Archive for Online Persuasion – Page 5

Emotional Attention + Memory = Content Marketing

How do you write good blog posts that connect emotionally with readers and turn them into loyal fans? Oh, heck, that’s easy. All you have to do is:

  1. Grab their attention
  2. Get them emotionally engaged
  3. Make a memorable impact

There you go, right? Easy-peasy. This is what you need to do whenever you write any content designed to market your products and services. Attention, emotions, memory.

Neuroscientists are now showing that the two most important elements of persuasion are emotional engagement and memory. Of course you can’t get either of these unless your marketing messages gain readers’ attention first.

Why this is so important? We’ll go into how to do it another day, since this involves quite  number of suggestions and tips.

These three goals for your content marketing are required if you want to write stuff that is effective to attract prospects, and get them interested and primed for making a purchase or other desired action.

This information comes from research on neuromarketing and what makes people buy. If you’re interested in learning more about the brain from a marketer’s viewpoint, I recommend The Buying Brain and Neuromarketing: Understanding the Buy Buttons in Your Customer’s Brains.

Neuroscientists are monitoring brain activity in consumers as they are exposed to marketing messages. You probably don’t have access to the brain imaging that is being generated by these studies, and quite frankly, you don’t need it. All brains are alike. Read More→

Content Marketing to a Caveman’s Brain

How do you gain the attention of readers? How do you get them to stay and read your blog post, your web pages, your newsletter?

Your brain is 100,000 years old. You may not wake up in the Savannah of East Africa, grab your spear and walk miles to hunt prey for food. But on your commute to work in traffic, the same stress hormones (cortisol) are surging through your body as you fight traffic to get to your office.

Once there, your senses scan the environment for prey, competitors and allies, and the same goal-seeking behaviors are at play. The male of the species, in particular, is driven to acquire and achieve to protect his family and status.

For women, it’s slightly different, but not entirely. Women tend to the feeding of their offspring and mate, attend to the shelter, and are acutely aware of emotional needs of her family members. She may also fight traffic and go to an office full of stress, competitors and allies. As a female, she multitasks many responsibilities and skillfully uses language and relationships to get things done.

Our brains haven’t changed in 100,000 years. Our world, however, has. Most significant in the last 20 years is our ability to communicate and stay informed on a global level. Marketing is changing along with this world that offers multiple media channels to spread more messages to more people. Content marketing is growing rapidly as a way to connect with consumers who have become adverse to interruptive advertising.

Here’s what I’m reading in an excellent book, The Buying Brain by A.K. Pradeep:

The questions remains, how do we engage with the primal brain – embedded deep within us – in this modern world? How do we soothe and seduce it?

How do we send it messages that are important enough to be noticed and remembered?

How do we stand out from the amazing barrage of sensory stimuli to be the one product or brand that makes sense and is embraced by the brain?

How do we make life easier and more fun for this miracle of nature that’s perpetually on guard?

More importantly, how do we start treating our customers as the smart, evolved people they are?

With respect and dignity, compassion and caring, delivered in a way that invites and engages, but doesn’t over-stimulate or alarm? Read More→

10 Ways to Make Content More Engaging

The Content Marketing Institute has hit another home-run with their question to content experts, “How do you make content more engaging?” Ten experts responded, including moi, and their answers are illuminating, especially for anyone charged with creating quality content for blogs, social media, and writing for the Web.

In my opinion and experience, marketing that engages is emotional.

The human brain is emotional at its very core.

While women process messages with more emotions than men, both must be engaged emotionally for a message to be remembered and acted upon.

Marketers must uncover the key emotional triggers their product inspires and pinpoint them in their messages.

Here is a summary of what other content marketers think about this important question:

Just as there is no single definition of engagement, there is no single way to engage with your audience:

  • Focus on what is important to your ideal reader, which is often different than what is important to your business.
    • Actively listen to your audience and respond to their needs.
    • Create buyer personas to capture key information about your readers.
    • Try to connect with your readers emotionally. Read More→

Neuromarketing: This is your brain on advertising…

Neuromarketing is a concept based on fact plus a lot of assumptions — and it can easily evoke a little fear as well.

