Modern marketing requires businesses to take a deep dive into customer engagement that goes beyond the surface level. Companies are adept at tracking the end-to-end customer experience, assessing how customers respond to the company brand and its products and service offerings. Although this action provides important data about the company’s performance, it doesn’t offer a strategic plan to increase customer connections.
Instead of only analyzing and investing in customer activity across all touchpoints, businesses can build and leverage emotional connections with consumers to create brand loyalty. Brand loyalty increases brand recognition, delivering a greater return on investment (ROI).
What Does Emotional Branding Mean for Companies?
Emotional branding refers to creating a brand that will engage consumers emotionally. This requires the company to appeal to a consumer’s natural affections, desires, and needs. Customer engagement based on emotional bonds is much more likely to yield long-term consumers. Not only that, but they’ll be more likely to give you free word-of-mouth advertising.
Understanding the Connection Between Customer Engagement and Emotions
You might wonder how customers can emotionally connect to a business. Businesses often look at customer engagement in terms of product and service satisfaction. However, most consumers are satisfied but don’t emotionally connect with the brand. For example, although customers may not necessarily be dissatisfied with your product or service, without a true emotional connection, there is no guarantee that they won’t switch to another company if the opportunity arises.
Customers’ emotional connection to your brand is what builds loyalty. Consequently, businesses that optimize consumer emotional connections see greater ROI. In fact, research indicates that fully connected customers are 52% more valuable than those who are highly satisfied. These consumers boost metrics in things like purchases and frequency of use.
Top Motivators That Impact Customer Connections
Knowing that emotional branding is crucial is helpful, but how do companies tap into customer emotions? Harvard Business Review’s research shows hundreds of “emotional motivators” drive consumer connection. Out of the hundreds, these ten were identified as top emotional motivators:
- A desire to stand out from the competition
- Feeling confident in the future
- Having a sense of well-being
- Desire to contribute to social responsibility
- Feeling a sense of freedom
- Being thrilled or excited
- Feeling a sense of belonging
- Desiring self-improvement and greater self-image
- Feeling a sense of security
- Feeling that you are a success in life
Companies should position their brand in a way that fulfills more than one of these emotional motivators.
Strategies to Leverage Emotional Connections with Your Customers
Implementing a marketing plan focusing on emotional branding is key to delivering tangible results. Strategies that are helpful to leverage these customer connections include:
Track and Measure Data
Be sure to track and measure how consumers are currently responding to your brand using big data analytics.
Analysis
Once you have the data on current customer behavior, analyze the results, keeping top motivators in mind.
Identify Motivators
Determine which emotional motivators are driving customer engagement.
Tap Into Motivators
Implement methods that target these emotions. For example, if a business determines customers are motivated by “feeling confident about the future,” they could use marketing terms and methods that inspire confidence, security, and a safe future.
Have the Right Focus
Studies show that companies saw much greater results by focusing on customers who are already satisfied and trying to move them up to being fully connected instead of turning dissatisfied customers back to being satisfied. This is because businesses see a much higher yield with fully connected customers. Remember, even if you turn a consumer from dissatisfied to satisfied, they still have a way to go on the pathway of connection before they become fully connected.
Strengthen Your Insurance Brand with the Right Company
Learn more about leveraging your brand through emotional connections. At Confie, we stay on top of modern marketing and other factors influencing the insurance industry. If you want to join a leading insurance line organization, we’re always looking for talented agents. Reach out online or just give us a call at 714-252-2500!
