Connect Emotionally with Digital Marketing

Win at every customer experience touchpoint.

Increasingly, people are first experiencing brands digitally. They see ads while they cruise the digital world. Their friends and family invite brands into their social communities, and if they discover them to be value-adding, then they add them to their community. They search for solutions to their needs and brands come up there. Maybe they click on a link and they get the answer they are looking for on a brand website. Now, more than ever, that ultimate moment of truth, purchasing, is happening digitally. So, in other words, the full customer journey has become digital.

How a brand connects emotionally with its customers in a digital environment is honestly not as easy as it was with old faithful, the 30-second TV ad. Brands now don’t have the attention, the time or the highly produced video, audio and celebrity spokesperson. The brand’s opportunity is short and infrequent, and getting attention is a double-edged sword. Just like in polite society, interrupting is a bad thing, but being wallpaper is boring. Entertainment and humor are desirable at some touchpoints, while just-the-facts is the right approach in others. How is a brand manager or agency to know what is the right emotional tone for each situation? How do you build a consistent emotional relationship across all these different touchpoints?

Here are a couple of things we do to ensure that we are delivering the right emotional tone for our clients’ brands across all touchpoints and the best possible customer experience.

The first and most important thing to do is really thinking through the customer journey. Who are you trying to connect with? What are their needs? Hurdles? What actions are they taking, and what resources are they relying on to answer or address them? And what’s the right balance of emotion and straight information in each case?

Our social media director always says brands that want to connect with people need to act like a person, not a product. We believe this is not only true in social media. If you think about a friend, they can share your joys, console your pain and tell you the straight facts. They have that flexibility. Your brand needs to as well. And just like a person, sometimes you interact with them face to face and sometimes digitally, but that doesn’t change the emotional relationship. How do you hug someone digitally?

As I mentioned in a previous article, we believe that the brand’s voice is something not to be taken lightly. It deserves more attention than ever in this digital world. Our method is to develop a detailed customer persona, brand personality and brand voice, which connects the two emotionally. We do this after we have built out the customer journey, as that helps us think through the implications of how it will manifest itself at different touchpoints.

I hope this helps. If you have any questions, please call or email.