Crystal Clear Communications Blog

Emotional messages move people to act. Put emotion into your message to engage more people in your audience.

The heart and soul of your Message Map

That’s why a heart is the center of your Message Map.

How can you make the heart of your message great? In the eyes of your audience, the heart of a great message does 7 jobs well – it:

• Captures attention and pulls in your audience.
• Stirs people’s emotions, which is crucial since people make decisions based on emotions.
• Leads with audience benefits by answering: what’s in it for me?
• Reflects empathy for audiences, and a deep understanding of their wants and needs.
• Is simple, memorable, and easy to share.
• Paints a picture with words, to engage human brains on multiple levels.
• Sounds good by using rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, and other mnemonic devices.

Keep the heart of your message simple

Why? Because the simpler it is, the more memorable it will be. And that makes it easier for people to share. You say a simple message today and people in your audience can repeat it tomorrow.

As Steve Jobs said, “Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”

A great heart helps you move mountains by influencing what people think and feel about your brand. You need a heart that resonates with your audiences on an emotional level. One that clearly answers their first question, “What’s in it for me?”

Put heart into your emotional messages

Why focus on emotion in the heart of your message? Harvard researcher Gerald Zaltman estimates that people make 95% of buying decisions subconsciously, Inc. magazine reported. People often think they make buying decisions rationally, when in fact their emotions are in charge. That’s why emotional content outperforms purely rational content about two to one, based on research using the IPA databank.

Maximize rewards for your audience by stating clear and emotional benefits as your audience sees them, in their words. Emphasize the emotional benefits people perceive over the physical benefits you provide.

Fast Company reported that purely emotional content performs best with audiences, based on an analysis of 1,400 successful advertising campaigns: “Campaigns with purely emotional content performed about twice as well (31% vs. 16%) as those with only rational content (and did a little better than those that mixed emotional and rational content).” Here’s a way to visualize that finding:

Emotions drive people’s decisions. One reason is that people process sensory information in the emotional brain faster than in the cognitive brain.

Focus first on people’s emotions

Let’s look at a Message Map that puts emotions first. For example, here’s a Message Map for a children’s museum.:

The main message is: “The Children’s Museum helps prepare kids for future success.” This message works because it paints a picture of kids growing up, reflects empathy for kids and stirs strong emotions. For the museum’s audience of parents with children, this message really resonates.

What do people care about the most? A St. Louis Post-Dispatch study set out to determine which topic was most important to the newspaper’s readers. It wasn’t their families, children or God.  “Instead, their answer was: ‘Me,'” said Dick Weiss, a former editor.

People care most about themselves.

You do too. Imagine that you open up today’s New York Times and see your name in a headline. It’s salient – noticeable and prominent, obviously standing out.

Audiences want messages that are equally salient. Messages about them and their lives are the most compelling messages. Especially emotional messages.

A study of digital news consumption by Reuters Institute and the University of Oxford found that people have more news sources to choose from than ever before. With so many choices available, people decide which stories are worth their time based on relevance. The stories that matter most to them affect people’s personal lives, family, workplace, leisure activities and local communities.

People also choose stories they think friends and family might be interested in, to share with them. “People frequently click on stories that are amusing, trivial, or weird … But they maintain a clear sense of what is trivial and what matters,” the study found.

What matters most in your Message Map is the emotional answer to the audience question: what’s in it for me?

When your message leads with heart, you offer an emotional answer to your audience’s first question.