Persuasion Economics 6: NeuroMarketing

95% of our decisions are made in an unconscious state, only 5% are made conscious.

This is week six of my Digital Psychology training by CXL and I’m learning about how to use Neuromarketing to drive action or purchasing decisions and dominate your market.

I would be sharing my take home from these learnings as well as tips from my experience as a Copywriter and Mindset Coach.

Each piece of content would contain my thoughts and/or learning from CXL’s teaching and a personal “How Can I Brand This” section, where I would share tips on how you can use the information for your brand success.

Enjoy…

The Neuromarketing Spectra

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: change, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire. — Aristotle.

When making a decision, our emotions come to play, reason tries to put it in check. So reason rides the car and emotion is sitting at the back seat. Emotion is mostly concerned with how he feels, while reason considers what is right. So when your emotions feel you should be eating some junks because it tastes nice, feels nice and yummy, reason considers the effect it would have on your health and body. While reason is behind the driver’s seat, emotion could sometimes hijack the car as you move on.

Behaviour ↔ Neuroscience: This involves EEG and FMRI technique in Neuroscience and tries to figure out what brains are specifically activating to produce behaviour. Behaviour scientists are mostly concerned with measuring how people behave in the real world.

General ↔ Specific: Where a specific task or information is applied to a particular type of marketing. General where several principles can be applied to a broad range of marketing.

Out thought processes are divided into two:

System One: Fast, intuitive, emotional, rule-based, inefficient.

System Two: Logical, analytical

Our brains don’t really like to be in system 2.

How Can I Brand This?

• Tie to underlying action you want your audience to take to one of the seven causes of action: change, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire.
• When making a marketing offer, appeal more to their emotions, and give them reasons to take that decision. For instance, instead of selling shoes, sell the comfort that can be derived from wearing those shoes.
• Understand that the overall human behaviour is triggered by certain psychological features. Knowing what triggers to pull to activate a certain behaviour could be the game changer in your marketing.
• Make your offers easy to assimilate or take, appealing to system 1, rather than allow your audience to go through the process of analysing your offer.

Five NeuroMarketing Hacks

1. Confirmation Bias

We select our information and data according to our opinion. We make decisions based on what we already think or believe to be true. Significance is not validity.

The ROI Pyramid

I have to buy it

Brand, Habit

I want to buy it

Behavioural Economics Neuromarketing

I am able to buy it

Usability, Accessibility, Visibility

Focus 10% of your marketing effort in making your website usable, accessible and visible for your audience to be able to buy it.

The other 90% should be focused on getting them to really want to buy your product and eventually having to buy it by building a brand culture.

To change motivation, you must answer the question of “Why should I buy here?”

Ask these 4 questions for prioritizing your hypothesis

• Will the change in variation be perceived?
• Is it relevant? Does it have any value?
• Is it differentiating me from my competitors?
• Does it follow psychological principles?

2. Mere Exposure Effect

Things that are perceived more frequently are rated more positively and trustworthy. Simply showing up consistently positions you as trustworthy to your audience.

3. Loss Aversion

Loss aversion refers to people’s tendency to strongly prefer avoiding losses to acquiring gains. They would rather prefer not to lose out on something. For instance, a marketing offer that states “Offer last for 2 days only” could compel more people to jump in on your offer.

4. Emotional Resonance

Things that are emotionally relevant are the basis for any persuasion technique.

Goals + Ability + Culture = Growth System

5. Bandwagon Effect

The bandwagon effect is the tendency to do or believe things because many other people do or believe the same. Using facts/statistics that other people are getting in makes people believe it’s worth the hype and want to get in as well.

Hype — Disillusionment — Enlightenment — Productivity.

How Can I Brand This?

• How does your product or offer confirm your audience’s already existing bias?
• When creating tests or hypothesis, always ensure you are answering the question of relevance to the audience and how it stands you out from your competitors.
• How often do you show up? Only when you have a product to offer or as consistently as possible? Show up even when you have no product for sale or even when the audience is not ready to buy. When they are, you will be the first on their mind to contact.
• How scarce or available is your product or offer? Include FOMO (fear of missing out) in your product offering so they could take immediate action.
• Emotion-based selling is an important part of marketing. Sell to people’s emotions.
• How many other people use your product or offer? The more the hype, the more action your target audience will be willing to take in favour of you.

That’s it on this week’s learning on Persuasion Economics. These are my personal take home from the learning sessions at CXL on Digital Psychology and Persuasion. I hope you got value or learnt something new. If you did, please leave a comment and let me know what stood out for you.

A huge thank you to CXL for the learning opportunity. You can check out their website if you want to learn how to take your Digital Marketing game to the next level. There are several digital courses that can help you become badass at marketing.