In today's competitive marketplace, digital signage is everywhere. But, with so much content competing for customers' attention, in a room full of princesses, you need to be batman.
Content takes many forms, but today we look to how emotional selling can catapult you ahead of your competitors by cutting through the noise and taking centre stage.
Emotional selling isn’t a new concept, in fact it can be traced back as far as the 1800s when advertisers first began to recognize the importance of appealing to customers' emotions to connect more deeply and increase sales. A great example of this is the John Lewis Christmas ad, pulling on the heart strings of parents with their strongly rooted family values messaging and tearjerking story telling.
When it comes to decisions, the human brain is hard wired to remind us of emotions from related previous experiences and affix values based on those experiences to the options we are considering now. These emotions create preferences, which then lead to our decision. By using emotional appeals to elicit specific emotions, brands can create a connection with their customers that goes beyond simple product or service offerings.
As the saying goes ‘If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video is worth a million.’ By addition of movement through use of video and motion graphics, those emotional pulls are amplified, and the impact of emotional selling accelerated to create a connection and influence your customers. This connection can be powerful enough to inspire customers to take action, such as entering your store or making a purchase.
The key to mastering emotional selling in digital signage relies on, not only your content, but doing your homework, and harnessing the scheduling capabilities of your content management system. Here are 5 key elements you should incorporate when considering the use of emotional selling in your digital signage content strategy:
1. Know Your Audience
It's important to understand your audience and what motivates them. If your target audience is young and tech-savvy, you might use messaging and visuals that appeal to their sense of adventure and curiosity. Alternatively, if your audience is older and more traditional, you might emphasise family values and community. If your audience demographic changes at different times of day or throughout the week, schedule content that resonates accordingly to maximise performance and conversions. And if you don’t know the demographic of your audience, use the audience analytics capabilities of digital signage to better understand this invaluable data.
2. High-Quality Visuals
Visuals are a crucial component of digital content, and using high-quality visuals can help to elicit deeper emotions in customers. For example, using vibrant colours, motion graphics, and attractive imagery can help to create a sense of excitement, spark memories and increase engagement.
3. Tell a Story
Storytelling is a powerful way to connect with customers and elicit emotions. By using storytelling techniques in your content, you can create a narrative that customers can relate to and feel emotionally invested in. A heart-warming story or relatable situation helps customers connect with your brand and feel more inclined to make a purchase. The story telling could even be linked to specific stock levels through the dynamic capabilities of digital signage, to only reflect story themes that align with real-time stock levels.
4. Create a Sense of Urgency
Creating a sense of urgency can help to motivate customers to take action. By using messaging that emphasizes time-limited offers or exclusive products, you can create a sense of urgency that drives customers to take action before the opportunity is gone. Digital signage is a great platform to display creative and captivating live countdowns to product launches or limited discount periods.
5. Social Proof
Social proof is a powerful way to build trust and drive engagement. By using customer reviews, User Generated Social Media Content and testimonials, this demonstrates the positive experiences of your customers to create a sense of trust, relatability and credibility that encourages customers to engage with your content and interact with your brand. Social Media walls are great way to integrate this concept into your retail environment and provide a great focal point for your customers to interact with your brand.
Once you have established your audience, identifying which emotions to elicit in your customers will form the basis of your emotional selling campaign. Emotional data continues to confirm that ‘Happiness’ is the most evoked emotion used by brands as a key driver in the growth of purchase intent, discovery and shareability. But there are differing drivers for each, and emotions such as greed, sadness and pride can also yield impressive results, like this ad from Extra Chewing Gum (get the tissues ready).
Who'd have thought you'd be crying at gum, right?
In a nutshell, by understanding the emotional drivers of your customers and coupling this with a solid digital signage strategy you can use emotional selling to achieve powerful and compelling connections with specific audience demographics to drive engagement, loyalty, and sales across all of your online and in-store channels. Find out more about our digital solutions and work with one of our consumer psychologists to start your digital journey today.