The most effective content is honest, authentic, and resonates with customers. While many brands try to tick each of these boxes as they create content, it’s not as easy as it sounds. To generate relatable content, more marketers are leaning into emotional intelligence.
Emotional intelligence moves away from marketing assumptions and focuses on an audience’s emotional needs. As a result, marketers can foster customer relationships.
What is emotional intelligence?
Emotional intelligence, sometimes abbreviated as EQ, is the ability to understand someone’s feelings, empathize with them, and build a relationship based on those needs.
Marketers benefit from using emotional intelligence because it allows them to connect with customers on a deeper level, which in turn develops trust and loyalty.
Emotionally intelligent content:
- Understands customers’ wants and empathizes with them.
- Focuses on honesty and authenticity.
- Caters to customer’s needs, not those assumed by marketing teams.
Advantages of emotional intelligence in content creation
Leveraging emotional intelligence helps marketers forge stronger relationships with customers and helps marketers:
Create tailored messages
When marketers are in tune with customers’ needs, challenges, and pain points, they can create tailored content that provides solutions. In a competitive landscape, customers aren’t interested in being sold a product; they are interested in finding solutions to everyday problems.
Produce compelling stories
Emotional intelligence lends itself to relatable storytelling. Enabling your brand to make a strong, memorable connection with customers builds brand awareness and loyalty.
Build trust
By showing an emotional interest in customers, you help them trust your brand. When you establish trust, customers are more likely to buy from you and remain loyal to you. Research shows 88% of customers are willing to buy from brands they trust and are 90% likely to recommend them to a friend.
How to incorporate emotional intelligence in content creation
As a marketer, you may wonder how to apply emotional intelligence to your content. While the goal is to connect with customers at a deeper level, what actionable tasks should marketers take to achieve it? Here’s how to get started:
Collect audience data
Most brands collect customer data, but in most cases, it’s quantifiable data like age, gender, income level, and purchase history. Emotional intelligence requires more qualitative data, like identifying customers’ pain points, ambitions, and reactions to visuals and messages.
To collect emotional data, you can:
- Send surveys
- Host focus groups
- Conduct customer interviews
- Use social listening tools
Build out your customer personas
Research shows 44% of brands use buyer personas to define their audience. If your brand is part of this group, you’ll add your emotional data to the profiles to have a more complete picture of your audience segments.
If your brand doesn’t have customer personas, it’s time to create them. Use online templates as a guide, and add your emotional data.
Build campaigns that incorporate emotional triggers
Through your research, you’ll likely identify reasons why customers support your brand.
A cosmetic company may find that self-care is a common trigger for purchases, for example, or a retailer may find that its commitment to eco-friendly practices attracts customers.
Pinpoint emotional triggers and work them into your campaigns. The cosmetic company could focus on self-care products with messaging that encourages women to take time for themselves, for example. Since you’ve identified self-care as a trigger, the campaign has a higher likelihood of engaging with your customers and driving sales.
Emotionally intelligent campaigns are rooted in customer-given data, not on marketing assumptions. Without understanding the audience’s emotions, the cosmetic company could run ads encouraging women to achieve trendy looks — and they’d likely fall flat.
Emotional data helps you create more relatable, effective campaigns.
Segment your audiences
As you build more robust customer personas, you can break your audience into more segments. Start creating variations of your campaigns that cater to each group.
In some cases, campaigns might need a small messaging tweak, while other times, entirely different visuals and messaging may be needed. Either way, tailored content will connect with your audience.
Analyze and adjust
As with any marketing effort, you should analyze metrics and make adjustments to improve. Monitor engagement, website traffic, lead captures, click-throughs, and purchases.
Get together with your marketing team to discuss what’s working and what’s not. If you identify data gaps, make a plan to obtain them, be it through customer interviews, surveys, or focus groups.
Incorporating emotional intelligence into content creation takes time and effort, but its potential ROI is worth the investment. If your brand is interested in using this tactic but simply can’t find the time to secure customer data and generate relatable blogs, videos, and social posts, ContentMarketing.com can help. With content solutions for brands, agencies, and publishers, we can help you connect with your audience while increasing content production and streamlining processes.
