What are 3 ways to frustrated your reader’s brains? Last week, I presented a speech at the 5th International Customer Media Congress in Haarlem, The Netherlands. Besides sharing what neuromarketing is teaching us about the brain and marketing, there are tips here for most web-based content publications.
I hope you enjoy it and learn something. Let me know if you have questions…
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→
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:
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:
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→
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…
If you want to know more about how to write content that makes an impact on the brains of your readers, here are some interesting sites and books about the emerging field of neuromarketing.
There are new neuromarketing companies and books galore, and I believe most offer important clues for content marketers. Here are a few of my favorites:
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→
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…
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→
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:
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→
Through the magic of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), neuroscientists are able to look inside the brains of consumers while reading marketing messages.
Copywriters and content marketers have been telling us for years how important it is to address the “what’s in it for me” filter in consumers’ minds.
Really Big News: They’ve found this WIIFM center located in the old brain!
Thanks to advanced scientific formulas and algorithms, we can now market directly to the subconscious mind and get anybody to do what we want without even knowing it!
I’m just kidding you… If that were actually true, it’d be really scary. It’s not that easy, neither is neuroscience easily applied to content marketing. Every time I read about a new neuromarketing study, it seems they’re only confirming what copywriters and marketers knew all along.
But here’s some new information, which could improve your marketing messages. Although we can’t directly cause people to do something, we can use knowledge of the brain to improve our chances of influencing their buying decisions. We can write better content because we understand how consumers make decisions.
We know more about the subconscious functions than ever before. We know what kinds of messages reach the emotional brain and the old brain, even though consumers aren’t aware of their influence. More importantly, we now understand that much of our decision making goes on in the old brain, out of conscious awareness.
Neuromarketing and science can help improve your content writing so that it has more of an impact on people in your target audience.
I just love this site: SalesBrain, a neuromarketing company. Founded by Christophe Morin and Patrick Renvoise, authors of Neuromarketing: Understanding the Buy Button Inside Your Customers’ Brains. The company does sales training using neuroscience as it applies to what influences buying decisions.
I recommend you visit the site, as it is clear and easy to navigate to find great information about buying decisions. I found the page on 6 ways to stimulate the old brain especially illuminating.
Here’s an excerpt: Read More→
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:
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→
