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Emotion Has Everything To Do With It

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“As a highly data-dependent field, marketing requires us to absorb information about industry trends and buyer preferences. That can seem like a very logical endeavor if all you’re doing is letting the  data dictate your moves,” Rebecca Rick, content strategist at CIDDesign writes, “but that’s simply not enough. There has to be human insight and emotional truth at the heart of the messaging for anyone to care about it.”

Audiences crave authenticity from brands and are quick to notice when it is missing. “In a competitive landscape, ContentMarketing.com agrees, “customers aren’t interested in being sold a product; they are interested in finding solutions to everyday problems. “Modern consumers aren’t loyal to products, but to brands’ stories and experiences, intuitmailchimp.com adds. By tapping into emotions such as joy, nostalgia, and empathy, brands can create authentic experiences.  On the other hand, negative emotions can have a lasting impact, acting as a deterrent to customer engagement.

At Say It For You, we found great inspiration in Jeremy Porter’s “Using Emotion to Persuade”. “Remove the metaphorical barriers between you and your audience,” Porter cautions. In content marketing, one goal needs to be presenting the business or practice as very personal rather than merely transactional, reminding readers that there are humans providing the product or service.  “Don’t put on an act or ‘lecture’ the audience; infuse a sense of humor.” But, can emotional marketing be effective in B2B situations?  To be sure – no company is faceless.  Behind every decision there is always a person involved, and that person has feelings.

During the pandemic, when we were all exhorted to practice “social distancing”, I remember being impressed with a reminder offered by Dr. John Sharp of Harvard to not practice emotional distancing. As a content creator, I understood that emotion trumps fact for people, and that it is compassion and emotional intelligence that must drive marketing initiatives.

“Stories and narratives are particularly effective at evoking emotions because they engage our brains in a unique way, activating not only the language processing areas, but also the sensory cortex and motor cortex,” the Unity Environment University website explains. “Consumers are used to telling stories to themselves and telling stories to each other, and it’s just natural to buy stuff from someone who’s telling us a story,” observes Seth Godin in his book All Marketers Tell Stories.

What we’ve learned at  Say It For You is that blogging is a very personal form of communication, and our clients’ messages need to be translated into human, people-to-people terms.

In content marketing, emotion has everything to do with it!

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Don’t Kill With Your Critique

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Kill with your critique, but do it in a good way, Ryan G. Van Cleave advises in Writer’s Yearbook 2025. As an editor, van Cleave is regularly invited to conferences to give manuscript critiques.  He knew his comments were difference-making, but “best of all, no one cried”.

You can offer serious, honest feedback without it being crushing, Angela Ackerman notes, by following these guidelines:

  • being constructive, not destructive
  • praising the good along with pointing out the bad
  • focusing on the writing, not the writer

In comparative advertising, value is conveyed not only from quality, but from the disparity in quality between one product or service and another. The other company or provider serves as an anchor, or reference point to demonstrate the superiority of your product or service. Still, at Say It For You, we advise not “killing with critiques”. Yes, in writing for business, we want to clarify the ways we stand out from the competition, but staying positive is still paramount.

What about the other extreme, offering positive comments about a competitor? While it might appear that praising or even recognizing the accomplishments of a competitor is the last thing any business owner or professional practitioner would want to do, prospective buyers need to know you’re aware they have other options, and that you can be trusted to have their best interests in mind.

 

The challenge posed to us as content writers relates less to critiques of our competitors, but in making clear just what our clients make, sell, and do that sets them apart from their competitors. Even more importantly, we must make clear why any of those differences would even matter to their prospects. In a sense, the purpose of content marketing is to provide a forum for business owners and practitioners to answer those very “what”, “how”, and “why” questions!

 

An essential point I often stress to clients is that the content must represent their opinion or slant on the information we will be  helping them serve up to their readers,  expressing the core values on which  their business or practice was founded.  That way, they protect themselves from being “killed with critique”, establishing themselves as thought leaders and subject matter experts.

 

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In Content Marketing, Consider Readers’ Home Bias

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When it comes to their stock portfolios, financial advisor James Cheng observes, investors tend to invest the majority of their money in domestic equities, ignoring the benefits of diversifying into foreign companies.  Home bias isn’t restricted to American investors, he explains – investors from all over the world tend to prefer investing in companies based in their own country. While being too concentrated in any one area of the market can actually be a dangerous practice, Alexander Joshi Of Barclays of London cautions, exposing an investor’s portfolio to elevated market volatility, investors would rather invest in things with which they are already familiar, rather than moving into the unknown.

