Archive for Attracting Clients – Page 12

Print Consumer Magazines Score Big in Europe

Print magazines are alive and well, but they’re in transition. The ones that are thriving are customer magazines, designed to be helpful and relevant to consumers while delivering marketing messages and building brand loyalty.

Yesterday I led a workshop in the Netherlands at Media Partners Group. They specialize in both Dutch and English language publications for large companies, like Shell Oil and Heineken Beer, among others. Here’s the way they describe themselves:

MediaPartners Group inspires with text and images. We build relationships, stimulate sales and promote loyalty. We reach clients or employees by performing the unexpected, but without being creative for creativity’s sake.

Our dedicated team of specialists in the areas of strategy, design, content, copy, account and project management provide clients with sponsored magazines, web design, direct marketing solutions, in store communications, advertising and loyalty programmes for internal and external target groups.

As almost everywhere in Holland, professional people all speak English. There were several staff members from the UK, which is why they are able to create high quality communications for huge global corporations. The other reasons are because they are a group of talented smart people who love their work. Read More→

Content Marketing Tips: The Brain Runs the Show

If you’re going to create content that grabs readers’ attention, sparks emotional engagement, and gets them to take action, you need to know what makes people tick. Although traditionally the heart is referred to as “the ticker,” it’s the brain that runs the show.

Your brain:

  • Occupies 2-3% of your body space
  • Is a small organ of 1,500 cubic centimeters
  • Weighs 6 kilograms
  • Contains 100 billion cells
  • Houses 1 million kilometers of interconnecting fiber
  • Uses up 20% of your body’s energy supply of glucose

This last tidbit of information is key. Although it’s a small organ, it is a huge consumer of energy. The way it conserves energy is by going on automatic pilot, similar to the way Kindle and laptops go into sleep mode.

This is why the brain prefers to not have to think. If it can rely on the subconscious parts of the brain, it will, because this part decides without thinking, using intuition. It doesn’t have to use up precious energy reserves.

Your brain is responsible for a huge number of functions:

  1. Sensory perceptions
  2. Interpretations, assigning meaning
  3. Emotions
  4. Memory
  5. Bodily movements, both autonomic and voluntary
  6. Motivations, drive
  7. Planning, goal setting
  8. Imagining, anticipating
  9. Speaking, communicating
  10. Innovations, creativity
  11. Decisions, both conscious and subconscious, both logically and irrationally

Feelings Come  First

The emotional parts of the brain are larger than the rational part. Feelings come first, and are processed five times more rapidly in the subconscious brain than in the conscious, thinking brain. Read More→

The Ladder of Emotional Values: Pleasure Reigns

What emotions are people seeking to satisfy online? What can we understand about human motivations and values in order for content marketing to work?

Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs tells us we are motivated to satisfy our basic needs first (food, shelter, clothing), before we seek to obtain satisfaction for social, intellectual and spiritual needs.

A similar hierarchy of emotional values exists. As incoming information from web and blog pages enters the brain and is processed, our emotional centers assign values to offers.

Brain science, along with studies on decision making from behavioral economics, has shown that people often don’t use logical reasoning. Instead they go with their gut reactions. They make decisions based on feelings.

Later, when that leads to a buying decision, people justify their actions with rational logic and intellectual “alibis.”

At the lowest level, people have a desire for security. The next thing they seek is comfort. At the top of the ladder, people will pay the most to satisfy a desire to experience pleasure.

Although these values are all emotional, rationality plays a part. Online, an offer must work properly for consumers to feel secure. A marketing offer also provides comfort through ease of purchase, and also by providing reasons to defend the purchase to friends and family. But rationality is never the deciding factor. Read More→

Content Marketing to the Male Brain

What can we learn from brain science about how to market to men?

79% of men are alienated and barely able to recognize themselves in the ads portraying their gender (Business Week, 2006)

The Old Spice site has some great TV clips that do a good job of appealing to men’s views of themselves, using humor and exaggerations of stereotypes.

Here’s what else grabs the attention of male brains…

Attention: They live in the ‘now.’ They are concrete thinkers that like to consummate, finish. Men are goal-oriented. A male axiom is “get it done.”

Men are interested in power and in looking good, even more than being good.

Time– Men tend to hone in, more quickly than women, on what they’re looking for. Men are not browsers. A male motto, “Get what I want and move on.”  Provide clear links to what they are looking for.

Causality– Men are concrete and tend to tightly focus their awareness. Their notion of cause and effect is linear and men are visually-oriented because of this concrete perspective.

