In the old days, as in a few decades ago when I began my career, marketing was all about branding and advertising. He who had the prettiest logo and the biggest bankroll for TV ads and billboards won the race. Marketing was about looking as beautiful as the Mona Lisa and getting as many eyeballs on your work as possible. Then along came Peppers and Rogers in 1993 with their groundbreaking work, The One To One Future, with the premise that we were actually all unique human beings with our own tastes and desires and that as computing power was becoming cheaper and more available, we should all segment our databases into small groups and target our communications based on what people actually wanted to hear, especially the people most likely to buy from you. This eureka moment, while seemingly obvious now, was actually a pretty big deal at the time and I focused the next several years of my marketing career on CRM consulting by helping large corporations figure out how to define and target these tiny segments through decision analytics and predictive behavioral models. Marketing, meet science. CRM also led each marketer down the path of test and learn, which formed the basis for the A/B testing we use today to test responses to particular marketing campaign creatives such as Adwords and email subject lines.
A couple of years later, in 1995, Yahoo launched and information began to slowly become more available. Then in 1998 Google hit the scene and changed everything. Although launching with more academic intentions, Google quickly recognized its economic potential and in 2000 announced Google Adwords. As a marketer, the shift toward science had hit its next phase of evolution. To throw some more science into the marketing mix, in 2007, researchers began to investigate the application of functional MRI technology to market research. Marketers have learned over the years that people can’t always tell you what they want. As Steve Jobs was famous for saying, if Apple had asked people what they wanted they would not have come up with the iPhone. Even Henry Ford, an early marketer, was quoted as saying that if he had asked people want they wanted they would have said a faster horse. But with the fMRI, we can’t hide our secret thoughts…or at least the part of the brain we’re engaging. When hooked up to the machine and being shown images of ads, for example, researchers can see the part of the brain that lights up in response to the stimulus. Neuromarketing techniques include tracking eye movements to see what we pay attention to, facial emotion coding to test our reactions, biometrics such as heart rate, and neural measurements using an EEG and fMRI. So if you show me an image of a shiny red Ferrari and my eyes get wider and zoom over to see it, my heart beats faster, and the pleasure center in my brain lights up, you can pretty much tell that I would like one. Unfortunately, science cannot yet tell the marketer whether or not I can afford to buy one with these methods alone.
But here are some interesting applications of the world of neuromarketing that you can apply to help you sell more stuff. This will be part one of a multi-part series since I only have time to scratch the surface today so we’ll start with how to make a good first impression online.
First, we know that when someone looks at a website, their eyes follow a Z pattern before they leave that above the fold section of your home page. During those 3 seconds, they’re checking your tagline, imagery, and copy for a very clear answer to what you do, and if you can solve their problem. Seems like a simple question but you wouldn’t believe how many websites don’t actually tell you that. The what you do part should be easy, but to show them you can solve THEIR problem (remember this is all about them, not about you), you need to understand what makes them tick. That’s the psychology part. Take some time to really understand your target audience, how they buy and why they buy, and do a little check on your homepage later to see if you’re answering those two questions clearly without scrolling.
Something else that neuromarketing has taught us is that you need to get emotional. Well not you personally, but you need to trigger an emotion in your audience. Otherwise, we don’t even notice what you’re saying. In fact, in a Hubspot study, out of 1400 successful advertising campaigns, those with emotional content performed twice as well as those with only rational content. So make your audience feel happy, sad, even angry or fearful, and you’ll grab their attention to listen to your message.
And a third thing that neuromarketing has taught us is that if you fall into the trap of sounding like an expert when you explain what you do, you’re doomed. Figure out a way to explain what you do as a story. A quick one mind you but a story nonetheless. Here’s my example, “we help small businesses to get found, by treating marketing as both an art and a science.” In one sentence I have told you what I do, the benefit you’ll receive if you work with me, and what makes me different. But I have also hopefully left you just a little curious to want to learn more about how that art and science thing works.
So your homework is to go back and reflect on what you’re using as your current tagline. Don’t be afraid to change it up every once in a while if it doesn’t reflect how you have evolved as a company. But see if in one quick sentence you can express the bottom line benefit of what you do, the benefit your audience will receive from working with you, and what makes you different. Oh and don’t be surprised if it takes you hours on end to refine the perfect tagline. As the old saying goes, Rome wasn’t built in a day!