While the expression “home bias” originated in finance, familiarity bias influences consumer behavior in every aspect of life. “Have you ever noticed yourself gravitating towards the same brand of coffee or choosing to watch movies from a favorite genre repeatedly?”  Octet Design Journal asks. Gravitating towards familiar faces and avoiding interactions with strangers can mean missing out on valuable relationships and opportunities.

How can sellers overcome this inherent yet irrational desire to keep something the same, even if it’s less than optimal?  While prospect theory explains that people are more averse to losing what they have than benefitting from something new, value selling can help overcome your customers’ status quo bias, David Sviel  of ROI Selling suggests. “Your job,” he tells salespeople, “is to convince them that, despite the risk of making a change, which always exists, not making a change has its own risks and consequences.”

Will blog marketing “close” deals in the same way as a face-to-face encounter between a prospect and a sales professional? The answer is obviously “no”, we explain to our Say It For You content marketing prospects. On the other hand, prospects what have been reading your blog posts will typically enter the sales process more educated on your place in the market, your industry, and what you have to offer. Consistent posting of valuable information positions you as a SME, or Subject Matter expert, offering you a much greater chance to overcome your audience’s “home bias”.

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In Telling What You Have to Offer, Show Them Who You Are

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Some three years ago, in a Say It For You post entitled “Blogging to Offer – and Change – Opinion”, I emphasized a core belief I have about content marketing: “Providing information about products and services may be the popular way to write blog posts, but in terms of achieving Influencer status – it takes opinion.” A recent editorial in Wine Spectator Magazine reminded me of the crucial “op ed” aspect of our work….

As Wine Spectator editor and publisher Marvin Shanken explains, “We believe that evaluating wines blind ensures that our tasters remain impartial and that our reviews are unbiased, with all wines presented on a level playing field.” Shanken admits that not all wine critics share this approach. Some argue that it’s all right to review wines alongside the winemakers themselves, believing that honesty and independence can overcome the expectations triggered by knowing the identity of a wine, its reputation and its price.

In “Differentiate, differentiate, and Differentiate” (back in September of this year), I explained that, in content marketing, we identify the unique qualities of our client’s products and services, highlighting the differences between those and the ones offered by competitors. As Carol Kopp explains in Investopedia.com, those differences might relate to product design, marketing, packaging, location convenience or pricing. The piece “Why We Taste Blind”, though, goes much deeper than that, showcasing a fundamental difference in philosophy between Wine Spectator tasters and those of some of the publication’s competitors.

There’s an important content marketing lesson here, in my opinion. In just about any field, there will be controversy – about best business practices, about the best approach to providing professional services, about acceptable levels of risk, even about business-related ethical choices. Rather than ignoring that controversy, we need to help clients weigh in on those very choices and issues. Their readers need to know what’s most important to them, what their vision is in terms of serving their audience.

In doing what our English teachers used to call “compare and contrast”, I want to add, it’s important to emphasize the positive. Rather than “knocking’ competitors, marketers need to focus on demonstrating what this company or practice values and the manner in which the owners believe their products and services are best delivered to their customers.

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Today, I’m Working on Being a Content Expert In…

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The vast majority of reporters are constantly thrown into topics, issues, controversies, and specialties they know little about, Indianapolis Business Journal editor Lesley Weidenbener admits. In fact, being a journalist requires diving into unfamiliar topics, she says.

Often, upon learning of the content marketing my team members and I do at Say It For You, someone will ask, “So do you specialize in marketing for a particular industry or profession?” In fact, not only does being a ghost writer of marketing content require diving into unfamiliar topics, much of the joy we take in the work derives from precisely that experience of gathering information, interviewing practitioners and business owners, and then (just as Weidenbener puts it), “massaging” that information into stories that help readers understand things better.

From data analytics to death care, from HVAC services to nutritional supplements, from personal injury law to retirement planning to leadership training, dental surgery, and leadership training, each content marketing assignment has offered a new “today I’m working on being an expert in…” opportunity.

One of the most telling acknowledgments of this “working-to-become-an-expert” philosophy came in the form of a recent client testimonial:  “Say It For You worked hard to understand nuance in our industry, including external research…”

Being a lifelong learner is a big part of online content marketing, to be sure. In order to deliver quality writing of any kind, you’ve got to keep educating yourself, reading everything you can get your hands on. While it’s important to cite sources by paraphrasing and hyperlinking back to the page where the information originated, the skill lies in “translating”” that information, putting it into the context of your primary topic.

When content marketing works, though, it’s about much more than the technical details.  The goal is to attach a “face” and lend a “voice” to the information by filling in the finer details about the people behind a business or practice and sharing the reasoning behind the choices they’ve made.

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, my fervent hope is, I’ll be working on become an expert in…who knows?

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