7 Key Strategies That You Must Learn From Apple’s Marketing Rethink the Need for Advertising

6. Aim at Your Prospects’ Emotions
Think back to the first ads for the iPad, after its buzzy launch in 2010 and how simple their content marketing was.
Remember those images of people relaxing in the living room with the strange new gadget? They looked happy and comfortable.
They weren’t talking about display dimensions or processing power. They were just enjoying their iPads.
Those ads, as with all of Apple’s marketing, hit their consumers where they really live – not in the pocketbook (we’ve already seen that’s not true at all!) but in their hearts.
Emotional connections are the key to successful marketing strategies. It’s what makes certain stories, videos, and memes go viral.
Dr. Jonah Berger’s famous study showed that content that evokes high arousal emotions is more likely to go viral than content that provokes no emotional response. Examples of high arousal emotions are happiness, awe, amusement and anxiety.
Moreover, positive content is more likely to go viral than negative content. Positive emotions simply trigger a stronger reaction in users’ brains than negative ones. These are simple marketing strategies.
In his book, Descartes’ Error, author Antonio Damasio, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Southern California, states that our emotions play a crucial part in our decision-making processes, especially when we’re buying something. Marketing strategies must start with emotion.
And, neurological science tells us the same thing. Functional MRI tests prove that when consumers evaluate businesses, they primarily use the parts of their brain associated with emotions, personal feelings, and memories/experiences, not the portions associated with facts.
Above all, you’ve got to understand and publish the kind of content that your target audience wants most of all. Smart content marketing gets you the most on the web’s leading social media networks? Turns out, it’s content that evokes either awe or laughter – or both.
The testing team at BuzzSumo wanted to understand just what makes content go viral and get shared thousands of times by users. So, they teamed up with OKDork and conducted an extensive study about the marketing mix in social media.
First, the team identified the most shared content all over the web, within a specific time period. Next, they mapped each of the articles to a specific emotion, such as joy, anger, sadness, happiness, laughter, amusement, empathy, etc.
Here’s what the breakdown they created looked like:

You can see from this chart that the top two emotions that the most viral content evoked in readers were awe (25%) and laughter (17%). Similar emotions, such as joy and amusement, accounted for another 29%.
What this means is that if you can quite literally make your readers happy with your content, you’ve really hit the target.
To evoke and build on your customers’ emotions the way Apple does, use emotional language in your copy where it makes sense to do so. Make sure it flows naturally. One way to do this is to use emotion-trigger words in your copy to develop smart content marketing material.