Seeking clarity, men create absolute distinctions: black-white, yes-no. First- last, winner-loser.

Men like to feel unique and special, and as such they will follow their gurus, heroes and sports stars and teams.

Celebrity endorsements and affiliation – If Michael Jordon wears them, they’re good enough for men.

Look at Steve Jobs, Richard Branson: If the company president is a rebel and a renegade, then others will join their cause and identify with the company and their products.

Other people – For the male it’s every man for himself. Men prize individuality and self-reliance. They conceive of other people as “my competition.“

They ask, “What will your product do to make me better than the others?”

Look at Razerzone.com, a manufacturer of PC gaming hardware such as mice. This company publishes a gaming guide to show “noobs” how to rapidly improve their online game scores. It’s a list builder that is responsible for the company going from a list of 8,000 to 200,000 in less than 2 years.

It’s their key content marketing piece, and there are others. The president, RazerGuy, has his own blog, and they have active participation on Facebook. There are even Razer fan sites built by evangelists, and many tattoo the company logo, a three-headed snake, on their bodies.

The Senior Brain: How to Market to Oldies but Goodies…

Something’s wrong with the way marketers are trying to reach people over 65. I know this from personal experience.

I am learning new stuff about the brain all the time, and since I have one myself, older brains are particularly interesting to me.

If marketers don’t get wise to the way seniors perceive their marketing messages they are are in for a rude awakening. Marketing to the older brain isn’t done by showing pictures of frail people, confused people, or trying to frighten them into buying stuff.

Wake up, folks. “Seniors,” doesn’t mean senile. Older people aren’t all decrepit and stupid. Not only that, but we’ve got more of the money, honey.

Let’s just take the young seniors, those Baby Boomers who are just coming of age now. The 44 million baby boomers are maturing rapidly, and represent the richest generational cohort in history. In the US, they control 77% of all financial assets. They use ½ of all credit cards, and spend 2½ times the per capita average on discretionary purchases.

The level of spending by those over 45 will soon exceed that of people between 18 and 39 by $1 trillion US. Yet, despite these statistics, only 10 percent of all branded marketing target older consumers (Wolfe and Snyder, 2003).

I know that neither myself, my husband or any of my friends of similar ages are attracted to the way seniors are depicted in marketing messages.

Some of us don’t use a cane or a walker. We actually play sports and even dress like younger peeps.

Here are a few facts about the older brain and how it likes to be marketed to. Read More→

Engaging Content: Get Emotional, Really Emotional

How can content  marketers create content that engages – truly engages – the emotions of readers?

When Harry Met Sally, Sally insisted men could never tell when women were faking an orgasm. To prove it, she demonstrated her own audio version, fully clothed, sitting in a crowded restaurant. The diners at Katz’ Deli were shocked and amused, as were millions of movie goers.

The scene features one of the funniest lines ever, “I’ll have what she’s having,” spoken  by Estelle Reiner, the director’s mother who played one of the restaurant patrons.

This is important stuff for content marketers to grasp and use when creating content that engages the hearts and minds of readers.

If you want your readers to be so moved that they ask you for some of what “she’s having,” then make your stories emotional.

Scientists have shown that humans have an innate ability to feel what others feel through neurons called mirror neurons. These are what allow us to feel empathy, to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes.

Our brain neurons fire just as if we were actually doing or feeling what we see another human doing or feeling. Each time you tell a story about a client, we put ourselves into the picture.

Telling stories about clients who use your services and products isn’t just a marketing tactic. It’s neuroscience in action. Your readers can feel the pain of the client who was frustrated, angry, disappointed… and feel their relief when you helped them out. In those moments, they are that client, they get it. They are right there in the story.

How many of you did that when you watched Meg Ryan fake an orgasm? The director tells us that in test showings, the women in the audience were all laughing. The men were silent. Maybe they were worried…  I don’t know. For sure, no one was bored or unengaged…

Try to imagine the feelings your audience of readers will experience when you tell a story. Will it make them want “some of what you’ve got?”

Content Marketing with Blogs: New edition

Want to know more about online persuasion and how you can write content that gets results? Here’s a quick one minute video promoting my Content Marketing with Blogs ebook, newly revised. The formatting and design was done by my son-in-law, expert graphic designer and creative genius, Scott Krakoff. Tell me what you think…

If you haven’t downloaded it yet, be my guest: Content Marketing with Blogs…

7 Ways to Market to the Subconscious Brain:
The Homer Simpson Guide to Content Marketing

Content marketing and the people who write marketing messages must understand how consumers’ brains work if  they want to engage and create trust and loyalty. The problem lies in assuming people are in charge of their own choices…

Everybody thinks they are in control of their behaviors and decisions. We think we are rational, logical, and smart human beings. But we may not be so smart if we don’t recognize our own and others’ irrationality.

