Emotional content marketing: how to create content that connects

TL;DR

Emotional content marketing is about creating content that makes your audience feel something, rather than simply telling them what your business sells.

To create emotional content that works:

• Know your audience. Understand who you’re talking to, what matters to them and where they are in their customer journey.
• Choose the emotion deliberately. Decide whether you want your audience to feel reassured, excited, understood, inspired, nostalgic or something else.
• Use storytelling. Stories, relatable situations and real experiences make emotional messages easier to connect with.
• Stay true to your brand. The emotion you’re creating should reinforce how you want people to perceive your business.
• Don’t force the sale. Sometimes the aim of your content is simply to build familiarity, trust and authority.
• Give people somewhere to go next. Match your call to action to their stage in the customer journey.
• Measure what happens. Engagement, shares, returning visitors, conversions and customer feedback can all help you understand whether your content is connecting.

People might discover your brand because of what you say. But they’re far more likely to remember it because of how you made them feel.

What is emotional content marketing?

Emotional content marketing is content created to evoke a particular feeling or emotional response in your audience.

Rather than focusing solely on your products, features or sales messages, emotional content marketing uses elements such as storytelling, language, imagery and relatable experiences to build a stronger connection between your audience and your brand.

It can form an important part of your wider Digital Content Marketing strategy.

Digital Content Marketing is any content such as videos, blogs & social media posts that informs and helps a prospective customer. It doesn’t always need to be about selling. One of its objectives can simply be proving to the consumer that you are a trustworthy brand with authority and expertise in your field.

And emotion can be incredibly useful in achieving that.

How does emotional content marketing work?

So, how do you tell somebody, “My brand is trustworthy,” without sounding like you’re flogging them something? It’s a tricky balancing act, for sure, but it can be done, and when it’s done well it can be incredibly effective.

The aim is to evoke a feeling.

If the customer journey is a funnel with the moment of purchase right at the bottom, a lot of Digital Content Marketing sits towards the top of that funnel in the “Customer Awareness” section. This might mean it’s the first time the customer has ever heard of your brand, or at least the first time they’ve had reason to sit up and take notice.

If you’re selling life insurance, for example, a single person in their twenties probably hasn’t given much thought to what you do. Fast-forward a few years, when they’ve got a kid on the way, and they might be starting to consider shopping around.

If your Digital Content Marketing happens to flash up in front of them at this point in their life, the last thing you necessarily want them to see is a pushy, sales-heavy piece of content. Instead, you might simply want them to see something that makes them feel safe and trusting when they look at your brand’s name and logo.

Then, a few months down the line, when they’re further along their customer journey, you’re in prime position thanks to your emotive Digital Content Marketing.

That’s an important distinction. The content hasn’t made them buy immediately; it has helped shape how they feel about the brand when they’re eventually ready to make that decision.

Who is consuming my emotional content marketing?

This is a key question that any brand must ask when creating Digital Content Marketing: who are we targeting with this?

We’ve touched on how an individual can change and how that affects their customer journey, but it’s also vital to know the demographic that will be consuming your Digital Content Marketing. Understanding your audience doesn’t just help you decide what to say; it also helps you decide what you want them to feel.

Take Vision Express. While people of all ages can need glasses or contact lenses, it’s most common in older people. So, Vision Express opted for an older person who is immediately recognisable to viewers of a similar age as a trustworthy figure. After all, who’s more trustworthy than a news reporter?

By pairing this with an array of emotionally charged historical events that older viewers will remember, they unite the brand itself with a sense of trust throughout those emotional memories. Finally, and crucially to the message they’re conveying, the advert shifts away from war and terror to conclude with a safe, calm park scene and the Vision Express branding.

We don’t need to tell you why that’s a better scene to have associated with your brand than war.

Look beyond the advert itself and you can see some useful emotional marketing principles at work. The audience is made up of older consumers who are likely to recognise the references and presenter, while the intended emotions are familiarity, trust and reassurance. The technique is to connect the brand with memories and experiences that already carry emotional weight.

The marketing lesson is simple: you don’t always need to tell your audience how trustworthy you are. Sometimes it’s more effective to create content that allows them to reach that feeling themselves.