It is true that the human brain responds to images and words, which is why advertising works. It hasn’t been that long since brain science has revealed what many of us suspected: most of our decisions aren’t made in our thinking brains.

We make decisions unconsciously, using split-second intuitive processing in our emotional brains. What does this mean to marketers?

That advertising and content that appeals to our primitive emotions (sex, food, danger,pleasure) will get our attention better than long text of facts, figures, and logic.

This isn’t exactly a news flash, ask any copywriter. And yet, we don’t approach content creation that way. At least most of us don’t, because we learned in schools from teachers who didn’t understand this yet. And as educated people, we value logic and reason, facts and figures.

The assumption is that marketers, by using high-tech neurological equipment such as fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) machines that trace brain activity, could create more successful ads. The fear is that use of that knowledge could do more than stoke interest in a product — it could more or less compel interest.

In an interview with the Gallup Journal, Dr. John Fleming, responded to the question if neuromarketing is something to be feared: Read More→

Engaging Content: Start with Why

How do you write engaging content? How do you unlock the minds of your readers?

  • What makes your blog writing effective?
  • How do you create quality content that pulls in interested readers?
  • How can you reach, attract, and make an impact?

For that matter, how can anything you write or say actually work to market your business and bring in potential customers? Let’s face it, you’ve probably been saying some of the same things for a while now, and … so have your competitors!

How can you be engaging to your clients if your competitors are all talking about the same thing?

I wrote about this important $64,000 question last week, and I’m immersed in research about what makes content engaging right now. One of the books I’m reading is Simon Sinek’s Start with Why. He says we should start our messages with the big WHY… why we’re in business, why do we do what we do. In other words, make it clear what your higher purpose is.

“Your higher purpose is where your talents and the needs of the world meet.” ~ Aristotle

Don’t you love it when a good quote for today’s busy world comes from a 2,400-year-old guy? Here’s the content marketing version from Joe Pulizzi, Content Marketing Institute and Junta42:

“Your higher purpose is where your expertise and the needs of your customers meet.” ~ Joe Pulizzi

Read More→

Content Marketers Answer the $64,000 Question…

What does it mean to write content that “engages” readers? What the heck is engaging content? According to a recent survey by the Content Marketing Institute, this is the #1 challenge for people charged with creating content that markets businesses.

These questions are asked and answered by a distinguished group of contributors to the Content Marketing Institute’s blog and you can read the post here: What Does Engaging Content Mean?

I contributed my take: your content must create an emotional impact in the brains of readers if you hope to influence them to take any sort of action.

Here’s a summary of the ideas, in case you’re in a hurry:

  • Make sure content is relevant to your audience and helps them with an issue they have right now.
  • Give your audience something that they can’t find anywhere else.
  • Be entertaining, educational or both.
  • Tell the audience a story.
  • Invite the viewer to engage with you further by adding a call to action. Read More→

10 Conversion Tips from Brain Science

Why do people decide to buy a product online? How is it they decide to trust the information you provide, and register to download information from your blog or website? What can we learn from brain science?

This is something that intrigues me. I read a lot of research on motivation, decision making, and neuroscience to try to figure out how brain science can be applied to better content marketing.

The problem is not what you might think. We know enough about the brain and marketing today to realize people are influenced by unconscious feelings, as much as they are by logic and reasons.

Any professional who has studied content marketing and copywriting knows that you must use emotional stories to get people to take action.

The problem for content creators  is that so much of what influences and persuades is unconscious and specific for each reader. Everybody’s different, and you can’t possibly address each reader’s wants and desires.

What are the unconscious reasons for people’s actions, how do their emotions affect decisions, and how can professionals apply the principles of persuasion to create content that encourages users to take action? Read More→

Blog Writing: What Can We Learn From Reality TV?

