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Use These Emotional Hooks to Create Compelling B2B Content

It’s funny how little we consider emotion in B2B marketing, when it pervades almost every other aspect of our daily lives.

To butcher Shakespeare’s Shylock: If you prick me, do I not bleed? If you show me funny kitten pics, do I not LOL?

My personal theory is that creating emotion-based content is so easy to do badly, marketers would rather take a chance on not having any emotion in their content at all.

But it’s a bigger risk to leave that tool on the table. Emotional content does a great deal of heavy lifting in marketing — even B2B marketing.

Emotional beats rational every time

Wait, really? After all, the B2B buying journey is far removed from the “wants and needs” of the end consumer: ordering millions of dollars worth of specialized equipment or software services feels like a more rational decision compared to buying a soft drink based on a TV commercial.

Not quite: even rational B2B purchase decisions are more emotion-driven than you think. According to Harvard Business School professor Gerald Zaltman, 95% of our purchase decision-making takes place in the subconscious mind. And for ex-Saatchi and Saatchi CEO Kevin Roberts, “80% percent of [buying] decisions are made emotionally”.

(Considering that, in Roberts’ view, 80% of marketing is done rationally, “there’s a real mismatch there.”)

Research from a variety of sources bears this out. According to global marketing agency Dentsu, emotion-driven personal decision drivers are now the main decision driver for B2B purchasing decisions — putting “concerns about trust and values over trying to find the most competitively priced product.”

A chart showing the influence of personal and professional decision drivers for B2B

Forrester research also found that trust in a company drives B2B buyers to be twice as likely to recommend that company externally, or to pay a premium to work with that company, compared to those who do not trust a company.To wit: if you can align your own emotional values with the potential buyers’, you’re more likely to build enough trust to close a sale.

There’s no exact roadmap to transforming emotional connections into brand trust — but these emotional associations tend to drive more responses than functional product messages.

But you can take a cue from successful salespeople, who reverse the traditional B2B sales process that most companies follow:

A diagram of a reversed B2B sales process

Effective emotional hooks you can use

We’ve put together a list of effective emotional hooks for your B2B marketing content, with examples on how to use them.

1. Fear of Missing Out (FOMO)

People naturally want to stay ahead of trends, own the latest products, and be part of exclusive experiences. They also dread being left behind the curve — the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) is real. (The Singaporean version of this is kiasu, FOMO’s “more excessive forebear”.)

Poking the FOMO nerve has long been part of the emotional marketing toolkit — because it works. Marketers all the way back to the Gilded Age have used urgency, exclusivity or scarcity to motivate action. Today, FOMO drives massive campaigns like the Labubu craze.

In the B2B context, FOMO can create a sense of urgency, pushing decision-makers to take action sooner rather than later. Selling a “limited-time offer” or the promise of early but limited access to a product is FOMO in action: making audiences feel they might miss a valuable opportunity.

You might not have a Labubu-level product on your hands, but you can leverage FOMO too, using the following B2B marketing tools to turn your prospects’ FOMO into interest or a sale:

  • Exclusive webinar or event: You might invite C-level executives to a private session with a renowned industry expert, with limited seats available. The webinar promises insights to the privileged few attendees, motivating quick registrations.
  • Beta testing program for a new product or feature: You might open a limited-access trial to a product or service before the official launch. Beyond getting early access, participants also get to influence the final product’s development.

2. Empathy

We are hard-wired to relate to others, which makes empathy such a powerful tool for savvy marketers. You can make your reader feel emotionally invested in your product or service if you can relate the latter to a personal story or shared issue.

An emotional hook built on empathy not only resonates with your audience but also reinforces your brand’s values as they align with your audience’s. In a B2B context, identifying customers’ pain points — and offering solutions that can address them — can reinforce your position as a sympathetic partner, not just a disinterested vendor.

You can demonstrate empathy by incorporating the following into your content:

  • Pain-point-centric social media posts: Write LinkedIn or Facebook posts/videos that address specific, industry-relevant frustrations, such as time-consuming manual processes or compliance burdens. These posts (for example: those by The Woke Salaryman, see above) can show how you relate to these issues, and add a dimension of empathy to your marketing message.
  • Thought leadership pieces: Produce social-proof-heavy content like whitepapers, webinars, or blogs that directly address your audience’s struggles, such as navigating digital transformation or adapting to remote work.

However, empathy is a double-edged sword: if your emotional hook smells inauthentic or opportunistic, the reader will immediately peg your content as manipulative, and walk away! Use this hook only if empathy is directly in line with your service or overall personality.

3. Community

A sense of community is a powerful draw in an impersonal online environment. Gathering users around your brand demonstrates the trust and loyalty your brand inspires; in the long run, it also creates a tight group of users willing to evangelise your product for free.

Apple is a powerful example of community-building done right. Steve Jobs and his successors figured out early that a) consumers have an innate need to belong, and b) by fostering a sense of inclusion and shared identity, you can create loyal, engaged audiences.

In a B2B context, you can build a community around your product or service, by demonstrating its common emotional impact across users. Can we make the case for a community of users, enjoying shared success and satisfaction that comes from leveraging your solution? Or can you show how “we” (customers of your product or service) are better served than “them” (competitor’s customers)?

ANEXT Bank community content

Consider building a community around the following marketing efforts:

  • Personal case studies: Create a series of narratives demonstrating how your product or service empowers people, with a focus on positive human impact. Consider a first-person testimonial approach where users tell their own stories in an authentic manner and post on social media for easy sharing. ANEXT Bank produced a series of articles featuring their “SME Friends of ANEXT”: a group of ANEXT Bank users who’ve since gone on to experience success in business, and are raring to share their stories with potential ANEXT clients.
  • Comparative content: Blog posts or white papers comparing your product or service against the competition. Stress the advantages of your product or service to your users, versus the value delivered by your competitor.

Authenticity matters for emotional B2B marketing

We’ll leave you with one final tip: connecting to customers with emotion requires authenticity. Any emotional angle in your B2B marketing content needs to be absolutely true to your brand to work effectively.

You’ll need to dig deep to find the connection between your product/service and its emotional alignment with your customer — look for an authentic emotional connection that you can build a marketing campaign on in a real way.

What emotional hooks fit for your brand or product? And which ones have you already used — and are working well for you?

200+ industry-leading tech companies in Southeast Asia are happy clients of With Content. Join them and start delivering valuable content to your potential customers today.

Let’s talk about your winning content marketing strategy.

Mike Aquino

Senior content strategist at With Content; secret travel fanatic with extensive experience hopping around Southeast Asia, wannabe Formula One driver stuck in a Toyota Vios.