5 Reasons to use Emotional Analytics in B2B Marketing

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Introduction

Emotional Analytics (EA) software collects data on how a buyer persona communicates verbally & non-verbally (i.e. explicitly & implicitly) to understand the mood of a person & his attitude towards a prospective purchase. The technology is also called Emotional Analytics in b2b marketing & provides insights about how a customer perceives a product. The perpetual brand proposition of a product or service that the existing & potential customers might have in their minds helps create hyper-personalized targeting strategies, to optimize the experiences of the prospects through omnichannel marketing endeavors. We breathe in an era where optimizing customers’ experiences are an indispensable element of B2B marketing endeavors & eventually paves the way for Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). Just as the diverse data sources, such as data resonating with demographic, firmographic, technographic, “fit-data” as well as the psychographic analyses of the prospects, are used to divide prospects into clusters & to hyper-personalized experiences for them, to drive sales conversions; emotional data, too, is used to create strategies that will improve businesses’ customer relationship management (CRM). Recent research from searchcustomerexperience.techtarget.com depicts that the facial recognition & emotional analytics technology market will grow from $3.37 in the year 2016, when it began, to a figure of $7.76 billion by the end of the year 2022. More & more B2B marketers are gradually recognizing the vital importance of emotional elements in marketing.  Ipsos conducted a study on Global Business Influencers which revealed top decision-makers opening up about their willingness to embrace emotions, with 58% saying they either “strongly” or “somehow agree” that they “often rely on their gut feelings to make work decisions.”  As the CEO of Captivate Group, Chloe Ellis writes: “Emotions have huge action potential & can enable customers to receive messages they wouldn’t accurately perceive in another way, so if brands want to cut through the noise & optimize for messages to drive action, they need to give much consideration to the power of emotion.”

How to use Emotional Analytics for Businesses

Software for recognizing emotions have found use in sales, marketing & other vital departments resonating with customer care. Combining sentiment analysis with existing CRM data provides the marketers & the existing sales teams with a holistic view of the implicit emotions of the customers. Accordingly, personalized campaigns can be created for the prospects. Technologies employing emotional analytics enable devises to collect data about users. The improved application of emotional analysis also known as affective computing or emotional AI enables devices to analyze, process & react to people’s moods, to optimize their personalized experiences (CX). Let’s delve into some ways employing emotional analytics in B2B omnichannel content strategies can be beneficial for the businesses:

