Use Emotional Marketing to Get Your Audience to Notice and Remember You

You can talk about your prices, your offers, and your bonuses all day, but there's no guarantee your ideal clients will buy. If you want to truly connect with them, you have to tap in to the most powerful marketing tool we have: emotion.

Emotional marketing - using feeling to connect with and convert clients - is the number one way to get your audience to notice and remember you. And as an artist and storyteller, you've already got the tools! Now, let's learn how to implement it in your own business to attract, convert, and build trust with your audience.

What Is Emotional Marketing?

At the end of the day, most of us make major purchasing decisions based on emotion, not logic. It's why you just couldn't walk away from that shiny new piece of equipment at the camera store. It's why your neighbor drives a fancy sportscar, even if the booster seat barely fits in the back. It's why we sometimes invest in things that enrich us and sometimes waste money on things that don't.

Sure, some buyers want to know all the nitty gritty details about their purchase: how much it costs, what they'll get, how long they'll have access to the product. But beyond all that, most of us make the final decision based on how the purchase will make us feel and what it will add to our lives. Simple as that.

When you learn to use emotion in your own marketing, you'll find that you're able to connect much more deeply with your audience. That connection inspires trust, and trust leads to a sale.

What Emotional Marketing Isn't

The idea of using emotion in marketing isn't new, but unfortunately, old-school marketing often takes advantage of our emotions.

Consider the beauty industry. They show us before-and-after images, present only flawless faces, and convince us to strive for unreachable standards. These tactics play on our emotions for sure, but those emotions are often shame and self-loathing. The beauty industry wants us to feel negatively about ourselves so we will buy their product in order to change ourselves.

Ethical emotional marketing doesn't take advantage of negative emotions. Instead, it inspires trust, empathy, and connection.

Consider the SIMI framework for trauma-informed marketing. As a marketer (or a photographer marketing your own business), you'll come across four roadblocks to connection: