persuasion triggers | Writing On The Web by Patsi Krakoff, The Blog Squad

Writing On The Web by Patsi Krakoff, The Blog Squad

Content Marketing Strategies for Smart Professionals

Archive for persuasion triggers

Social Proof and LinkedIn:
‘Tis Better to Give, than Receive…

By Patsi Krakoff

Saturday, August 22nd, 2015

As I’ve shared in previous posts, the value of social proof — referrals, recommendations , and client testimonials — cannot be underestimated.

Similar to how frequent, quality content enhances your website pages, social proof enhances your professional credibility. When readers learn from the comments from other people about your business, they become your most persuasive sales people. Comments from others are such strong persuasion triggers, you shouldn’t limit them to just a page, but have them scattered throughout your web pages, blog, and social media profiles, such as LinkedIn.

With over 350 million members, and over 1 million members publishing blog posts on LinkedIn, you’re likely to encounter a few colleagues you know. So make sure you take the time to recommend and endorse them. Your recommendation or endorsement on LinkedIn is social proof for a other people; it signals that the person is qualified and recognized as a valued colleague. Read More→

Categories : Attracting Clients, Content Marketing, How to...Tips, Online Persuasion, Social Media Stuff

Tags : Attracting Clients, converting readers to clients, LinkedIn, persuasion triggers, social proof

How to Make Social Proof Work for You

By Patsi Krakoff

Wednesday, July 8th, 2015

When writing on the web about your services or products, I can’t emphasize enough the importance of testimonials and client reviews. Social proof is such a strong persuasion trigger you shouldn’t limit these comments to just a page, but have them scattered throughout your web and blog pages.

Know what works best for your content marketing strategies, especially when creating a website or blog, introducing yourself, a new product, or special promotion.

In my previous post, Social Proof: Why It’s So Important, I reported on research that showed travel destinations with client recommendations and photos of the reviewer were selected 20 percent more than destinations with no review.

But not all recommendations (and ratings) will yield the same results. According to Dr. Susan Weinschenk, in her book Neuro Web Design: What Makes Them Click: Read More→

Categories : Attracting Clients, How to...Tips, Writing for the Web

Tags : Attracting Clients, persuasion, persuasion triggers, social proof, stories, storytelling

Online Persuasion: Seeing Through the Eyes of Customers

By Patsi Krakoff

Wednesday, March 21st, 2012

There’s an important shift in content marketing tactics that affects professionals who want to get found, get known and get clients online. And that shift means a different mindset.

Not too long ago I came across a great blog post. There was a picture of a pair of glasses lying on a bench with this caption: Don’t you wish you could see through your customers’ glasses?

What if you could live in their shoes for a day? Or, track their brains as they go online to your website? What makes them click? What makes them take action?

Here’s where you should start thinking a little differently when writing content for the Web:

Smart content marketers are using persuasion tactics that appeal to emotions rather than reasons. They know that emotions not only guide our decisions and actions, they determine whether or not we buy. Read More→

Categories : Attracting Clients, How to...Tips, Online Marketing, Online Persuasion

Tags : content marketing with blogs, neuromarketing, persuasion, persuasion triggers

The Ladder of Emotional Values: Pleasure Reigns

By Patsi Krakoff

Tuesday, February 14th, 2012

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→

Categories : Attracting Clients, Brain Based Content Marketing, Online Persuasion, Writing for the Web, Writing Great Blog Content

Tags : brain science, converting readers to clients, neuromarketing, persuasion triggers

Basic Human Motivation: 4 Ways to Engage Readers

By Patsi Krakoff

Tuesday, November 22nd, 2011

If you are writing content designed to persuade and influence, you need to know what makes people tick. (photo courtesy of digitalart/FreeDigitalPhotos.net)

There are universal drives that are common in all human beings, across cultures, across the globe. When you create content that appeals to either of these four basic drives, you can’t help but engage the hearts and minds of readers on a profound level.

We can learn a lot from evolutionary studies. Our brains haven’t changed much, nor have our fundamental motivations.

I suggest a frame work for understanding basic human motivations: the Four Drive Theory, presented by Professors Paul R. Lawrence and Nitin Noria in their 2001 book Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Our Choices.

