OmniKick Blog

Stop wasting your time and budget.

Emotional connection is what you need to sell your product or service.

If you don’t connect with prospects on an emotional level, they won’t buy.

According to research published in the Harvard Business Review:

“Brands put billions into boosting awareness, satisfaction, and loyalty, but they often overlook the most powerful driver of customer value: emotional connection.

Our research involving hundreds of brands across dozens of categories shows that consumers who are emotionally connected with a brand are anywhere from 25% to 100% more valuable in terms of revenue and profitability than those who are “merely” highly satisfied with it…”

Companies spend the majority of their time on measuring satisfaction and improving transaction details. Focusing merely on those is a waste of time.

So what is an emotional connection?

How do you emotionally connect with customers?

(GrowthFunnel_Code)

Emotionally connecting with customers means capturing their hearts and minds.

How you make customers feel when they buy from you, when they read your content online and offline, and when they hear about you is very important.

Building an emotional connection is crucial to selling more, earning more and making customers stay loyal to your brand.

Loyal customers are more likely to recommend your product to their friends and family

A Nielsen UK study found that people are more likely to purchase a new product when they learn it through friends and family.

It’s difficult to achieve brand loyalty if you are not building an emotional connection with customers.

So, how do you build an emotional connection with both prospects and customers?

Tell Stories. Stories Sell.

Storytelling is a great content marketing strategy that can greatly benefit any brand or company no matter the kind of product or service.

Stories are so important that they are passed down from our parents. And from one generation to the next.

Storytelling is a powerful communication tool in marketing.

It helps you emotionally connect with customers. Faster and easier.

Brands like yours (no matter how small) can leverage the power of storytelling in its content.

Branded content gives content marketing a bad name.

That word was created by advertisers, agencies and media planners who are from the world of paid media.

Users hate branded content because they’re often biased.

A branded content doesn’t offer anything valuable and exciting.

It’s hard to emotionally connect with customers when your content is filled with product pitches and rants all about your company.

There’s a better and right way to do it.

Let’s switch the name.

Let’s call it content brands instead of branded content.

According to Andrew Davis, the author of Brandscaping and Town, Inc:

“Content brands are created for an audience, while branded content is created for a business.”

With content brands, you focus on the needs of your customers.

You make them the focal point of your content marketing.

You think of the things they find interesting, educating and valuable. Then you include those things in your content.

As a result, you create content that engages customers, evoke their emotions and inspire them to take action.

If your content is superb, they will share it with their friends and family. That shows you’ve managed to connect with them.

Storytelling helps you quickly connect with prospects.

Everyone loves good stories.

Over 100 years now, John Deere is still using storytelling to market their brand. They rarely mention their products in their content. Their focus is the prospect and customer.

If your goal is to build a long-term relationship with consumers, you need to start using storytelling in your content.

If all you do is talk about your brand, then you’re selling it short.

Respect prospects and customers by showing and telling them compelling stories. They’ll engage with your content when you do that.

And as a result, you’ll emotionally connect with them.

Don’t Be A Boring Brand

A boring brand is what it is:

Boring!

Would rather buy from a boring brand or purchase from the one that does the same thing but somehow better?

I’m sure you’ll choose the latter.

There are a lot of boring brands out there.

People hate boring brands.

Boring brands struggle to connect with customers.

First, if you’re the mind and face behind your brand, you have to stop being boring.

If you’re boring, your brand will be boring too.

You have to be interesting.

You have to know what you do and live why you do it. You have to be interested to be interesting.

Your passion and love for what you do will transfer to your brand, and it will make it interesting.

There are different ways to create a loving and exciting brand.

Get curious.

What interesting things can you do that haven’t been done by the competitors?

You may come up with some silly ideas. But, trust me, they are going to help you create a compelling brand.

They a lot of crazy ideas out there.

For example, you might want to stop blogging.

If many of your competitors are creating great content on their blogs, and you believe that you can’t beat them, it’s wise to drop the blog.

Dropping the blog doesn’t mean you should stop doing content marketing. It’s just that you want to try a new form of content.

Take inspiration from GoPro.

GoPro creates a lot of interesting video contents and uploads them on their YouTube channel.

Many of their videos have millions of views on YouTube.

Their interesting video contents get people talking about their brand everywhere on the web.

GoPro is emotionally connecting with customers without being boring.

Don’t be afraid to shoot some interesting videos for your brand.

A video helped launched a lifestyle company that would later be sold for $1 billion.

The video was created for under $5,000. The company I’m talking about here is Dollar Shave Club.

12,000 signed up in the first 48 hours from when their first video launched.

As I write this, that video alone has amassed over 23 million views on YouTube.

Embed below is the video:

See how interesting it is?

It’s far from boring.

You can’t hate a brand that creates interesting videos like this.

Video marketing is the future.

There are more ways to be interesting.

You could try a new random platform most of your competitors currently ignore.

Maybe you could reach a new untargeted audience on that platform.

And because it’s only you or a few on the platform, it’ll be much easier to connect with customers there.

Pinterest?

Podcasting?

Snapchat?

Vine?

BuzzFeed?

