When making a purchasing decision, people have two types of need – emotional needs and functional or factual ones. Which is more important?

You need to take care of BOTH of these in your content if you want a greater chance of success.

But decisions are as much as 80% emotion and explains why marketers try and appeal to our emotions. Apple are very successful. They make good gadgets, but really it's about the cool factor and why Apple fans will buy Apple products sight unseen. They'll just back up their decision by pointing out the design features.

The order in which you appeal to these emotions and logic is also important, because people make decisions based on emotions and then use logic to back up or justify the decision.

Sell the sizzle before you sell the sausage.

Which means selling the benefits (which appeal to emotions), before the features (which appeal to logic). Good article headlines appeal to some emotion: Fear – the most powerful one, Greed. Pride. Guilt. Hope.

The simplest why to find out which emotion you need to appeal to, is to find out what keeps your customer up at night. Talk to them. As them WHY they want to do something. These are sometimes called their 'hot buttons'.

If you can find out what their goals, passions and fears are, it will open the door for an emotional connection that takes precedent over features and price.

Emotions are also why building trust on your website is so important.

Eventually you will have to get to the factual bit (some would say the boring bit) because logic and fact justifies the decision.

And quite often, buyers can't (or won't) explain their decision in terms of the underlying emotion, but will explain it in logic terms – even if that logic doesn't always stack up!