Posted July 6, 2018

Finding your way to Emotional Advertising

Finding your way to Emotional Advertising
i4 Asia Blogs

Have you tried watching those emotional commercials that’s trending on social media sites? If you have, then you also might’ve found yourself leaning towards that specific brand after watching the ad. Okay, here’s a specific example: Do you remember when Jollibee released a series of tear-jerking commercials in time for Valentines Day? I’m pretty sure you’ve watched that on your Facebook timeline, and you’ve definitely loved Jollibee even more after crying over the plot twists of their 3-minute commercials. Now, if you’re asking why you suddenly craved for a Jollibee burger and fries after watching the ads, then you’ve been a witness of the genius of Emotional Advertising.

from Jollibee’s #KwentongJollibee campaign: “Crush”

It’s an advertising strategy that targets the consumers’ emotions and subconscious for effective brand recall. If an ad is so powerful that they can evoke a feeling, then consumers are more likely to associate that feeling when they purchase the product. It’s quite amazing how it works, isn’t it?

Today, this is one of the most trending ad strategies in the digital marketing industry. For digital marketers, it’s the perfect time for emotional ads since people now use the internet as an avenue to vent out their feelings and emotions.With that, there are four core human emotions that we can project in our ads to connect with our audience: happy, sad, angry/disgusted, and afraid/surprised.

Before we discuss further how to use emotions in your ads, you have to know that this is incredibly risky. If this is used in the wrong way, then it can be catastrophic and controversial, and we all know we don’t want that. Nationwide’s “The Boy” is probably the best example of emotional advertising gone completely wrong.

This is a reminder that emotions can be dangerous and volatile. That’s why as brand managers, we have to carefully think through the overall content and the message we want to tell our audience.

Now, going back, let me discuss how we successfully handled one of our clients’ social media page with emotional advertising. One of our very first digital marketing clients is The French Baker Philippines. If you’re familiar with this French-inspired brasserie, you’ll know that their branding is warm, inviting, family-oriented, and has a romantic voice because of its French theme. When we first handled their Facebook page, we were a bit surprised that the brand is not performing well in social media. They were highlighting the products, they were consistent with their content, but there was still something missing.

Our digital marketing team decided to take a different approach in our captions, content, and copies with the approval of the people from The French Baker, of course. We first started out creating content that were relatable to the audience. We posted images of the products, but the voice we used in our captions were conversational. Our goal was to create feel-good content since our objective was to make our audience happy by eating at The French Baker.  We started out slow, but once we got to know our audience by studying how they engage with our posts, we knew exactly how to execute our ads.

We used certain phrases in our content like, ‘Tag that special someone’, ‘Who would you take to dinner?’, and ‘Bring home our freshest breads to your family’ to be consistent with the brand and at the same time, to encourage our audience to engage with their friends and family using our posts. If people are tagging their Facebook friends in our posts, then it will definitely increase our traffic and reach.

Emojis also played a big part in our ads. I know using emojis as marketing strategy sounds ridiculous, but we were also surprised that it made a significant difference in the performance of our posts. People were engaging more and most importantly, we gained an increase in page likes!  Now, what exactly did the emojis do? It humanized our posts, and it spoke the language of the digital generation.

From posts that only reach a hundred people,  our organic reach now usually targets up to more than five thousand people. With boosting, we can go as much as 500,000 reach. Emotional advertising made this all possible, and of course, it was the perfect strategy for the The French Baker brand.

What did we do exactly? We humanized our posts as much as possible, and we tapped into our own emotions to produce posts that our followers would like to see. To be honest, it wasn’t always easy to think happy thoughts while creating the posts but it definitely worked and we couldn’t be more proud.

There are a lot of ways to utilize emotions as part of your marketing and advertising but just make sure to be genuine and honest without compromising the brand. Remember, the ads that stood out were the ones who relied on their brand truth AND were able to portray raw human emotions that everyone could relate to. So, here’s my advice: go out there and find an inspiration. Best of luck to your advertising and marketing!

i4 Asia

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