What do your learners feel?
When it comes to your learning, do you ever think about how your learners feel? Not what they do? Not what they think, but what they feel? Human emotions play an incredible role in our day-to-day lives and they are leveraged incredibly well in effective marketing campaigns.
Today we’re talking about the value of using emotions within your marketing and communications efforts and the role that emotions play in forming connections and bonds with your audience. Using emotions in marketing is a deliberate act; the most effective marketing campaigns in the world do this with incredible flair. You can also be doing it. You are going to be using emotions to persuade and influence and tap into human emotions to form a very deep connection with your audience with the main goal of achieving a specific result. That result may be to undertake a course. That result might be to do something differently. That result might be to think a little bit differently about learning at work.
Of course, there’s a spectrum of emotions that we have available. Some are very simple: sad, happy, mad. But also think a bit wider, are we angry? Are we joyful? Are we curious? Are we intrigued, are we spiteful or are we filled with frustration? All of these emotions play an incredible role in linking your learning and your learning brand with your learners. And actually emotional marketing works. It is incredibly effective, way more effective than using logic in advertising. In fact, 31% of advertisers report significant profit gains with emotional campaigns. Only 16% report the same with rational campaigns.
So, the reality is you could be getting two times higher performance from your communications and campaigns efforts, if you start to look at how you can build emotions into the communications and efforts that you are building.
There’s a range of emotions that you could be looking at exploring. Like I said at the beginning, things like fear, guilt, trust value, belonging, pleasure, even competition. There are a range of emotions that are used effectively in marketing campaigns to generate a response from your learners. And like I said, once you have these responses in place you start to affect the bond and the response of the learner to your learning and your learning brand. Fear is a really interesting one as well because I actually see a lot of organisations really stay away from negative emotions. And I think that’s actually a super shame because our world is not just candyfloss dreams and peachy unicorn pineapple, ice cream cones,
You know, the reality is, there is a lot of bad stuff that happens in our lives. There’s a lot of bad things in the world. If we ignore these, the other half of the spectrum of human emotions, which are negative, we’re missing opportunities to connect and acknowledge some of these feelings in our learners. So whilst you need to get the positioning, right, you know, it’s odd. I would never suggest you say, go do this or you’re gonna die, or lose your job, but you could look at, you know, something I was discussing with a client recently. “Do you want to keep pace? Do you want your career to stay relevant? You want to continuously evolve your ways of doing and thinking, because tell you what your peers are.” That’s fear. It doesn’t sound so scary when you boil it down like that.
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Ashley Sinclair is the host of the Marketing for Learning podcast. Having been a marketer for nearly a decade, Ashley is committed to developing the marketing skills of L&D. She also owns her own marketing agency, MAAS Marketing.