1. By Impactful Storytelling:

Stories have the power to entice users to act. When the brands can show the value proposition of their products or services utilizing effective story-telling, it lays the foundation for sales optimization. Telling stories that resonate with the pain-points of the prospects are absolute essentials of inbound marketing methodologies to attract, engage & convert the potential buyers. The author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie quotes the imperativeness of an impactful story-telling as under: “Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign. But stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a person. But stories can also repair that broken dignity.” So, when it comes to effective inbound strategies for marketing, impactful storytelling becomes very important. According to Simon Sinek, Optimist, and Author at Simon Sinek Inc., prospects first want to know why businesses do what they do, that is your core idea or value that inspires their causes. Then, prospects would like to know about the business processes or how the businesses operate towards achieving their goals. At last, the inclination of the prospects might be towards what is the output or the end result of the endeavors businesses take, i.e. what they actually do. An effective story-telling should revolve along the trajectory of the golden circle to help the organizations optimize their users’ experiences (UX). An optimized user experience further lays the foundation for optimized sales revenue. 2. Make Customers “The King”: The marketers need to brainstorm & come up with new ideas about telling their brand stories in impactful ways, while at the same time empathizing with the pain-points of prospects, often by paraphrasing them. Making customers the king in the brand stories are imperatives to optimize conversions. According to Peter Minnium, President, Ipsos, and the US at Ipsos: “Compelling ads are more than a checklist of behavioral triggers”.  He associates impactful ads as indispensable tools that engage audiences’ imagination. He advocates for the value of expressing brand ideas via ads. The more the customers would resonate with the ad campaigns being displayed by the organizations, the higher will be chances of conversions. 3. Create Blogs on Trending Topics:  Keeping abreast with the latest developments within a niche & being in touch with the major influencers & most importantly with the prospects, ensures that the marketers always have an idea about the latest trending topics within a business. Writing blog posts after researching the most common keywords being searched for by the prospects during their buying cycles helps the marketers in evoking positive emotions such as trust in the minds of customers. Susan Moeller, Marketing Partnerships Manager at Tailwind, quoted the importance of blogging for marketers in the following words: The business of content marketing is the business of ideas. Blog post ideas, newsletter or e-book ideas, ideas for courses or whitepapers—we need them all.” She believes in a data-driven approach for treasuring out the blog ideas. The marketers can create blog posts about the trending topics being researched by a niche-specific audience so that accordingly the audiences can be attracted, engaged & converted by the blog costs, thereby optimizing the Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI) from the omnichannel marketing endeavors. 4. Focus on Building Strong Brand Equity & on Positive Word of Mouth Marketing (WOMM): The marketers can evoke positive sentiments in the minds of their prospects by positive word of mouth marketing (WOMM). Moreover, displaying positive customer testimonials across omnichannel ensures that positive brand equity is developed. WOMM & the perpetually positive brand resonance are important for marketers to optimize the CX & also lay the foundation for optimized sales conversions. According to a post published in the contentmarketinginstiture.com by Chris Gillespie, founder of the content marketing agency “Find A Way Media” , the importance of good writing in making or marring the brand equity is quoted as follows: The responsibility for great content lies with the employer; it’s the organization that must deliver results – it’s up to managers to find the writers to do that.”  He also adds that good writing should have an amalgamation of subject knowledge expertise along with good writing skills. Good writing helps in establishing trust with the prospects. Content marketers can earn the confidence of the readers by mentioning sources for the citations derived, being objective with the subject matter knowledge & cutting down on jargons to make the pieces of content snackable for the readers to digest & repurposing the old pieces of content from time to time to maintain their vitality. 5. Using online Videos: Videos are known to be strong emotion drivers. The prospects that prefer to engage with the videos and watch videos after the value proposition of specific products or services are more likely to make a buying decision. Furthermore, the engagement level of the prospects can also be monitored with the help of major social KPIs to measure the reach, engagement, positive reviews or testimonials & most importantly via the conversions generated through the diverse social channels. According to a survey by LinkedIn, 62% of the B2B brands found that video content is more beneficial in building brand awareness than plain text. The respondents in the survey also acceded to the fact that video-engagement rates help them identify higher-quality leads (about 78% of the participants) and also drive more leads overall (as told by about 57% of the participants).  How Emotional Analytics can be measured Technologies for voice and facial recognition, along with biometrics are the prominent emotional metrics, though measuring them, is a bit complex. Remote panels are used in real-time to measure the fluctuations in breathing patterns, heart rate, eye movements, and micro-expressions which primarily are employed to decode human emotions for marketing. Companies are decoding facial expressions, voice tones, bodily gestures, eye movements and electrodermal analysis (the measurement of change in skin conductance), to analyze the explicit and implicit emotions the brands would evoke. B2B marketing is all about building trust with the prospects. The perceived brand resonance of a brand can be decoded by the application of emotional analytic. According to Forrester, brand equity is considered an important metric by 15% of the B2B executives. Many companies are already using emotional analytical metrics to understand the psychologist of their audiences and to improve their services. Emotional Analytics somehow overlaps with the Facial Recognition technology but is not confined to the field & surpasses way beyond it. The emotional data can be extracted from video cameras that capture the facial expressions during chats & microphones that collect data pertaining to the tones of voice, samples of text in blogs & articles & social updates. All this data is analyzed by feeding into the machine learning algorithms which can help to recognize expressions, tones & other characteristics that co-relate with the facial expressions. The emotional data can be extracted by “text mining”, “audio mining” or “video mining” technics. The data from emotional analytics can be displayed on the dashboards in real-time. Thus, the marketers can shape their content strategy to optimize the relevance for the prospects so as to improve their experiences. Cisco, Slack, Juniper Networks, Buffer, and Squarespace are some of the companies already using principles of “affective computing”, to optimize the experiences of their customers. Companies such as Beyond Verbal, audEERING, EMOspeech, Vokaturi, Verint & Good Vibrations provide speech-based solutions in emotional analytics. Text-based emotional analytics solutions are provided by companies such as Hexagon, Crimson, Clarabridge, FeedbackFerret, Receptiviti, Heartbeat AI Technologies & IBM Watson Neural Language Understanding. Companies such as Affectiva, CrowdEmotion, RealEyes, Sightcorp, Noldus & Kairos provide video-based facial expression analytics.

Wrapping It Up

In an era where marketing practices regulated by AI (Artificial Intelligence) are picking up, emotional AI has huge potential. It can be used by the markers to optimize users’ experiences. Hyper-personalizing users’ experiences based on the insights obtained from emotional metrics can, in turn; help the marketers in optimizing their revenues from sales. Just like it is with everything new in the dominion of Content Analytics & ROI measurement, emotional analytics, too, has supporters as well as opponents. Proponents of the technology argue that the technic is more valuable & reliant than information obtained from customer satisfaction surveys in assessing & optimizing the users’ experiences (UX). The opponents are ardent that there can be no technology so developed to truly measure our gut feelings. Emotional analytics can help in optimizing content strategy through multi-channel marketing. The tone of the content for example (whether a humorous or plain and informational text) can be experimented with to analyze which types of pieces of content evoke positive responses in the minds of customers. The technic can also be used to decide about the length of content that serves the best in attracting the users’ attention. Furthermore, establishing a correlation between the positive & negative emotions triggered in the minds of users & the subsequent actions they take to generate the conversions on the website can help marketers in deducing some specific pieces of content which have the highest probability of generating the website conversions. Based on the data-driven insights gathered from emotional analytics, marketers can optimize their content strategy to motivate positive actions towards sales conversions. We, at Valasys Media, help our customers with end-to-end B2B solutions, which have been specifically been tailored to match to their requirements so that they can achieve their bottom-line goals such as Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO), optimized users’ experiences (UX) & sales revenue. Our services include lead-generation, appointment-setting services, account-based marketing, content syndication & business intelligence to name a few. For any help with architecting a perennially healthy sales pipeline, feel free to contact us.

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