New research into viral emotions has revealed the power of content and the ways it can tap into people’s emotions and affect internet marketing campaigns. Specifically, the data reveals that positive emotions can significantly impact people’s responses by encouraging them to care about content and subsequently share it with others.
Viral images elicit a particular set of positive responses including happiness, pleasure and affection, amusement, interest and hope. However, negative emotions can also play a part, particularly if they result in surprise and anticipation. The way you make your visitors and viewers feel can directly impact the way your marketing campaigns perform.
Viral content needs to be able to trigger complex emotional reactions. When content aims to result in a range of emotions as opposed to a singular response, it is likely to make more of an impression. Content can result in strong views and substantial coverage but fail to incur a large amount of shares. When aiming for viral success, the aim should be to evoke an authentic emotional response that will drive people to share your content.
Additionally, by deliberately using emotions that work as multipliers you can drive content sharing. The study showed that amusement, interest and surprise serve as multipliers for positive feelings with empathy typically behaving as an accelerator of negative emotions. Unanticipated reactions, whether positive or negative, can be highly effective marketing tools as they grab and retain people’s attention. You can aim for this by ensuring your content offers the unexpected or unique.
By taking a novel approach to your content and digital marketing you can increase your chances of eliciting an equally different response from your audience. You can present original ideas and develop innovative content that aims to strongly affect your audience and lead to widespread shares. We can assist with all aspects of your digital marketing and we can help you create striking content and devise effective campaigns.