Influencer marketing is the art of finding a balance. With 5,000+ influencers with over one million followers in the United States on Instagram alone, you need tools to find the right influencer and message that fits your brand or hashtag campaign.

There’s a time in place for helpful, authoritative content.

But there’s another content marketing strategy that also helps foster positive brand associations … emotion marketing.

Emotions drive audience behavior.

How influencer marketing strategy and emotions interact

You build your most meaningful connections with your target customers through influencer marketing campaigns that draw out specific emotions. This encourages your audience to know your brand better and helps nudge them closer to a conversion.

That is why great influencers have great emotional intelligence (EQ). 

They must be outstanding at it to stand out and move utter strangers.

Look at any Instagram reel from a successful influencer, and you will notice how they have mastered the following four principles of EQ:

1. Self-awareness: The ability to recognize and understand one’s emotions, strengths, weaknesses, and how these affect behavior.
2. Self-regulation: The capacity to control and manage one’s emotional responses, maintaining composure in challenging situations.
3. Empathy: The skill of understanding and connecting with the emotions and perspectives of others, fostering more profound relationships.
4. Social skills: Effective interpersonal communication, collaboration, and conflict resolution, all driven by an understanding of emotional cues.

Pair this with the personal, if not parasocial, touch of influencer marketing — and you have a perfect cocktail for powerful messaging and brand loyalty.

See this example from Kris Collins, where she masterfully plays through different aspects of awareness, emotion, empathy, and social situations seamlessly in a way that may seem spontaneous but takes hours of work.

She tells emotionally compelling stories in a way that very few high-budget movies and scriptwriters in modern Hollywood can.

Authenticity matters too

For successful influencer marketing, you need one more thing besides emotion: authenticity. At the heart of influencer marketing lies user-generated content (UGC).

In a way, influencer content is a subset of user-generated content. So, looking at UGC to better understand influencer marketing makes sense. One nearly universal aspect of UGC is its authenticity. Authenticity adds a stunning level of impact.

Social media campaigns with user-generated content increase engagement by 50%, and ads with UGC have four times the click-through rates and cost 50% less per click.

Thus, mastering emotional intelligence and authenticity are the two underlying building blocks you need. If you are merely "authentic," you seem dull, but if you manipulate emotions without authenticity, you will appear off and fail to impress.

There's *that* balance again.

What is emotional marketing?

Emotional marketing is a marketing strategy brands use to bring out specific emotional responses in their target audiences.

The goal is to deeply connect with their ideal customers and influence their behavior.

Emotional influencer marketing strategies focus more on appealing to the audience’s emotions than rational thinking. For instance, marketers use storytelling, imagery, and music to create a solid emotional connection between the brand and the target customer.

Let's walk you through seamlessly adding emotion marketing to your influencer marketing in simple steps.

Imagine a social media influencer documenting an RV trip to Canada with a dreamy acoustic-pop-inspired background track or playing a classic road trip song in the car, like On the Road Again by Willie Nelson or Road Trippin’ by Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Videos like these transport audience members into the influencer’s experience — helping them envision what it’d be like to plan their RV trips.

Benefits of emotional influencer marketing

Emotions play a significant role in consumer decision-making and can drive purchases.

When you tap into your audience’s emotions, you can create positive brand associations — and encourage brand loyalty and sales. Emotion marketing can also help you develop a sense of shared values and identity between your brand and your ideal customer. This can further strengthen brand loyalty.

Successful emotional influencer marketing strategies

Here are two examples of emotional marketing campaigns you may have seen:

Dove

Dove’s “Reverse Selfie” campaign challenged society’s beauty standards by encouraging women to embrace their natural appearances and celebrate their unique features.

The emotional impact of the campaign was powerful, with many women sharing their own unedited “reverse selfies” on Instagram and praising Dove for promoting self-love and body positivity.

Coca-Cola

Coca-Cola’s “Open to Better” campaign focused on spreading positivity and optimism during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The campaign featured heartwarming stories of people overcoming challenges and spreading acts of kindness, evoking strong emotions of hope and unity.

This emotional storytelling helped Coca-Cola foster meaningful connections with its audience during a difficult time.

