{"id":63105,"date":"2016-02-16T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-02-16T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rockcontent.com\/blog\/use-science-emotion-write-better-copy\/"},"modified":"2025-09-11T00:36:51","modified_gmt":"2025-09-11T03:36:51","slug":"use-science-emotion-write-better-copy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pingback.com\/en\/resources\/use-science-emotion-write-better-copy\/","title":{"rendered":"Use the Science of Emotion to Write Better Headlines"},"content":{"rendered":"

POLITICO recently ran a headline on its website titled, “The fury of Ben Carson.” In a news cycle that has been consumed with sensational stories about politicians of all stripes, it normally wouldn\u2019t be noteworthy. At just five words, the headline\u2019s not even a complete sentence. It doesn\u2019t have an action verb. But the use of “fury” speaks volumes. It creates an immediate emotional connection with the reader that appeals to readers in a way that the basic meaning of the words doesn’t on its own. Sure, we\u2019ve all been angry. But think back to the last time you were furious<\/em>. It’s harder to do, right? It’s a very specific emotional place, and you immediately want to click that headline to see why Carson is upset or how that rage is manifesting itself. (Answer: In case you wanted to know.<\/a>) For content marketing managers, the lesson of this headline\u2014and any headline, social media post or email subject line\u2014is that emotion is everything. This little bit of content, short though it might be, is your one opportunity to win over an audience. Of course you need to deliver once you get the click, but it doesn’t matter how good your content is if nobody sees it in the first place. <\/p>\n

The attention dilemma<\/h2>\n

The need to create an emotional connection with your audience is becoming more important for three reasons. The first is your audience is consuming more digital media than ever before\u2014roughly 5.5 hours per day per U.S. adult, according to data from Nielsen. \"Nielsen_TimeSpentWithMultimedia\" The second is that your audience isn\u2019t growing by leaps and bounds. From the Nielsen data above, you can see that the average time online has plateaued, because the market is basically saturated. Further, data from the U.S. Census Bureau show that while all age demographics will see population gains between now and 2060, the majority increase will happen among residents age 65 and older. In many cases, brands are targeting adults ages 18 to 64\u2014a timespan that typically covers our highest-earning years and thus the ability to pay for more goods and services than those younger or older. Those prime demographic categories will each grow by less than 20 percentage points<\/a> in the decades ahead. \"US Third, your competition is heating up. Fully 76 percent of B2B content marketers<\/a> and 77 percent of B2C content marketers<\/a> say they will create more content this year than in 2015, according to the latest benchmark reports by the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs. This creates a supply and demand problem. There is simply way too much content for people to consume, and the impact of this surplus content is becoming quantifiable. For example, TrackMaven just published a report<\/a> that showed (among other things) that the level of engagement with social media posts is inversely proportionate to the number of posts brands make: \"Screen<\/a> Bottom line, at a time when people’s attention span is only eight seconds<\/a>, you have a very small window to connect. <\/p>\n

Spin the wheel of emotion<\/h2>\n

As sociologists and psychologists have tried to understand our emotional connection with words, they have developed tried to find frameworks for organizing and classifying them. Perhaps the most famous is Robert Plutchik\u2019s wheel of emotions: \"Buffer_Wheel Writing in the January\/February 2001 issue of “American Scientist,” Plutchik presented this visualization<\/a> as a means of describing the \u201crelations among emotion concepts, which are analogous to the colors on a color wheel. The cone’s vertical dimension represents intensity, and the circle represents degrees of similarity among the emotions.” Plutchik noted eight primary “emotion dimensions”: <\/p>\n