(Guest Post: I’m on vacation, so I invited Tim Handorf to write a guest post. Tim writes on the topics of online colleges and universities. He welcomes your comments at his email Id: tim.handorf.20@googlemail.com.)

As a blogger, you know by now that increasing your traffic means grabbing your audience’s attention and keeping it. The Internet is a veritable distraction mine filled with bells and whistles and flashing lights, so keeping a large audience enthralled and focused is a constant but rewarding challenge.

While Writing on the Web and other websites like it have featured dozens of solid tips for improving your blog writing, I’m going to offer a source of divine inspiration when the going gets tough. That’s right. Reality TV.

The invasion of reality-based shows in our popular imagination isn’t always mentally stimulating. Some shows, like Bad Girls Club or The Hills, are downright silly and immature. But I’ll be darned if they aren’t mind-bogglingly popular. And the range of viewership is startlingly diverse–even my mother, a woman hailing from a different country, culture, and generation–is obsessed.

One Sunday afternoon, splayed on the couch watching a marathon run of America’s Next Top Model, I started thinking about what, exactly, is it that makes these shows so attention grabbing, and what can I take away from the experience to get more readers reading my own blogs? Here are a few things I noticed.

1. People love personal stories.

I’m convinced that at the core of reality TV’s popularity is its microscopic look at personal detail. While your blog may not necessarily be a hub of personal confessions, always throw in some personal detail when writing any article, no matter how technical or abstract the subject matter is.

Nearly all readers desire seeing the person connected to her work. Even though America’s Next Top Model is about modeling, would anyone really care as much if we didn’t get the occasional personal glimpse into each model’s life? Probably not.

2. People love unique personalities. Read More→

Compelling Content: Pushing Readers’ Hot Buttons

How do you write compelling content that attracts and engages readers? Ahhh, that question again…(followed usually by how do you turn readers into buyers?) This is the job of good content marketing and the challenge for online professionals who write blogs, articles, and  web pages.

First, let’s deal with the compelling content thing. Your content isn’t going to market anything if you don’t reach inside the heads and hearts of your readers.

Obviously it’s all about your readers. The better you know who they are and what they like, the easier it is to write content for them.

Use emotional words and phrases, and think about triggering their hot buttons. There are universal drives and human motivators. It doesn’t matter if your reader is a 20-year-old gamer or a 70-year-old retired professor.

Human beings are all driven by hot button motivators. (See the excellent book by Barry Feig for more about this: Hot Button Marketing: Push the Emotional Buttons that Get People to Buy). Some of these are:

  • The desire to be first
  • The desire to know it all
  • The desire for control
  • The desire to love and be loved
  • The desire to enjoy and have fun
  • The desire for values or feelings of moral righteousness
  • The drive for prestige
  • The drive for self-achievement
  • The drive for power and influence
  • The drive to help others

What drives your readers? Do any of these hot buttons seem similar to your clients? How can you test your assumptions? Maybe you could push a few buttons to see what reaction you get? Read More→

Content Marketing with Emotions: Write with Feeling

Are you writing with feeling? Does your blog trigger emotional reactions? Next time you review your writing, try to identify possible feelings in the reader.

Content marketing that doesn’t resonate emotionally can’t do a good job of building relationships, inspiring trust, and moving people into taking action.

Blog writers need to step away from their anonymous masks and get real, get emotional. It doesn’t mean you get all new-agey, touchy-feely. It means unless you get real with readers, readers won’t respond to you. You can still be professional and reveal your true feelings.

Emotions are either positive or negative. There are relatively few pure emotions:

  • Anger
  • Sadness
  • Fear
  • Enjoyment

These elemental feelings are universal. Specific facial expressions for fear, anger, sadness and enjoyments are recognized by people across diverse cultures.

Emotions can be complicated because they get combined, like primary colors. Jealousy may be a mix of anger and sadness. Guilt may be a combination of enjoyment and fear. Fascination may be an excited version of curious.

Authors Dan and Chip Heath, in Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, mention Read More→