I talk a lot about “tapping into emotional hot buttons” – so much so that in a recent class I taught an author stood up and said: “Ok, enough already! Everyone talks about emotional hot buttons but what are they?” Good question, and I suspect it’s one many of us in marketing forget ourselves from time to time. So let’s look at some of these emotional triggers. What makes people buy, read, or join whatever it is we’re selling?

We want what we don’t have. This is pretty basic. We want what we don’t have. We want more money, we want to be fitter, healthier, sexier, smarter. Some of us (ok, most of us) want more time. We also desire to be popular (come, admit it, even the most modest of us desire popularity). We want more security, but we also want to have more fun. We want to be smarter and with all the data out there, we want to be “in the know.”

We want to keep what we have. Once we have whatever it is we desire, we want to keep it. Books on keeping relationships strong, keeping marriages working, staying on your diet, keeping the weight off, keeping your job, whatever it is – these thousands of books are a testament to the fact that once we have what we want, we don’t want to lose it.

We want to avoid stuff we don’t like. Let’s face it, we’ve all ‘copped out’ at some point or another. We want it the way we want it and the icky stuff, well, let’s avoid that altogether. How can you help someone avoid doing stuff they don’t like? Thousands of books have been written on this topic. Everything from reframing, to repositioning a particular topic, and even less painful ways to end a relationship.

We want to be liked. It’s a pretty standard human emotion. We want to be liked, or at the very least respected. Being ‘in the know’ makes us liked, doing and saying the right things in social situations makes us likable. While some would argue “I won’t sell my soul to be liked,” it’s still a very strong thread in our culture. From buying the right shoe, to purchasing the right house, we want to be liked, or rather, be like everyone else.

We want to be unique. On the heels of the above statement this may not make sense, but in a world of sameness we also want to be unique. Not so unique that we’re walking down the street with pink hair (with all due respect to my fabulous hairdresser who from time to time dons a pink-do), but we want to be seen as individual, and independent. You’ll see a lot of this in car commercials. The next time one of the car manufacturers is trying to sell you a car on TV watch the ad closely. In not so subtle ways they’ll tell you the car is what everyone else wants or has and yet at the same time it has your own personal thumb print of uniqueness.

Now that you know what emotional hot buttons are, how to do you tap into them? Well, first off find out what your book does for the reader. Whether fiction or non-fiction, it doesn’t matter. There’s always an emotional trigger that gets someone to buy something. We all buy from emotion, it’s that simple. Figure out what the emotion is (and there might be several) and then tap into that emotion. You can tap into an emotion through engaging words on your website, through blog postings, ads, a video trailer of your book. Whatever it is, if you’re not pressing their buttons, you’re probably not making the sale either.

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