Empathy is the secret to successful digital marketing campaigns in the BFSI sector: Report

• A recent study by Instoried has revealed that positive tone with joy as a dominant emotion worked as a foolproof combination for digital ads from the BFSI sector.
• The study also found that a combination of a positive tone with joy produces an ideal piece of text that will perform strongly. This combination boosts customer engagement and promotes a wider outreach for any digital marketing campaign.

Empathy and messages of joy go a long way when it comes to digital campaigns for the BFSI sector, according to a study by Instoried, a deep-tech platform that analyzes and predicts the emotional quotient, tonality and relevance of written content across formats like blogs, articles, social media posts.

The organization's recent study was undertaken to understand the overall emotion and tonality of digital marketing communications in the BFSI sector. The study found that empathy is the secret to a successful digital marketing campaign in the BFSI sector.

Over the years, and especially in the last one years, we have come to realize that emotions play a big role in consumer decision-making. There have been several studies that have focused on the impact of empathy in consumer purchasing but not many have focused on the impact of empathy in Digital marketing.

The study by Instoried was aimed at understanding what is the overall emotion and tonality of digital marketing
communications in the BFSI sector and if there was a correlation between empathy and performance in digital marketing. They analyzed Search Ad copies and Social media posts between Jan to May 2021 to draw their conclusions. The report is composed with the help of the organization's proprietary sentiment analysis tool which is capable of showing the percentage of different tones and emotions in a provided piece of text.

As a part of the study, around 500 Google Search advertisements that ran between Jan 2021 to May 2021 from various
companies of the BFSI sector and their Google Search Ad Ranks were studied. Additionally, around 5000 social media posts from various companies of the BFSI sector along with their 'likes' were also taken into consideration.

Instoried’s native AI tool was used to carry out this study. Instoried is built to predict the percentage of positive, negative, and neutral tones in any piece of text. Simultaneously the tool can also analyze the percentage of emotions such as joy, anger, fear, sadness, and surprise can. Thus, by simply pasting a text in the tool, one can check for the tonality and emotional quotient. The text advertisements and captions of social media posts were pasted to obtain the tone and emotion percentage. The tonality and emotions of the social media posts were then cross-correlated with their applause rate or performance i.e, Likes. The tonality and Emotion of the search ads were then cross-correlated with their performance i.e Search Ad Rank.

The study observed that the positive tone percentage is higher than the negative tone percentage in most
text advertisements. The dominant emotion in the text advertisements was joy followed by fear, sadness, anger, and with the least amount of surprise. The company performing the best on Instagram and Twitter with the most number of likes was ICICI Prudential Life. The dominant tone was positive and the dominant emotion was a joy.

The study also noted that a positive tone not only shows confidence in the company but also boosts the
confidence of the customer. Positivity sells and t is something that social media and advertisement campaigns rely majorly upon.

Meanwhile, the increase of a negative tone decreases the applause rate. Negative words tend to bring down enthusiasm and self-confidence in a decision. Customers often find themselves in the middle of a conundrum with their decisions when they interact with a text having a heavy negative tone.

Meanwhile, in terms of the role that empathy plays in Search Ad campaigns, the study noted that when the percentage of Joy is increased in a campaign, the text advertisements rank higher in search. It also noted that anger is a very strong negative emotion and affects the search ranking.

Conclusion:

Some of the major takeaways from the study were as follows:

1. The performance of a text advertisement depends on the tone and dominant emotion. The study concludes that a positive tone with joy as a dominant emotion, appears to work as a foolproof combination. This combination will produce more impactful text advertisements which down the line can help generate more sales and an
increased ROI.

2. After analyzing the data set for social media, it was concluded that a combination of a positive tone with joy produces an ideal piece of text that will perform strongly. This combination boosts customer engagement and promotes a wider outreach for any digital marketing campaign.

3. The study makes a solid ground to claim that empathy is the secret to a successful digital marketing campaign in the BFSI sector.

Speaking about the findings of the report, Sharmin Ali, Founder & CEO, Instoried said, "Empathy is an often overlooked component in Marketing communication. Most marketers obsess over marketing copy and how it converts customers, but they don't always look at what state of mind their marketing copy puts their customers in. With this report, we wanted to explore the empathetic quotient of marketing content in the BFSI sector, a sector that has become increasingly relevant in these trying times, where more people are looking towards financial security, health insurance and increased investments. We were pleasantly surprised at finding out that most marketers communicate in a positive tone and use joy as a core emotion instead of appealing to customers' insecurities. It is also resulting in better Ad performance and social media performance for these brands. We hope more marketers look at the empathetic quotient while creating ad copies and create truly resonating content that not just converts but compels users."