How to Design an Emotional Content Strategy: CXL’s Digital Psychology and Persuasion Review
We have come so far in understanding the working of the human brain, thoughts, and behaviors. We have talked about System 1 and System 2 of the Brain in our previous articles. System 1 is the old brain that is responsible for making most of the decisions spontaneously and is kind of in charge of our behaviors. System 2 is the boring one the rational part of the brain where we think different stuff and this is where cognitive load occurs. In this article, we will be talking about Emotional Content strategy and how we can use it to drive the behaviors of our prospects. This article is a review of CXL’s mini degree in Digital Psychology and Persuasion.
Why are we talking about emotions? Why shouldn’t we talk about the features of our product? Doesn’t everyone check the feature list before purchasing? Humans are a creature of post rationality. We make decisions before and after that think of reasoning for those decisions. We are all steered by System 1 or the old brain and the old brain is steered by Emotions.
In this article, we will be ultimately working towards an Emotional Content Strategy. This strategy will help us influence the behavior of our visitors with the help of emotions and those emotions will be conveyed with the help of the design of our site, colors, copy, elements, etc. The whole process of Emotional content strategy consists of four steps. Let’s explore these steps one by one.
Emotional Competitor Analysis:
We as marketers are running competitor analysis on daily basis. Where we are looking at what new features they are launching, what kind of ads they are running, what kind of partnerships they are creating, and a bunch of other stuff. In Emotional Competitor Analysis, we are looking at the Emotional side of things. In this analysis, you will be focusing on where your competitors are emotionally, where your industry is emotionally and where you fit in all this emotionally.
First of all select ten to fifteen of your competitors and for each competitor you will have to analyze the following factors.
Messaging: The message they are conveying to their audience. What emotional elements are contained within that message?
Colors: Colors are a silent emotional language. Each color has an emotion attached to it that’s why you need to look at all the different colors your competitor is using.
Image: You need to look at what kind of image your competitors are using on their side in the background, in the banner, etc. You need to analyze the emotions that they are trying to trigger using those images.
Emotional Triggers: Check what they are making their customers feel using their messaging, color and images, etc.
Emotional SWOT test:
A simple SWOT test is used in marketing to look at the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. In the emotional SWAT test, we will be doing all of those things but this time we will be focusing on emotional strengths associated with our product, emotional weaknesses, Emotional opportunities in the industry space, and emotional threats. We will then be using this data in our emotional content strategy.
Emotional Content Strategy:
Now it’s time to roll up your sleeves and start working on the actual emotional content strategy for our brand. The objective of this content strategy should be to address the biggest issues that our visitors are facing in this niche and craft something so that we can address those issues with our emotional content. You have your SWOT analysis and to create the emotional content strategy what you’ll be doing is eradicating all the threats that you found using your emotional content and highlight all your strengths that you found using your emotional content.
Now you have your emotional content strategy that is addressing all the weaknesses of your brand, addresses the threats, follows up on the opportunities, and focuses on the strengths of your brand. You need to be different from your competitors and analyze what are the loopholes in their content that you can address using your emotional content strategy.
Testing:
This is the most important part of your journey. You have your emotional content strategy, You have the emotions that you want to achieve in your content. This step will address the different areas you can utilize to achieve those emotions.
You will need to create two different sheets. The first one will contain emotional triggers for all of your competitors. It will provide you with the emotions that your competitors are using and what kind of elements, words, visuals, and colors they are using to create those emotions on their website. The second sheet will be for emotional triggers for your brand. You will also list the elements, words, visuals, and colors that you want to use to create those emotions on your site.
Now you’ll need to design different variations of copy and design. For a copy, you’ll be using the words that you decided in your emotional content strategy and for design, you will be working on different variations of different colors.
Avoid mistakes:
You have to be careful when creating and testing an emotional content strategy. for example, every color has is associated with different emotions that you can utilize for your emotional content strategy but every color has a negative emotion attached to it too so you’ll have to be careful around that.
It is fairly common among newbies of testing that they get excited when they see a sudden increase in conversion rates after two or three days of starting a test. You need to wait at least two weeks for your results to be matured after that you can make decisions off the data that you have available. The same goes for A/B testing between two different variations, you need to test them at least two weeks and then select a visitor.
Make sure that your test is not being affected by outside variables e-g if you are running two separate tests on a single landing page. There is a chance that the results for both tests will be tampered with by each other and you won’t be able to identify the correct winner.