Emotional vs Rational: Facebook App Marketing

When you use Facebook for your app marketing, your content directly competes with your competitors' content in an auction. With the competition, you can only get a couple of seconds to prove your ad is worth clicking more than the next piece of content in the user's Facebook feed, and this is no easy task.

As the best digital marketers out there will tell you, it is an intense, head-on competition, and you must be on the winning side if you want to stand out and make the most out of your budget regarding advertising. Finding the most effective way to capture your audience's attention as quickly as possible is essential. The goal is to get them to react to your social media advert before they get distracted by the following content on their social media feed.

Additionally, to define a target audience that works for your brand, you will need to determine which advert creatively delivers the best results in your app marketing campaigns. This will open up the question of how you should be approaching your audience. It is important to note that there are two opposing ends of the spectrum you can go with the first being emotional and the second being rational marketing.

Rational marketing is what centres around facts, brand advantages, and its features. It allows you to showcase the value and technology of your mobile application or product while seeming more appealing to a user's logic and direct problem-solving capabilities.

On the other hand, emotional marketing focuses on being enticing to a users' emotions, experiences, wants, and needs. These types of campaigns center around the emotional benefits of using a product or application. They use empathy, personal problems, status, and storytelling to appeal to user's to download or purchase your product. Emotionally-driven campaigns have popular marketing potential and can establish a brand's entire identity, but they are not the easiest to run successfully. This is because it can be challenging to predict how your audience will react to a specific emotional prompt.

Such as, which type of ad creative works best, emotional or rational?

When comparing the profitability boost of campaigns that have used an emotional appeal versus those based on rational information only, an analysis done by the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising found that those with purely emotional content performed about 2x and those with rational content. Campaigns with purely emotional content also did slightly better than those with mixed emotional and rational content marketing.

Apart from the statistical data, it is key to understand which marketing style best suits your product, target audiences, your budget, and your company size.

Not all brands can or should focus on purely emotional app marketing campaigns. It is seen that smaller brands might benefit from a combined approach, as they need to educate their audience on what their product is first.

More prominent brands have the advantage of being able to focus on the emotional side of app marketing entirely, and their logo will be educational enough in context.

Here is how you can incorporate emotional marketing into your Facebook advertising campaigns:

First, Generate excitement. Nothing makes you want a product more than seeing other individuals be excited about it. Using an excited, energetic tone of voice is a great way to make your product appear compelling, which will help generate excitement and driveve those purchase decisions.

Secondly, Solve a problem and be more relatable. Everyone has problems, so when we do find a solution, we must have it at all costs, more importantly when someone can relate to the same experience as you. Figure out which problem your product solves, and then explore clever ways of positioning the solution in front of your target audience. 

Thirdly, Spark curiosity. Human beings are curious creatures. By sparking interest in your ads and subsequent landing pages, people cannot help but want to know more about your company. 

Fourth, Portray emotion through imagery. It is not just about copy and tone of an advert. Rather, using bright colors, happy images, or other visual prompts can be a very effective strategy.

Fifth, Tell a story. Good storytelling is very memorable, making it an excellent tool for building brand awareness and customer conversion. Everyone enjoys a good story that they can relate to. Just be sure that you include enough branding if you are advertising for a smaller brand. 

Six, Make use of FOMO. In today's fast-paced and hyper-connected world, it is challenging to be a part of the action all the time, which creates the Fear Of Missing Out very real. Make your audience wonder whether they are missing out on something such as your product or service. Whether that's a great deal, an event, or a feature that everyone will most likely possess very soon. Make those individuals wonder how they can stay relevant, then help them achieve this with your app.

It is essential to understand what works best for your brand and audience, as with every advertising campaign. Just because an ad campaign looks great, that doesn't mean that it will work well for you as well. It is important to keep in mind your retention strategy will be critical here, too.

Look into finding out how much user education is necessary at the marketing stage that your company is at right now, Then find your balance between emotional and rational marketing based on that.