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…
There aren’t many conferences that I’d fly 5700 miles to get to, but the 5th International Customer Media Congress looks as if it’s going to be another smash hit. I’ve been invited to speak, by uber-publishing-content-marketing icon, Sak van den Boom.
Somewhow in my family it meant you were in real trouble when you were “in dutch…”
Met wat voor tekst scoor je nu het beste op het web. Internetguru Patsi Krakoff uit Mexico blogt dagelijks en heeft wereldwijd veel volgers. Ze komt speciaal voor het jubleumcongres naar Haarlem om haar kennis te delen. 11 topvrouwen in marketing en communicatie op het netwerkcongres over customer media in de Philharmonie in Haarlem. Verzeker jezelf van een plaats. Schrijf nu in.
I don’t suppose I’ll see you there, but consider yourself invited. Here’s the line-up: 11 top notch experts in creating content that engages the hearts and minds of customers through custom publishing. Who says print is dying? Read More→
Here’s how to bust out of blog oblivion: Blogging 101: 6 weeks to Confident Blogging with the Queen of WordPress, Suzanne Bird-Harris.
The latest survey of small biz professionals revealed most people struggle with “Time:” 72% say they don’t have enough time to update their blog.
But we often say that, when in fact the reason we don’t have time is because we’re not sure what exactly what we’re supposed to be doing, or how to do it.
Once you master a skill, you can get it done quickly. And, if you’re successful at it, you want to do it again and again.
Here’s what the survey reveals:
No wonder people run out of time. If you sit down to blog and have to figure out these two important things (#2 and #3), well, there goes your day!
To remedy this, Suzanne and I are going to teach the solutions to #1 and #2: blog writing and SEO workshop in January 2011.
In the meantime, get prepared by mastering the basics. If you’re struggling with your WordPress blog, don’t miss Suzanne’s Blogging101 workshop: 6 Weeks to Confident Blogging. (Don’t miss the early bird discount – you must sign up by Friday, Nov. 5, 2010 to save $50.)
You can read more about the details of the 6 week workshop on Suzanne’s Blogging101 web page here.
Here’s what one of her clients said about her: Read More→
What are the steps you need to follow to ensure each blog post is optimized for search engines as well as for your readers’ interests? Oh my… there are a lot. But to keep me out of overwhelm, I wrote them down, and put them into a flow chart.
This is good for days when I’m brain dead and likely to forget something important. But it’s also a good chart for anyone working with a V.A. or assistant who needs to take over some of the tasks for you.
I recently designed and recorded a presentation for the Content Marketing Institute on everything that goes into creating and publishing a quality blog post. It’s published on a neat tool called Brain Shark: you make a power point presentation, then record the notes over the phone. How neat is that?
I’d like to share it with you here. Tell me what you think:
I realized after I watched this that my diagrams are way too small on this screen. So I’ve decided to republish them below, larger.
And here is the flow chart of all the steps I use for posting on my blog: Read More→
As content marketers, if you are writing content designed to persuade and influence, you need to know what makes people tick.
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.
These four fundamental drives motivate all human beings. Some are stronger drives than others, but we all have all four operating in the background of our lives.
Neuroscientists and anthropologists know that our brains haven’t changed much over the last 100,000 years. We are still driven by four key motivators. Everything the brain does is strongly motivated by these four drives:
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→
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.
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→
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→
