Use All Five Senses In Marketing

Our five senses are sight, sound, taste, smell and touch. Doing anything online engages sight and sound.

Marketers always seek new ways to engage with audiences through digital marketing campaigns.

So if you’re a marketer, what’s your strategy for using taste, touch and smell in marketing to engage more with online audiences?

This article looks at whether engaging senses other than sight and sound online is possible.

Taste and Smell

The first step is understanding how we engage our senses and compensating if a reason is doing the work when needed.

For example, taste and smell are closely related due to the proximity of the nose and mouth. Here is an interesting statistic:

80% of what we experience as taste is actually not what we tasted. It is what we smelled

As mentioned, the two senses are so close that we smell it when we chew the food. Plus, our sense of smell is also closely linked to our memory.

For example, recalling where you were on a particular day is often triggered by the memory of smell. Walking through by a baker and smelling fresh bread or in a park and smelling the grass.

Connect with Audiences

Knowing how we use our senses and how our business can connect with audiences through content that triggers our minds will achieve a higher engagement rate. Plus, do this type of marketing well, and attention will convert to what businesses want most – more sales.

Interactive Content

One type of digital marketing is working hard to use all the senses: ‘ interactive content marketing’.

Games, Quizzes, Videos

Designers of online games and quizzes know how to immerse the user so they get a deeper level of involvement and thus enjoyment for participation.

When a business creates an instructional game to introduce a new product or service, and it’s fun to play – it’s easier to sell to customers.

For example, technology can be a hard sell,, especially when businesspeople do not understand its purpose.

Use a game or explainer videos to demystify complex solutions into layperson’s language.

Explainer videos give users the confidence to use new features and apps.

Use Language and Imagery

How do you get your audience to ‘feel’ your brand or product? It can be done with the use of language and imagery.

Images and videos are a huge part of social media marketing (SMM) and PPC ads.

Most viewers are not highly tuned to what sense is being triggered when viewing images. However, it’s very clever how effectively ideas can recall the sense of taste, smell and touch.

For example, viewing an image of a cup of coffee will ignite your sense of the smell of coffee. If that image of a coffee is now animated and you can see the steam coming off it, you’re likely to recall the taste of coffee too.

When you add an image or video to your blog content or social media profile, consider what senses you want to ignite and use an image that grabs hold of that sense.

Ask your audience for their feedback. For example, show an animated image of a beach on a sunny day, and ask your site visitors if they could feel the sun’s warmth? Smell the seawater? The feedback could be a quick survey that follows after the image, so you get instant feedback.

Start Young

Education on our senses and how to use them can start with the young, and in the infographic below.

Simply Education who find teaching jobs has cleverly crafted ways to build up sensory skills in children. While these exact examples may not appeal to us directly now we’re adults, they provide valuable insight into how we can craft ways to work on our senses to incorporate them into our marketing and other business areas.