Small Business Marketing Tool - Blogging

A small business marketing approach which happens to be a great subliminal marketing tool to influence the masses is blogging.

Blogs are ever present in the People’s Media. Blogs are credible because you will always find a gathering of people that have an interest and want to identify with it and share their knowledge and information.

For your small business marketing blog to be subliminally persuasive you must understand which emotions you are appealing to and attempting to get a reaction from.

Emotions by their very definition are feelings that spring outward in response to some stimulus. In order to create an emotional reaction to your small business marketing you must create a powerful appeal that encourages people to feel the correct emotion. Overt appeals are rarely as effective as subliminal appeals

The key emotions to use in your small business marketing should concern themselves with:

• Desire – A sense of intense want or a feeling of identifying what is missing and wanting that.

• Lust – An intense desire or craving for something (including sex). Often it is not physically tangible like power.

• Loss – The anticipation of not having something that they could or already have.

• Shame – A feeling of doing something dishonorable. In the case of sales, marketing and persuasion, the emotion of shame is often associated with not taking action when you know you should.

• Pleasure – Pleasure is not technically an emotion rather a grouping of emotions to create an experience referred to as pleasure. It includes happiness, pride and other subsets of emotions. The anticipation of good and desirable feelings from actions you take or things you acquire.

• Anticipated Pain – Pain is often incorrectly referred to as an emotion. Anticipation of pain is one of the most powerful emotional sets that you can leverage. It is the self-inflicted feeling of what an experience will be like for the person if something in their control occurs because they don’t take an action. It is also often a very visceral reaction to a problem they are currently experiencing.

• Fear – Forms a persuasion perspective closely associated with loss. It is a sense of a lack of safety or anticipation of loss.

• Flattery – A feeling of being somehow special and desirable.

• Pity – This is most often induced to raise funds for charities, etc. It is a transposition of a very unfortunate person or incident onto themselves and feeling how they imagine they’d feel in a similar situation and wanting to make a difference now.

• Consequences – Cause and effect. It is the sense of what not taking action or not making a decision could bring.

• Status or Celebrity – Keeping up with the Joneses, a positive feeling of being on display or receiving very positive attention for some action. This is one of the most overlooked emotions by professional persuaders. Many people want their fifteen minutes of fame so they can leverage it . . . or at least enjoy it.

• Approval – A feeling of making a right decision of (or?) doing the right thing and receiving positive recognition for it.

• Love – Advertising has done a very good job of linking the feeling of love with products, particularly food. A sense of well being, connectedness and unconditional acceptance.

• Hate – Virulent dislike, revulsion. A very effective emotion to evoke when making comparisons or setting up us vs. them scenarios.

Watching blogs that focus on your industry is another great way to understand the emotion of your market.

Read what impassioned writers are talking about so that you can carefully craft your message to reach the market.

Persuasion occurs when you fulfill the emotional desire that your efforts have created.