By adaptive - February 11th, 2015
Every corporate marketer knows that emotion plays an essential role across the purchasing journey, with happy social media users being potentially the most lucrative groups to target.
According to Forrester: “51% of B2B marketing leaders rate their content marketing practices as very mature, an overwhelming 85% fail to connect content activity to business value — and, as a result, fail to retain customers or win their long-term loyalty. In fact, when asked to look back at the past 12 months and rate the effectiveness of content marketing efforts, only 14% of those surveyed gave their content practices high marks for delivering value back to the business."
“The majority of marketers find producing content that engages buyers to be a major challenge,” said Steve Liguori, founder of Liguori Innovation and former Business Marketing Association Chair. “And that’s for good reason. Our survey results show that the majority of B2B content practices focus too narrowly on early-stage buyer acquisition — which fails to engage buyers throughout their lifetime. To create content that attracts and builds customer relationships throughout the customer life cycle, B2B marketers must make a fundamental shift from writing about features and benefits to delivering valuable information that drives business results.”
And engagement is the key driver here, with marketing messages infused with emotion consistently performing well across all the leading social media networks. Emotions have even been categorised by Robert Pluntchik, who was a professor emeritus at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. The Wheel of Emotion offers an insight into how emotion is expressed and how it influences action that all social media marketers can learn from.
Happy tweeting
The corporate marketer that wants to ensure each of their campaigns connects with its target audience must understand the emotional content of their messages. A new piece of research from Brandwatch makes for fascinating reading, as it focuses on the positive and negative emotions expressed across Twitter in the US. With Valentine’s Day approaching, making emotion a core of your corporation’s brand messages is vital.
Successful marketing messages often reach their intended audiences at the right time. The Brandwatch research indicates that the mood of those recipients can have a massive impact on how well or not those messages are received. This is highly relevant, as calls to action will therefore, be negatively or positively impacted.
Brandwatch report: “While the exact location, setting and lifestyle of individuals within each region may differ, this analysis does hint at potential cultural or economic factors that could affect how positive people are online. The state-by-state analysis further exposes how happiness is distributed throughout the US. Namely, we can see which states lead the South and West to be more positive about their days than the Northeast and Midwest. Specifically Georgia (3.78), Colorado (3.68) and South Carolina (3.57) have the highest ratio of Good Days to Bad Days mentions of US States. Delaware (1.91), West Virginia (1.93) and Iowa (2.04) have the lowest.”
Gender not surprisingly also shows a difference with males being more positive than females when discussing their day. When talking about life in general the sexes are equal, with females more likely than males to use Twitter to talk about their lives in general than how a specific day is going. Positivity is lowest throughout the traditional working week, experiencing a slight uptick on Friday and a plateaued peak on Saturday and Sunday. The likelihood that users discuss the quality of their lives is highest on Saturday and Sunday.
“For anyone working with social media, it’s important to remember that data is always more than just numbers,” Brandwatch concludes. “Brands and organizations that can adapt, adjust and customize their activities in line with these quirks in consumer behaviour will be best positioned to succeed in the digital age. Understanding the conversations and nuances behind your organization’s audience ensures you’ll be able to communicate effectively and make informed business decisions.”
With James Lovejoy, content researcher at Brandwatch, who led the study also concluding: “This report only scratches the surface of understanding the ways in which we express emotions online. Researching emotion presents a number of complex challenges. For example, this study can’t possibly identify the actual emotions that Twitter authors are experiencing or the extent to which they are experiencing it.
“However, we can be certain that behind every tweet, post and conversation, there is some genuine emotion driving it. For the first time ever, online social conversations present the opportunity to further understand the language we use to express ourselves. The aim of this type of research is both to shed some light on and instigate dialogue on the trends, topics, and aspects of our lives that affect our well-being.”
This research focuses on US Twitter users but is applicable to any region or target audience. Before your corporation sends a single tweet connected to a marketing campaign, spending some time understanding the emotional drivers your target audience is likely to feel will ensure your messages are received at the right time. A positive reaction to a marketing message across social media will be impacted by the emotional state of the recipients. Placing this state within your audience profiling research is fundamental.
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