The holiday season has its own set of rules. Finding new angles or even just improving on the rules you were employing the previous year, can be challenging.
A great way to overcome the struggle to stand out, especially when businesses are stampeding to get customers' attention, is to harness the irresistible force of something that is already surging in customers during the holidays: emotion.
Social Media Marketing Focusing On Emotion
Shopping is largely an emotional activity. Brian Tracy, in his book “Psychology of Selling,” notes that the most critical part of selling to a customer is honing your emotional intelligence and understanding that shoppers shop with their emotions, not with cold logic. Many shoppers lean on rational thinking after they've already felt emotionally that they want to buy something, and they use the “thinking” part to justify what they've already decided emotionally.
Of course, not all shoppers do this all the time. But we've all done it at least once. It's a part of human nature.
And that last thought — understanding human nature — is the key to identifying the most prominent emotions that drive holiday shoppers. It's not rocket science, thankfully. A Big Data analysis or million dollar survey isn't needed to get some actionable conclusions. If we can identify the primary emotions in our own experiences during the holidays, we're likely to identify the emotions that millions of others feel too. Let's face it: underneath all of our varied backgrounds and cultures, we're not as different as we think.
With that in mind, here are four social media marketing tips inspired by four of the most common emotions that people experience during the holidays:
- Nostalgia: The holidays, whether we like it or not, overflow with nostalgia. We hear the same songs, see the same sights, and often reunite with the same relatives. Just the thought of the many little details of the season — whether it's music, turkey, candy canes, traditions or presents — can resurrect powerful feelings of nostalgia because these same details have been repeated so many times in our lives in so many situations from the past. Leverage this by doing more “throwback Thursday” style social media nostalgia campaigns during the holidays. Go retro. Resurrect old trends from our childhoods. Hone in on the nostalgia of past decades and the holiday traditions and trends of those eras. Harnessing nostalgia can help your posts stand out.
- Hope: The holidays in November and December work sort of like an emotional ramp that sends people into the New Year. For this reason, millions of people feel an emotional welling of hope in Nov. and Dec. and anticipating without even knowing why. Use this for your social media. Don't wait until New Years to zero in on our hope for a better future, a better year, or some other improvement in our lives that we want.
- Melancholy: This is a stereotype, perhaps, but stereotypes begin because they have at least a little truth in them. Even for people who seem to “have it all,” the holiday months can have an odd melancholic effect on the mind. It might be explained as a “looking back” of sorts. In the same way that the anticipation of the New Year brings hopeful emotions, the sense that another year is nearing completion causes people to look back and analyze losses, regrets, and other negatives from the year. Don't be afraid to get a little angst-ridden in your social media marketing campaigns by focusing on the things that people consume in pop culture to cope with that pain — to a reasonable extent, of course. This might be cheesy, but a safe example of this is how many people turn to melancholic music, like Adele's “Someone Like You,” to process their emotions during the holidays. It's common for break-up albums or other similar modes of entertainment to become popular in the holidays. In your social media, you can do Top 10 lists that focus on these melancholic areas of pop culture.
- An emotional craving for comfort: With all of the stormy ups and downs of nostalgia, hope, and melancholy that hit us during the holidays, we need a break from it all, and we are emotionally drawn to the “comfort” things in life: comfort food, comfort places, comfort entertainment — anything that is our go-to comfort zone, and is probably a little indulgent — to help us deal with the emotional roller coaster of the holidays. Try a few of these “comfort zone” themes in your social media campaigns and people will start turning to your posts for comfort too.
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