Emotions are always going to be part of any decision. As a business owner, you need to understand how to best use pathos to pull in customers.

Of course, you don’t necessarily need to tug at a potential client’s heart strings to bring in a sale. If you can make a customer feel good about choosing your company, you can easily drive sales.

Here are four tips you should follow if you want to master emotional marketing throughout your company’s annual marketing plan.

1. Point out the issues.

For a consumer to want to purchase a product or service, they must first see the value in the purchase. 

Pointing out an inconvenience, issue, or pain point that a potential customer is consistently exposed to can allow them to begin seeing the value in what you’re offering. By clearly showing how a client deals with a daily hassle and sympathizing with them, you can get the attention of consumers more easily.

It is important that while you point out these pain points, you are not overly negative. Subtlety mentioning inconveniences and identifying with your consumers can draw them in to learning more about the solutions your business provides.

2. Lay out the solutions.

Once you’ve identified your consumers’ most common pain points throughout your marketing, it’s time to sell your service or product.

You should provide helpful and simple solutions through your business and products that entice consumers to learn more about your company.

Focus your marketing on how your product or service can improve the lives of your clients by emphasizing just what they’ll gain when they do business with your company.

3. Create a community.

Everyone wants to belong to a community or social group. Post your past customer testimonials, highlight your customers’ positive experiences through social media platforms and have conversations online with potential clients. 

By creating a sense of community that is linked to your business or product, you can easily convince customers to use your company over the competition. Potential clients can also relate to your current customers and how your business solved their problems.

By allowing for open conversations between current and potential clients, you can allow your community of customers to do your emotional marketing for you.

4. Turn to storytelling.

Telling a story about your business is a great way to pull in potential customers and allow them to relate to your company on an emotional level.

A story about how your business got started, how you came up with a product idea, or a challenge you and your staff had to overcome will help pull in new clients.

By telling a story, you can connect with potential customers on a deeper level than simply spouting off the benefits of using your product or service.

Conclusion

Using pathos in your marketing isn’t just something for those selling greeting cards -- with the right story, any business can take advantage of adding emotion into their message.

Our guest author Jodie Shaw is the chief marketing officer for The Alternative Board (TAB), a global organization that helps forward-thinking business leaders grow their businesses, increase profitability, and improve their lives by leveraging local business owner advisory boards and private coaching.