And that’s why understanding the audience comes first.

How to create emotional content marketing

We’ve spoken a lot about the aims and objectives of Digital Content Marketing, but how do you achieve them?

There isn’t one perfect formula. It all depends on your audience, your brand, what you specialise in and the medium you’re using. However, there are some steps that can make emotional content marketing much more deliberate.

1. Know who you’re talking to

Before thinking about your campaign, advert, blog post or social media content, think about the person consuming it. What matters to them? What are they worried about? What do they want? What stage of the buying journey are they at? What do they already think about your industry, and what might they currently think about your brand?

A 25-year-old first-time buyer and a 60-year-old business owner could both be considering financial services, for example, but the content that connects emotionally with each person could be completely different.

2. Decide what you want them to feel

This is one of the most important questions in emotional marketing: how should somebody feel after consuming this content?

Don’t just start with “we need a LinkedIn post” or “we need a video”. Start with the response you’re trying to create. Perhaps you want somebody to feel safe, reassured, understood, excited, curious, inspired, nostalgic, confident or part of something.

That choice can shape everything that follows.

3. Choose the right emotional trigger

Not every emotion is right for every business, audience or situation. A solicitor helping someone through a difficult situation might want to create reassurance and confidence, while a travel business might want excitement and anticipation. A heritage brand might benefit from nostalgia, while a B2B technology company may want prospective buyers to feel confident that they’re making a safe, intelligent decision.

The goal isn’t simply to make content “emotional”. It’s to choose an emotion that makes sense for the audience and the situation.

4. Tell a story

Language is a key component that runs through every platform and outlet, but storytelling gives that language structure.

Instead of simply saying, “Our business understands first-time buyers,” you can show the nervous first-time buyer waiting for the phone call that confirms they’ve finally got their mortgage. Rather than saying, “Our product makes family occasions special,” you can show the family coming together.

You’re creating a moment the audience can recognise, imagine or remember, and that makes the message far more powerful than simply stating the emotion you want to create.

5. Connect the feeling to your brand

This is vital. There isn’t much point creating an advert that makes somebody laugh, cry or feel nostalgic if they have absolutely no idea which company made it five minutes later.

The emotion needs to have a meaningful connection to your brand. Think about what you want your audience to associate with you, whether that’s trust, innovation, reliability, community, excitement, luxury or simplicity.

Emotional marketing works best when the feeling reinforces the position you want your brand to occupy.

6. Don’t rush the sale

Not every piece of marketing content needs to immediately say “BUY NOW”.

Emotional content can help someone discover you, remember you, trust you and eventually consider you. Different pieces of content can play different roles throughout that journey.

That doesn’t mean emotional marketing has no commercial purpose. Quite the opposite. It means recognising that the journey towards a purchase can begin long before somebody fills in a form, adds something to a basket or speaks to your sales team.

7. Give people somewhere to go next

While you don’t always need to make a hard sell, you should still think about what somebody can do after engaging with your content.

That might mean reading another article, watching another video, following your social media account, signing up for useful content, exploring a related service, looking at customer stories or getting in touch.

The important thing is to match your CTA to where that person is in their journey.

Which emotions work in content marketing?

There’s no single ‘best’ emotion. The right one depends on the audience, context and brand.

Here are a few examples, though:

The important thing is to decide deliberately rather than trying to make something emotional simply for the sake of it.

Emotional Content Marketing methods

You’ll often see television adverts for high-end food utilising visuals to illustrate the feeling you get when you experience the product they’re offering. But that’s not the only way brands use emotion.

Think about the seasonal marketing you see at Easter and Christmas that shows happy families full of smiling faces coming together to enjoy premium chocolate or a home-cooked meal. It’s here, in this persona-led marketing, that a brand focuses on creating a feeling that you can associate with them. But not every brand has the advantage of being visually appealing.

Look at banks, for example. They aren’t exciting to look at, so how do you create visual content that evokes emotions? Language plays a major role.

Nationwide went all-out on this with spoken-word poetry from couples buying their first home, while Halifax tried to position itself as a hub of the local community going through life’s emotions with its customers.

