How to Evoke Emotion In Your Content Writing

Evoke emotion in your content writing is easy if you just follow our secret.

Some of this can be quite mechanical. You can bring out your emotions through mediums that work for you. Maybe journaling, or reading out loud, recording yourself experiencing the feelings. We have a surprise video for you to watch below. It’ll change your life because it’ll change your approach. Read on.

Use Content Buckets

In column five of the Content marketing Calendar Template, list the content buckets into which you are filing the post. A content bucket is a visual way to apply a theme. This helps in organizing your posts. We organize our posts into six content buckets; Introduce, Inform, Interact, Inspire, Entertain and Influence.

Content buckets remind you to publish a variety of content types (images, videos, links, text-only) on a variety of topics or themes.

1. Evoke Emotion right in the Introduction

These posts help our fans get to know the person behind the brand. They can be fun, goofy, random, reflective, inspirational… whatever you want. But they need to be candid and to reflect the “real” you. You might introduce a person, your company, products, services you offer. Make it interesting.

Need help writing an Introduction? Here are 3 steps on How to Write an Introduction and grab the reader’s attention.

Grab the readers’ attention. This looks different for every piece of writing.
Present the reason for the post existence.
Explain how the post will help correct the problem that brought your reader to it.

Are You a salesperson? Have you taken classes on how to be a salesperson because your business depends on it?! How many of us have been told … be ready to sell me this pen. But how many people have actually shown you how to sell the pen? Well, I found Wendy Alane Wright do just this in this video. It is the best example I’ve yet to see someone selling a pen.

The best example yet of how to “Sell me this pen!” The entire video is worth watching but start selling this pen at 21:13 minutes – 49:08.

2. Inform the Reader to Evoke Emotion

Help your followers solve a problem or meet a challenge by offering a wealth of niche-related educational content. This is my favorite content bucket; as many as 80% of my updates are informational.

3. Evoke Emotion as you Interact with your reader

We all know that social media is intended to be relational and interactive. Yet many of us (myself included) forget to ask our followers to participate in the conversation. Ask questions; challenge your followers to do something you’ve taught them.

4. Inspire your reader with Emotion

Motivate or encourage your fans with graphics, videos, quotes, success stories, and testimonials. Let them know you will give them the step by step process to accomplish a particular goal or solve a problem.

5. Evoke Emotion to Entertain Your Reader

Make them laugh. Make them cry. Make them go aaaaah.

6. Influence Your Reader with Emotion

Be extremely careful about overwhelming your fans with “buy my stuff” posts. Limit promotional content to about 10% of your posts.

The bottom line is with any of the content buckets, you want to evoke emotion. People buy two things. Products and Transformation. Once you identify your target audience, invoke emotion. For example, “The grief of a loved one’s passing.”, “The euphoria of falling in love for the first time.” Creating emotion in the reader, consider Showing rather than telling. Make a character sympathetic, so the reader identifies with you or your client. Make a character unsympathetic, so the reader feels anger or repugnance toward him. Don’t hold back. Tease the reader with hints of what’s to come.

Show rather than tell. Readers need to see the effect of your emotions through your body language, facial expressions, and actions. Rather than telling us She is Sad. Or He is Scared. Show us. Her trembling lips and watery eyes. You can see his body tense up in fear.

Build up to intense emotions for greater impact. Deep emotions: Unbridled joy – Aching Grief. Shallow emotions – Fleeting Happiness – Minor Disappointment.

We want to evoke emotion. We are educating. People like processes.

Try journaling. The most vivid and relatable character emotions often mirror real-life experiences. Document your own daily emotional experiences, whether it’s anger, sadness, or joy.

Please – avoid cliches. “a single tear fell down her cheek”. “his heart skipped a beat”

Brainstorm Titles, Headers, and subtitles. Say you are selling water…

“Everything You want to Know about Water”
“5 Most Dangerous Things Everyone Should Know about Water”
“5 Things you better now about Water and How it Affects Your Body”
“The impact water has on your mind, body, spirit, and energy”

Quick Tips

Mix-and-match social media updates into multiple content buckets. Write an update that is both informational and interactive, by sharing a tip and then challenging your followers to put your tip into practice.

Or write an entertaining “influence” post. Promote a product or service you offer, but do it in such an entertaining way that your fans don’t even realize you’re promoting something.

Link to other people’s content. One of the best ways to establish authority in your niche is to serve as a reliable source of information. My personal goal is to link to other people’s articles, blog posts, or social updates 40-60% of the time.

Give yourself permission to move things around. Monitor how your updates are performing on various social channels, and adjust regularly.

Save As. We manage social media accounts for several clients, so before we start filling in the calendar, we first save a blank calendar for each client.

Print once. At the end of the year, we have a complete record of every social update we have posted to every network. At the end of 2017, I will print the entire calendar and store a hard copy.

Download Your 2021 Content Calendar Now

If you haven’t requested your free content calendar template yet, now’s the time!

Hit-the-Web Marketing is a website design company in Rhode Island. Contact Us today. We’ll analyze your website and online presence to help you use more emotion in your writing, videos and any content you write.