Connect with Viewer’s Emotions On Your Blog

Technology is very important and without it we wouldn’t be here on the internet. It can also be very helpful in steering traffic our way… but technology can only take us so far with our blogs. We’re dealing with “people” and unless we turn into robots, it takes the human touch to connect with others. The thing about technology is the better it gets, the less you need to know about it! All you have to do is let those smart programmers do the work, while you sit back and worry about sales and marketing.

Those who work in marketing say most of the same basic principals used in “offline marketing” apply to “onlne marketing”. Whether marketing offline or online, the most important marketing tool is appealing to the emotions of your viewers. Emotions are strong…  they motivate us to want certain things, and to do whatever it takes to get them. If you have a blog, these offline/online marketing tips can be very useful to you. The internet has more potential for selling an emotion than offline marketing ever had for three basic reasons:

1. it is practically free!! All you need to invest is the cost of a site. (pennies a day)

2. it is text driven… and the easiest, quickest way to appeal to a person’s emotions is thru words.

3. it is easy for people to find what they want, they search for the words.

We usually think of “love” as the strongest emotion and it is a very powerful one that can be used in marketing. That doesn’t mean you have to make people love you to buy from you, but that would work also !(lol) It means you could sell the idea of “love”, or the idea that one will feel loved if they do what you say, or have what you’re selling. It’s done every day on the internet with matchmaking sites, relationship sites, social networking sites,  relationship advice columns, relationship E-books, or “How to Catch a Man or Woman” E-books, even astrology and psychic sites are all catering to the emotion of love. And it’s a HUGE moneymaker on the internet (one of the biggest), because they are selling love and that speaks to a human’s most basic emotion of happiness, or “pleasure”.

Love sites are openly and blatently selling an emotion, but you don’t have to go so far as to sell an emotion. You can sell an emotional motivator, or just use motivators in your content to capture your viewers attention. To do this you must know your target audience’s needs and desires and appeal to them with information you have to share.

 Here’s a list of the most common emotional motivators that effect behavior: power, independence, curiosity, acceptance, money, saving, honor, idealism, social contact, family status, vengence, romance, eating, physical exercise, tranquility, order, safety, selling, ownership, admiration, acknowledgement, and a desire to belong. 

Advertisers and marketing teams keep this list of motivators and refer to them often. One place that I worked at even had the words stenciled on the walls of their Think Tank…the room where they brainstormed! These same motivators are also used by fiction writers and screenwriters to plan plots for the stories they tell. They know that a story won’t sell,  or the audience won’t relate, if the plot doesn’t appeal to our basic emotional behavior and motivators.

Marketing studies prove that if YOU can appeal to any of these motivators in another person when they are visiting your site you’re golden. Of course, marketing studies were done for the big websites that are selling something, but blogs can learn a lot from marketing studies too. Most blogs are text heavy and aren’t selling anything (except ads) which is good. People come online expecting to read so you’re not  forcing them to do something they don’t want to do. They come to get information and entertain themselves, so you’re not pushing anything on them. If you can word your posts to appeal to other’s emotional motivators then you’re on the right track.