The Halifax advert taps into personal moments, both positive and negative, while employing the lyrics “Stand By Me” alongside the brand. Again, the important thing is the association. The product itself isn’t particularly emotional, but the life moments surrounding the product are.

That’s where the opportunity lies.

Emotional content marketing isn’t just advertising

It’s easy to think emotional marketing means creating a big-budget television advert designed to make somebody cry at Christmas, but it doesn’t.

Emotional content can appear throughout your marketing. Blogs can use stories, relatable situations and examples that demonstrate you understand what your audience is experiencing. Social media can build belonging, excitement, humour, reassurance and familiarity over time, while video can make complex subjects feel more human by putting people at the centre of the message.

Email marketing can also create an emotional response when the right message is delivered at the right moment, making an existing customer feel recognised and valued rather than simply marketed to. Case studies can become far more powerful when you explain the human problem behind the project instead of only listing what you delivered, while even straightforward website copy can influence whether somebody feels confident, overwhelmed, understood or confused.

Emotion isn’t a channel. It’s part of how you communicate.

Market positioning: why choose you?

It’s one thing to be a trustworthy expert with authority in your field, but how do you stand out from your competitors? How does the customer know that, and why would they choose you? When we’re talking about products, having a “Unique Selling Point” is always seen as a must. But is it really that different for brands when positioning yourself in the market?

A perfect place to look here would be The Volkswagen Group, an organisation owning the likes of Porsche, Bentley, SEAT and Audi, among others. However, if we put Volkswagen’s Digital Content Marketing alongside Audi’s Digital Content Marketing, we see chalk and cheese.

Why would the same organisation market two of its own brands in such drastically different ways? Because each one needs a position in the market, and that’s what Digital Content Marketing can help to create.

If you’re scrolling through Instagram while the mechanic fixes your car for the umpteenth time in the past year, you might be thinking, “It’s time I save up and get myself a more reliable car.” If a post from Volkswagen with the slogan “If only everything in life was as reliable as a Volkswagen” pops up on your phone at that moment, there’s suddenly a solution to your peril and the brand’s name feels like a weight off your shoulders.

Likewise, if you’re tanning on your yacht in the Mediterranean and happen to stumble across a tweet from Audi saying “Vorsprung Durch Technik”, roughly translating as “Progress through technology”, you might start wondering if it’s time to add a new supercar to your collection. Alright, perhaps that’s a slightly more niche customer journey.

But the principle is important. Volkswagen and Audi might both sell cars, yet the feeling each brand wants to create is different. That’s positioning, and emotional content marketing can help strengthen it.

Does emotional content marketing work in B2B?

Absolutely.

There’s sometimes a temptation to think emotion belongs in B2C marketing while B2B marketing should be rational, factual and serious, but businesses don’t actually make purchasing decisions; people within businesses do.

Those people can still feel concerned about making the wrong decision, relieved when somebody understands their problem, confident in a supplier, ambitious about what a project could achieve, frustrated with an existing solution or proud of making a successful decision.

That means B2B emotional marketing doesn’t have to involve dramatic stories or tear-jerking advertising. Sometimes the emotion you’re trying to create is simply, “These people understand what I’m dealing with. I’m in safe hands.”

For many B2B brands, that’s incredibly powerful.

When emotional marketing goes wrong

Emotional marketing can be effective, but that doesn’t mean every attempt at being emotional will work.

One common problem is trying too hard. Audiences can usually tell when emotion has been forced into content because somebody decided it needed to be “inspiring”. If it doesn’t feel natural, it can have the opposite effect.

Choosing the wrong emotion can also create problems. Humour can work brilliantly for one audience and feel completely inappropriate to another, while fear might generate attention but damage the trust you’re trying to build. You always need to consider the situation your audience is in.

It’s also possible to create an emotional response that people don’t connect back to your brand. If everybody remembers the hilarious advert but nobody remembers who made it, you’ve got a problem. Your brand still needs to be part of the story.

There is also a difference between understanding an audience’s genuine emotions and exploiting them. Emotional content should build a real connection, not manufacture anxiety purely to force somebody into taking action.

Finally, emotion alone isn’t enough. It might get somebody’s attention, but there still needs to be something useful behind it. Great marketing can make people feel and give them something of value at the same time.