Twitter?

Instagram?

Medium?

Think of a platform most of your competitors are neglecting. Be the first to use it.

How about rapping to create content for your brand?

Well, HubSpot did it.

As you can see, it’s not boring.

Another way to make your content more interesting is to go deep.

There are a lot of contents out there that repeat what have been created before. Don’t do that.

Instead, you should make your content more authoritative by adding depth to it.

I’m a big fan of the Skyscraper Technique by Brian Dean.

Here are the three steps that make up the strategy:

Step 1: Find a link-worthy content (Content that has received a lot of backlinks and mentions in your niche).

Step 2: Make something even better than what you find.

Step 3: Reach out to the people who linked and referenced the link-worthy content you found in step 1. And reach out to even more people that may be interested in your new piece of content.

These 3-steps work for creating the best content in your niche, and getting the links and traffic you deserve.

Your brand will be far from boring when you use the Skyscraper Technique.

The Skyscraper Technique will help your brand connect with prospects.

We publish a lot of long authoritative articles here on Mountnow.

Search users love long content. That’s why long, in-depth content performs extremely well on search engines.

Another great way to make your content more interesting is to use a lot of images.

Images make it easier for readers to digest your information quickly.

For example, Buffer uses a lot of images in their blog posts.

In fact, you’ll notice they add one or two between every 4 to 5 paragraphs.

Those images make their content super-cool. And their articles are far from boring because of this.

Visuals get more views for your content.

You’ll notice that this article contains a lot of images. These pictures make the post more interesting.

Isn’t it?

You should start doing the same thing.

Add a lot of visuals to your posts.

You want your content to connect with prospects. To achieve that, you need to make them more interesting.

Publishing boring contents makes you a dull brand.

A dull brand bores you. It bores your website visitors. And nobody wins.

Being boring is a sin.

Put A Face Behind Your Company

It’s intrusive and annoying when you have to deal with several people before buying a product or service from a startup.

The case may be different for the big, established brands like Amazon.

Consider the below two scenarios:

If you’re choosing between:

1. A local freelance web developer who meets with you in-person, talks about your needs, builds your profile, and genuinely wants to know you, or
2. An online web design agency that goes through multiple departments and redirects you to every HR and PR staff available

Which would appeal to you more?”

You’ll certainly want to pick A because there’s a real person behind the brand.

Today, it’s all about Engagement marketing.

Engagement marketing is about connecting with people on a personal level.

People go shopping for themselves.

Not you. Not me.

So you need to become their friends.

When you become their friends, you’ll understand their needs and interests.

By understanding their needs and interests, you’ll have a better chance of converting them into customers. And you’ll have a much better chance of making them stay loyal to your brand.

The first step of the engagement sequence is to connect with prospects.

You do that by meeting an immediate need they have.

That could be creating a valuable content that addresses their concerns. Or, a content that offers a solution.

It could also be that you dislike things they dislike. And you like things they like. They should be some connection.

It could also be that your website and product offer the exact experience they want.

As long as people like what you do and how you do it, you’ve connected with them.

Take this forward by informing, entertaining and sharing even more valuable contents with them. That’s how you develop a deeper connection with your prospects.

But the face is very important.

There should be a real face behind your brand.

People want to have an impression that there are people they can contact when they get stuck. When they need answers to a bugging question.

People want to feel they can trust your brand. They want to be sure you won’t disappear without traces.

It’s easy for anyone to start an online business today.

All you need is an HTML editor and a cheap web hosting set up and running.

Everyone can launch their startup.

What’s harder to do is building that connection that will get people to open their wallets and buy your product.

It’s hard to fake team members and claim they are the people behind your business.

For example, Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah are quite known and are the real face behind HubSpot.

People trust them. They know they are building an excellent product and team.

You may not achieve the fame of these two wise men, but people need to know you. They need to know who’s behind your brand.

If you’re the founder, you don’t necessarily have to be the face of your company.

It could be an employee.

For example, when you land on the Ahrefs website, you’ll see these three faces in the chat box located on the right side.

As long as people can trust you, you’ll have a better chance of connecting with them.

Brands like Ralph Lauren, The Huffington Post, Trump all have a face behind each of them.

Here’s a story published on Entrepreneur about how a woman built a successful business because she put a face behind it:

“Kimberly Fowler is a role model to her customers. Business at Fowler’s Los Angeles fitness centers boomed once she revealed her story of overcoming brain cancer and facing death after a climbing accident.

“When I started the company I didn’t have the budget for advertising and PR, but once I put my face on my company, sales soared,” says the owner of YAS Fitness Centers, which has grown into sportswear and production operations.

Once her triumphant story was posted on her website, media coverage took off—90 percent of which focuses on Fowler’s personal journey.

She estimates revenue jumped by 40 percent after she became the brand.”

That’s the power of putting a face behind your brand.

It makes it easier to connect with prospects emotionally.

By emotional connecting with prospects and customers, sales will increase.
Thanks for reading. And please share this article with your network on social media.

Related articles: customer engagement strategies, marketing stages, UX tips, influencer marketing, viral marketing techniques