Our behavior and decision-making is affected, 95% of the time, by the unconscious processing in the mid and old brains. 95% of our decision making and buying and Web actions are heavily influenced by unconscious processing.

85% of the time our brains are on autopilot. But marketers continue to write messages as if people were paying attention.

Market research: in 2005 corporations spent more than $7.3 billion in US alone. In 2007, $12 billion. That doesn’t include marketing, advertising, etc. which carries an additional annual $117 billion tag. Most of it is spent in the wrong places and fails.

Companies and brands are gathering the wrong information, because consumer surveys and focus groups can only report back what they consciously experience …and it’s falsified by biases and flaws. The only true market research comes from monitoring brains of consumers as they react to messages, through neuromarketing.

8 out of 10 new product launches fail. Could it be that we’ve misunderstood how to capture attention,  emotions and be memorable to consumers? Could it be we assume people are conscious and rational?

Health warnings on cigarette labels actually trigger smoking behaviors, they don’t deter any smoking at all, quite the contrary. How do we know? Not because smokers report they ignore the warnings. They all say they read them and believe them and want to quit smoking. But their brain scans show they actually want a cigarette even more. (Buyology, Martin Lindstrom) Read More→

Brain Scans Reveal 3 Elements of “Buying Brain”

As more brands are being studied in laboratories around the world, consumers are being hooked up to brain imaging machines, fMRI, EEG and other devices so that they are monitored while they read marketing messages and make decisions.

Neuromarketing is extremely expensive market research to do, but fortunately most brains work the same, with some exceptions for age and gender. So the results acquired for companies with big budgets are showing us how to create messages that have a powerful impact on the brains of all consumers.

So far, neuromarketing studies have shown that these three factors determine whether or not a consumer is inclined to make a buying decision:

  1. The degree of ATTENTION
  2. Whether or not there is emotional ENGAGEMENT
  3. How easily the message and the brand is encoded to MEMORY

Attention, emotional engagement, memory: 3 keys to priming the brains of your audience to buy or take the action you want. (Source: The Buying Brain, A.K. Pradeep, CEO of NeuroFocus)

And this makes sense, doesn’t it? … you can’t get someone to the point of wanting to buy something without first getting their attention. And if your message resonates with them on an emotional level, they’ll have trust. It’s well known that experiences that carry a strong feeling have better chances of being remembered.

In order to buy your brand, they have to remember where they saw it, and where they can go take action.

Think of a monkey waking up in a tree… he swings through the branches and he sees a bright yellow banana through the branches. Read More→

What Drives Us? 4 Keys to Creating Compelling Content

I’m extremely curious about the subconscious drives that compel people to do the things they do, in their work, in their choices, and their buying decisions, aren’t you? Sometimes, you feel driven to do things, and you don’t really know why.

Engaging the hearts and minds of readers through written content isn’t easy. The Content Marketing Institute recently surveyed content marketers who report that’s their #1 challenge:

How to write content that is “engaging, that gets readers to pay attention, the compels them to take action.

I think to be successful with content, one has to appeal to fundamental human drives and motivations, the ones that our primitive ancestors passed down to us over the last 100,000 years.

Recently, I came across a fascinating book I read 10 years ago, based on evolutionary biology, sociology, and psychology: Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Our Choices by Paul R. Lawrence and Nitin Noria.

These two incredibly smart professors propose a theory of four fundamental motivations at the heart of all human behavior.

  1. The drive to acquire objects and experiences that improve our status relative to others.
  2. The drive to bond with others in long-term relationships of mutually caring commitment.
  3. The drive to learn and make sense of the world and of ourselves.
  4. The drive to defend ourselves, our loved ones, our beliefs and resources from harm.

This theory says that humans and social groups will enjoy an advantage to the extent that they are able to fulfill all four of these basic human drives.

It suggests these drives have a strong emotional component, and would probably show up in the limbic system of the brain if monitored under brain scans. What that means is that they are embedded in the subconscious mind, out of our awareness.

After reading this book and a few others on human motivation, I can see how these four drives apply to writing emotionally engaging content that compels readers to take action:

Content written to appeal to each of these four drives will engage the emotional brains of readers.

Let me tell you a story that shows how this works. Information passes to the brain through the sense organs.

Let’s say Fred is reading the news online, and his eye catches a picture of an ad: a business man driving to work in a red sports car. Read More→