How do you measure emotional content marketing?

This can be tricky because Google Analytics doesn’t contain a metric called “Felt reassured: +32%”.

It would certainly make our lives easier if it did.

Instead, you need to look at the behaviour your content produces. Depending on the campaign, that might include engagement rate, shares, saves, comments, video completion rate, time spent engaging with content, returning visitors, branded search, email engagement, assisted conversions, enquiries and sales.

Qualitative feedback matters too. What are customers saying in comments? What words do they use in reviews? What does your sales team hear on calls? How do customers describe your business?

If your goal is to become associated with trust and customers repeatedly tell you that your team feels knowledgeable, reliable and reassuring, that’s valuable information.

Ultimately, emotional content marketing still has to contribute to wider marketing objectives. The emotion isn’t the end goal; it’s part of the route towards it.

Isn’t this all a bit complicated?

Yes, it is.

But good marketing always is, and getting this, your brand persona and market position, right is worth its weight in gold.

You need to understand who you’re speaking to, where they are in their journey, what matters to them, what you want them to feel, how that feeling relates to your brand, what you want them to do afterwards and how you’re going to measure whether any of it actually worked.

That’s why an emotional content marketing strategy isn’t simply about writing something “heartfelt”. It’s a strategic decision about the connection you want to create between your audience and your brand.

Emotional content marketing FAQs

What is emotional content marketing?

Emotional content marketing is content designed to evoke a particular feeling in your audience and strengthen their connection with your brand.

Rather than concentrating solely on products, features or sales messages, it can use storytelling, imagery, language and relatable experiences to create an emotional response.

Why are emotions important in content marketing?

Emotion can help content capture attention, become more memorable and create stronger associations with a brand. A customer might forget the exact wording of an advert or blog post, but remember whether it made them feel reassured, inspired, entertained or understood.

What emotions work best in marketing?

There isn’t one emotion that works best for every brand.

Trust and reassurance can work particularly well when a purchase involves risk or significant commitment, while excitement can suit launches and experiences. Belonging, aspiration, nostalgia, confidence and curiosity can all be effective when they’re relevant to the audience and the brand.

The important thing is to choose the emotion deliberately rather than trying to make content “emotional” for the sake of it.

How do you create emotional marketing content?

Start by understanding what your audience is experiencing and deciding what you want them to feel. You can then use storytelling, relatable situations, customer experiences, visuals and carefully chosen language to create that response.

The strongest emotional content also creates a natural connection between that feeling and what your brand represents.

Does emotional marketing work for B2B businesses?

Yes. B2B purchasing decisions are still made by people, and those people can be influenced by feelings such as trust, confidence, reassurance, ambition and fear of making the wrong decision.

B2B emotional marketing doesn’t necessarily need to be dramatic. Making someone feel understood and confident in their decision can be just as powerful.

Is emotional marketing manipulative?

It can be if emotions are deliberately exploited or misleading claims are used to provoke fear, anxiety or urgency.

Effective emotional marketing should create a genuine connection rather than manufacture one. The emotion should make sense for your audience, situation and brand, and your content should still be truthful and useful.

How can you measure emotional content marketing?

There isn’t one metric that measures emotion. Instead, look at the behaviour your content produces.

Depending on the campaign, useful measures can include engagement, shares, saves, comments, video completion rate, returning visitors, branded searches, conversions and assisted conversions.

Qualitative feedback can also be valuable. Comments, reviews, customer interviews and sales conversations can reveal how people actually describe your brand and whether the association you wanted to create is taking hold.

Make people feel something

Digital Content Marketing can have a major impact on how people perceive your business. In a world where your audience is surrounded by content every day, simply telling people what your company does isn’t always enough.

You need to give them something useful, show them that you understand them and create a feeling they can associate with your brand. Then, when they reach the point in their customer journey where they’re ready to make a decision, you’ve already given them a reason to remember you.

Emotional content marketing is only one part of that wider journey. The next step is making sure the content you create has a clear purpose and supports the rest of your marketing strategy.

Want to build a more structured approach to your content? Read our guide to the 70-20-10 Content Marketing System and see how different types of content can work together across the customer journey.