Skip to content

Make More Sales by Building an Emotional Connection

How to drive sales by building an emotional connection with your audience

It’s no secret that humans are bombarded with messages from brands in every direction. In 2007, research indicated that the average consumer was exposed to up to 5,000 ads per day – which doesn’t include the transformations in digital marketing, social media advertising, and customer targeting that have occurred since that time.

 

Many companies struggle with the question of how to stand out in the noise. To drive customers to make a purchase, your company will need to do more than simply capture their attention once.

 

Successful businesses such as Starbucks have demonstrated that building an emotional connection with your audience over time can increase brand awareness, sales, and customer loyalty.

 

By developing a strategic and memorable visual brand, as well as expressing your brand stories through web and social media content, your company can utilize branding to attract your target audience and convert them into paying customers.

 

 

Why is it important to connect with your audience?

Some companies putter along just fine without making an emotional connection. The best examples of this are generic store brands: things like drugstore mascara or the cheap paper towels that have your grocery store’s branding on them.

 

Consumers buy these off-brand versions when they don’t see the value in big-name brands that offer similar products. You won’t see customers recommending these generic products or even knowing the brand names, and there is absolutely no brand loyalty.

 

If a customer sees their favorite celebrity using L’Oreal mascara and decides to give it a try, they will quickly ditch their original generic mascara because they were never attached to it.

 

Don’t let your business become the drugstore mascara that no one remembers. In order to generate brand loyalty and increase sales, you need to create an emotional connection with your audience.

 

healthy snack packaging

 

Here are three ways to generate more sales and attract the right people by creating an emotional connection with your audience:

 

1. Understand your target customer inside and out.

How does the world look from your target customer’s perspective? What do they want more than anything when it comes to your specific product?

 

To build an emotional connection with your customers and make your company stand out in their minds, it is important to:

  1. Identify what your target actually wants.
  2. Express their desires using language and visuals that make sense to them.

 

Your target customers are chasing a feeling or an end result, and they want your product to help them achieve that feeling. They want to know if your healthy energy drink can give them an extra boost so they have the stamina to play with their kids after work. They want to know that a yoga mat from your company will help them feel more confident and capable during yoga class.

 

Let’s look at an example of a brand that is fully in tune with the desires of their target customer:

bearsville soap company

Image source: bearsvillesoaps.com

 

Bearsville Soap Company sells soap with natural ingredients – a product that technically anyone could buy. But notice that they aren’t trying to market their soap to just anyone. The Bearsville Soap Company brand specifically targets men who have an interest in the outdoors and are not attracted by the traditionally soft and feminine branding of most soap companies.

 

The Bearsville Soap Instagram feed is full of imagery of men riding motorcycles, exploring various natural landscapes, chopping logs, and wearing cowboy hats – all of which evoke a sense of freedom their customers crave.

 

Bearsville uses earthy color tones to convey feelings of peace and nature and differentiate themselves from the color palettes of other natural product companies:

 

bearsville soap instagram

Image source: instagram.com/bearsvillesoaps

 

Rather than trying to make your products appeal to everybody, how can you company tap into the precise desires of your target customer and craft a brand they will remember?

 

2. Position your brand

Customers can tell the difference between a business that tells us why we should buy from them (think of a late-night TV infomercial) and a business that shows what they represent through their visual branding (think of Chanel).

 

To make more sales and build long-term brand awareness, you need to identify what distinguishes your business from the competition and emphasize those qualities through your visual branding and content. This process is called brand positioning.

 

Let’s say your company makes face masks. To make more sales and grow your audience, you will need to position your brand so strongly that buying your face masks becomes an obvious choice for your target audience.

 

The natural skincare brand Yes To uses a creative and effective approach to its face mask branding. The company sells individually-packaged sheet masks, usually for less than $5 each, which have colorful and playful product labels while maintaining design elements that indicate natural wellness (such as imagery of fruits and words like “Vitamin C,” “oxygen,” and “purifying”):

yesto face masks - branding

Image source: yesto.com

 

If you wanted to purchase a few face masks as stocking stuffers or a bachelorette party activity, you wouldn’t want a $200 luxury face mask in a jar. You would probably want something that is fun, individualized, feminine, and affordable while still feeling like a fun and nourishing treat – something precisely like these YesTo face masks.

 

YesTo established itself a go-to brand for face masks because of the company’s strong brand positioning. You can do the same for your business, and it starts with developing a brand strategy.

 

 

3. Be consistent.

If you post about your product a few times without seeing immediate results, don’t give into the feelings of temporary panic that your business isn’t working. Work every day to engage your target audience and get your brand in front of them, and be patient enough to let your efforts and visibility stack up over time.

 

There’s a marketing adage called the “Rule of 7” which says that your audience needs to come across your product or service at least 7 times before they make a purchase. At least seven times! This means many people will need to be exposed to your brand even more than seven times because it’s easy to scroll past advertisements and posts online without noticing them.

 

However, if you have been marketing for a while and are still not seeing traction, it’s possible that you need to make some tweaks to your company’s brand strategy. This is common for startups, as oftentimes entrepreneurs learn along the way that their idea of who their target market would be is not aligning with the customers who are actually buying their products.

 

If this is the case, it is in your best interest to book a consultation with a brand strategist who can drill down into the details of your target customer, help you consistently position your company apart from the competition, and create a brand strategy that will attract more ideal customers.

skin care packaging


At Aventive Studio, we help health and wellness product companies scale their businesses through strategic branding and design. With comprehensive experience in both business strategy and visual design, we offer full-service branding packages as well as website development, competitive analysis, brand boards, and more.

 

Schedule a call with us to learn how the Aventive Studio team can help you craft a brand that your customers will remember.

Scroll To Top