Influencer marketing tools and strategies for seamless emotion marketing

Now that we’ve laid the groundwork let’s look at how to streamline emotion and influencer marketing.

1. Choose influencers with an emotional marketing style that aligns with your brand voice and audience

Find brand advocates who target your audience and have a similar marketing tone and style. This is key to evoking specific emotions and maintaining brand suitability standards.

The right influencers for your emotional marketing campaigns:

• Use emotional storytelling, images, and music

• Have strong engagement rates

• Are relevant to your brand

• Post authentic content

Get inspired by StudioSuits, a fashion brand that partners with influencers to evoke a sense of luxury, confidence, and elegance.

To market its linen and tweed jacket collections, it collaborates with high-fashion influencers who beam with confidence, like Mauro Littera.

Mauro creates Reels of himself sporting StudioSuit’s luxury wear while walking through the city. He also adds trending upbeat pop music tracks to further evoke a sense of confidence and modern luxury.

Mauro and StudioSuits cross-post these campaigns to spread reach, foster brand trust, and publicize their partnership. The result? Thousands of views from ideal buyers.

2. Maintain consistency in emotional messaging across your influencer marketing campaigns

Share content expectations with your influencers to maintain aligned brand messaging across your campaigns. This is also key to protecting your reputation from harmful brand associations.

During onboarding, share your brand messaging and guidelines and provide examples of successful emotional messaging in the past.

Before each campaign, work with your influencers to:

1. Set clear objectives

2. Establish guidelines

3. Talk about creative freedom within reason

4. Discuss personal experiences and emotions related to your brand

It’s also important to set regular check-ins so you can both provide feedback and suggestions for adjustments if necessary.

3. Use social media analytics and magic links to track campaigns, personalize engagement, and iterate content

When you use Flockler to show social media and influencer content on your website or any digital platform, Flockler's Social Analytics add-on lets you see your top influencers and top-performing content. 

You can also track user interactions and engagement with magic links — unique URLs generated for specific users or campaigns. In influencer marketing, magic links can streamline emotion marketing strategies by enhancing personalization and tracking.

Data-driven decision making

Marketers can make more informed decisions about future emotion marketing strategies and influencer partnerships by analyzing the data collected from social media analytics tools such as Flockler's Social Analytics add-on and magic links.

Insights from tracking user behavior and emotional responses can inform content creation, audience targeting, and campaign optimization efforts.

4. Pull insights from your MarTech stack to make data-driven decisions

Analyze rich insights from your MarTech stack to see how your influencers’ emotion marketing campaigns are performing.

Use your findings to show influencers how to ultra-tailor campaigns for deeper emotional resonance. You can also use the data to refine influencer selection based on your audience’s emotional preferences.

Be sure one of the tools in your MarTech stack is an influencer marketing platform that provides analytics. Use it to track conversions, click-throughs, commissions, and brand mentions to calculate your return on investment.

To measure success and improve campaigns, you’ll need to …

Set KPIs, such as

1. Brand awareness

2. Engagement

3. Conversions

As well as track and analyze data, such as:

1. Social media metrics

2. Website analytics

3. Sales data

5. Get your audience involved

Work with influencers to scale massive user-generated content (UGC) campaigns using a branded hashtag. Create contests, giveaways, and pledges to inspire a movement and spur campaign virality.

Ask audience members to create specific content using the branded hashtag to participate. To elicit emotional responses, influencers will need to encourage them with an emotional prompt.

For instance, “Share a Reel showcasing your most ’pinch me’ moments while traveling with Blue Airline.” Or “Share a ’get ready with me and mom’ video using our Rose Vitality products for Mother’s Day.”

Wrap up

Influencer marketing and emotional marketing are a powerful combination. Use them to generate brand awareness, foster trust in your brand, and connect with your audience on a deeper level.

Building long-term, meaningful relationships is the key to maintaining a high customer lifetime value (CLTV). And with emotion and influencer marketing — you can do just that.

If you’re ready to connect with your audience, bookmark this article and share it with your marketing team. Then, carve out time to find aligned influencers, set expectations, and run campaigns. Continue testing and refining your approach to create a higher ROI and make a more significant impact.

Here’s to your success!