There are many theories about what motivates behaviors, but I like this Four Drive theory because it is based on studies of primitive man, primitive societies, and the evolution of brain functioning over the last 100,000 years.

It doesn’t matter if you view humans as being motivated according to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, or Freud’s Pleasure/Pain framework, or any other drive theory. What matters for marketing is that you understand basic human drives, and what drives peoples’ behaviors at their most fundamental sources.

This theory doesn’t exclude other theories, but as a framework for marketing, I think it works quite well. Keeping these four things in mind, you can create more effective marketing that reaches the subconscious brains of your consumers. Read More→

Categories : Brain Based Content Marketing, Content Marketing, On Writing Better, Online Persuasion, Writing Great Blog Content

Tags : brain science, Content Marketing, Online Marketing, persuasion triggers, Writing for the Web

Content Marketing that Speaks to the Old Brain

By Patsi Krakoff

Friday, November 18th, 2011

You get better results with your content marketing when you speak to the “old brain,” the one that’s also known as the primitive brain or the survival brain. Knowing how the brain works will help you write better as well as help you with presentations to influence others.

There are a few principles to remember, and here’s a great story that makes this come alive… (photo courtesy Mantas Ruzveltas /FreeDigitalPhotos.net)

A Marketing Moment with a Homeless Man…

I want to share an excerpt of a story by Patrick Renvoisé, from his book Neuromarketing: Understanding the Buy Buttons in Customers’ Brain. He tells the story of how he earned the equivalent of a $960/hour consulting fee from a homeless man…

One evening as I was entering a restaurant in San Francisco, a homeless person stopped me. His sign read, “Homeless. Please HELP.”

The man showed all the signs of distress with sad empty eyes. He looked me directly in the eyes, and I was compelled to hand over a few bucks. However, something led me to go further with this particular man.

Like many of my clients who try to get responses from marketing, his message was weak, and certainly not unique. So I gave him $2 on condition he let me change the message on his sign for at least 2 hours.

The man agreed, and I wrote a different message on the back of his sign. Later, we met up again.

He insisted on giving me $10, because he had made over $60 while I was having dinner. His usual take averaged $2-$10 an hour.

As my entire interaction had lasted only 30 seconds, this eight dollar profit translated into a $960/hour consulting fee, not bad.

All I did was apply what I know about the brain and marketing messages that get people to act.

Here’s what his new cardboard sign said: Read More→

Categories : Brain Based Content Marketing, Online Marketing, Online Persuasion, Writing Great Blog Content

Tags : Content Marketing, neuromarketing, persuasion, persuasion triggers, Writing for the Web

The Homer Simpson Guide to Neuromarketing

By Patsi Krakoff

Friday, November 11th, 2011

Content marketing experts and the people who write marketing messages ought to 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 lower brains. 95% of our decision making and buying and Web actions are heavily influenced by unconscious processing.

Approximately 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 this 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.

Almost 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. Read More→

Categories : Brain Based Content Marketing, Content Marketing, On Writing Better, Online Persuasion

Tags : Content Marketing, neuromarketing, persuasion, persuasion triggers, Writing for the Web

Neuromarketing Research: 3 Keys that Trigger a Buying Decision

By Patsi Krakoff

Friday, November 4th, 2011

The study of the buying decision process, or neuromarketing, has had a tremendous impact on content marketing.

More brands are being studied in laboratories around the world as 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.

Neuromarketing research studies have shown that these three factors determine whether or not a consumer is inclined to make a buying decision:

The degree of ATTENTION
Whether or not there is emotional ENGAGEMENT
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) Read More→

Categories : Brain Based Content Marketing, Online Marketing, Online Persuasion

Tags : content marketing with blogs, neuromarketing, Online Marketing, persuasion, persuasion triggers

Archive for persuasion triggers

Online Persuasion: Seeing Through the Eyes of Customers

The Ladder of Emotional Values: Pleasure Reigns

Basic Human Motivation: 4 Ways to Engage Readers

Content Marketing that Speaks to the Old Brain

The Homer Simpson Guide to Neuromarketing

Neuromarketing Research: 3 Keys that Trigger a Buying Decision

Content for Coaches and Consultants

Serenity Virtual Assistant Services

Social Buzz Club