Recently, an article stated that people pay attention to food, sex and danger in life and in the media. Assumingly, the same things catch their attention in advertising.
Before running off to create sales copy and blog content about something delicious, something seductive or something hazardous, there’s something else that sells just as well.
EMOTIONS.
Copywriters have always played on people’s emotions when writing high converting sales copy. Businesses can do so too by creating emotional content for ads, blogs and social media.
A fine example of a company using emotional content to draw their audience in is Target. The nationwide retailer used emotional content in a commercial featuring homemade videos of high school students seeing college acceptance letters for the first time.
Moments like that are often experienced just among family and friends. Yet, Target played on the emotional factor of such an experience to attract television viewers’ attention to their commercial.
And you know what? It worked!
So how do smaller companies use emotional content to increase web traffic?
Transparency.
Be transparent, first and foremost. Using visual content like pictures and videos, introduce team members to the world. Show their positions, their hobbies, their quirks, etc. It plays on the human factor and gives the company more personality.
Community Involvement.
Post videos of employees’ involvement with charity organizations, with brief interviews of what they’ve learned from the experience or how the experience made them feel.
Family.
If they comply, post pictures and videos of employee’s interacting with their children. Kids – especially babies – have a way about them that tugs at your heart’s strings. Even the biggest Scrooge can’t deny them.
Curating.
Even easier a tactic is sharing emotional content, such as YouTube or Vimeo videos, with social media or via curated content on your blog. If the videos relate somehow to your market, products or services, that’s even better!
Get your audience emotionally invested in your business.
The idea is to get your audience emotionally invested in your company, at which point they choose you over competition because they feel more connected to the people who make up the business, but just the business as an entity.
Combining emotions with visual content exponentially increases its attraction capability. Consider what market your business operates in and the size of the business itself. Then discern what kind of emotional content you can show to your audience to convert site visitors into loyal customers.