Generates more sales and get the unfair advantage on your competitors and customers
In Part 1 I walked you through the changes in marketing and customer behaviours.
This hopefully has provided you with some context on how we now search the internet and how human behaviour has changed, providing you with a solid foundation to apply what I am going to share with you today in generating leads.
In this article we are going to be taking a look at Conversation Rates Optimised, Conscious and Sub Conscious brain Activity and how having an understanding of this can be used to take sets of eyes to actual customers.
What is Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO)?
This is where you take a systematic approach to increase the percentage of visitors to opt into something you are offering, as a sign up for a newsletter or to download the latest report.
The BIG mistake most people make when marketing is focusing on getting more visitors to a page instead of focusing on getting higher conversions from the ones you already have.
As an example, let’s say you are running an advert from Facebook to your landing page and wanting to generates more sales.
You are getting 100 visitors and 10 of those convert, this means you have a 10% conversion rate. The traditional thinking is “ok we need to send more visitors to that page, and we will get more conversions and generates more sales”.
Although this may be true to some extent, it is a flawed theory and also one of the fastest ways to burn through your marketing budget. Why spend money in generating leads when you have leads that just need to be nurtured further?
This is the main way things are done currently because it’s what is being taught in the “Marketing Playbook”. However, smart marketers know and rarely share CRO techniques.
Why is this important?
By paying attention and applying these principles to your marketing efforts you will drastically reduce spend per client acquisition and generates more sales all at the same time!
I think we can all agree with higher net profits for less spend and less work is a good thing.
It’s important to understand that to get higher conversions and persuade users to do want we want them to do we need to understand the human decision-making process.
Behavioural Economics and how it applies to your marketing
Behavioural science and behavioural economics provide you with in-depth insight into the forces that shape emotions, context, past experiences and how social influence drives decision making in product and service purchasing choices.
Neuroscience in the last couple of years has been making great advances in understanding how our brains function and respond.
You may think we are all rational and independent thinking people however in most cases this is not true.
Understanding that the human race has a mentality of “safety in numbers” or also known as “Herd Behaviour” where we will buy what others have purchased or follow in other people’s footsteps.
This is why using phrases like:
• As seen on TV….
• You are joining over 1000’s of others…
• Endorsed by….
• ‘X’ number of downloads to date
• Showing a large number of testimonials from users
These all create positive chemical releases in the brain signalling that it’s on the right path and you are safe.
This triggers an emotional response which leads to a quick decision when no strong emotions are present, we are likely not to make a decision at all.
Triggering the right emotions as we want them can be a little tricky as the brain is quite complex. However, the core fundamentals are either keeping us safe or building strong social ties.
Your brain is hard-wired to keep you safe, which is why when you have moving parts on the screen we are focusing on these moving objects as previously it could have signalled danger.
Whatever the emotion is we cannot stop ourselves from wanting to achieve this goal. It is in fact what’s kept us alive on this earth for many 1000’s of years.
Why is marketing normally so Ineffective?
Most people only get taught to focus on one area of the brain and target the conscious which is your “rational”.
However, this has a major flaw. Research shows we make over 40,000 decisions per day with nearly all of them occurring in the subconscious parts of the brain.
I often get asked when presenting this topic “what percentage of purchasing decisions are made with the Conscious and Sub Conscious?”.
My answer is always the same…95% of all purchasing decisions are made using emotional trigger (Sub-Conscious Factors) and we use the Conscious sectors of the brain (rational) to justify what we have just purchased.
Now targeting the subconscious area of the brain is going to require some planning. You need to think about underlying motivations that often are not expressed, but are key drivers of human behaviour.
You need to consider how people are wanting to feel about actions they take when buying brands.
Recent research is showing that even if people are not aware of the implicit motivations to the goal and its implanted into the subconscious, that it’s more likely you will still be top of mind in the person’s brain.
What are the implicit motivations?
The research into these is still emerging. However, a marketing consultancy agency has produced a very good chart detailing implicit motivations by combining insights from several psychological and neuroscience studies.
The model has eight core implicit motivations which each of those is then broken down into four individual categories.
The Core Eight are:
1. Certainty
2. Individuality
3. Belonging
4. Recognition
5. Physiology
6. Sexuality
7. Self-Development
8. Power
The chart above is the intellectual property of Beyond Reason.
This model gives you a level of detail that removes any ambiguity to how you should construct your marketing messages and how your generates more sales.
You now have a road map on how to create your message to the subconscious mind where 95% of the decisions are made.
Take a good detailed look at how you have set up your marketing funnels and messages to guide your visitor and turn them into a buyer.
Overlay the above chart and understanding of behavioural economics to your business today and see the positive difference it makes.
In part 3 of this article, I explain the core 8 implicit motivations and how you can apply them into your marketing methods.