This weeks’ topic was Applied Neuromarketing led by André Morys. We’re going deeper into neuromarketing but with the overarching objective to understand our customer’s brains so we can make more money.
When you understand someone better say a best friend, just by knowing them better you know their likes and dislikes, what’s important to them and goals or aspirations. So all this valuable information you’ve acquired over the years means you know what topics they love talking about with passionate enthusiasm or even what type of gift they would love.
But you ask you spent years understanding one person how can you possibly understand all of your different customers? Well through applied neuromarketing there are:
- Universal brain fundamentals
- Ways to control attention
- Emotional resonance
- 50 milliseconds
- Appling everything in real life.
1. Brain fundamentals
Humans love instant gratification and something in the brain triggers our reward system its called the “Nucleus Accumbens”. Think of the last time you logged into Facebook immediately went to check your notifications. Facebook is leveraging the instant gratification using the notifications and the Number
2. Ways to control attention
If you learn to control attention you can change behaviour. You need to give your customers a great experience to grow. And what should that experience be? Great, cool, fancy? No RELEVANT to them! If your website content e.g. images, copy and layout are all relevant to them by sharing their values and what important to them is important to you.
And it needs to be emotionally resonant. How can we expand our user personas so they can portray emotionally relevant messages? André Morys introduced the limbic map to help guide you through with 3 categories (simulant, dominance and balance).
One really important lesson for me this week was “Why communication fails” there’s a reason behind why our messaging fails to hit the mark.
A human brain is a guessing machine and it will guess if it’s unsure of meaning based on previous experience. So a customer could perceive your business as dated and old just because of the old logo you use. This not something you intended to communicate but it what the customer perceived about your business.
But all is not lost once you are aware of this you can take steps. These are the 7 principles of attention:
1) contrast 2) space 3) people/faces 4) movement 5) breaking rules 6) directional cues 7) person’s name/face
The 7 principles of attention with examples below:
- Contrast: if there no place for the eye to come to rest e.g. super busy and cluttered website then you can’t control attention. Contrast shows us what’s important and what’s not.
- Space: this is the same as contrast above but just using space to separate objects or to show what’s important.
- People/faces: The first thing users on your website will do is check the faces on display. Why does this happen? Back in primal times, they had to check for enemies and if the face presented was friendly or not.
- Movement: our eyes focus on things that move, they seem more important e.g. enemy moving closer so need to quickly check whats moving first.
- Breaking rules: In a row of objects, if one is different, people look there. e.g. all the same white runners and then the red Converse break the rules of all-white and immediately standing out and grabbing attention.
- Directional cues: e.g. arrows to move users down the landing page. It may seem obviously simple but it’s so effective as customers brains process they site they subconsciously see the arrows and immediately take action scrolling down or looking down.
- Person name/face: e.g. the Linkedin ad that shows your face with a company logo to see if you’d be interested in working for them or following their page. We just can’t help looking at our own face we’re drawn to it “Why is my face showing here?”
You can use one or a combination of all of them to direct customer attention to where you want.
3. Emotional Resonance
You can use emotional resonance by evoking emotion from users on your website via images copywriting, layout etc. When you get your customers to feel deeply, they become more interested in what you’re selling, more loyal to your brand, and more likely to buy from you. It’s an important part of content marketing.
But resonance is very fragile and needs perfect timing.
Using Indicators > Core values > emotional focussed type
Using Indicators > Core values > emotional focussed type
4. 50 Milliseconds
André Morys was careful o stress that you only have 50 milliseconds in that short amount of time, the user has already made their impression on your website. So will it be a good one of bad one?
You can do your own quick and dirty test for your website show them the home page briefly on screen for 50 milliseconds or using a printed page and show it to them for 50 milliseconds.
Ask them what words come to mind?
If they are not the words you’d expect e.g. busy, cluttered whereas you want premium & classy you’re going need to adjust your website until the words people start saying are closer to what you want to communicate. E.g. to unclutter a website use space and contrast as above to emphasis your top seller or what’s the most important message people need to know.
The more a user has to “figure out” what your site is all about the less emotionally invested they will be.
“Cognitive load is reducing emotional activity” – André Morys
So less clutter + order and harmony = cognitive ease (which leads to trust).
5. Implementing Learnings
Disrupt or die. Harsh but business growth is based on great customer experience and with website getting faster and more personalised etc. you need to keep up.
3 KPIs that help define custoerm success
- Agility: the number of experiments per year (n)
- Success rate: out of all the changes you made what was the success (%)
- Cumulative uplift: how big was the business impact ($)
“Always prioritise high impact over low effort”
There you have it the 5 aspects of applied neuromarketing to help you understand your customer better in order to sell successfully to them.
The applied neuromarketing topic was a milestone section to study and even come with certification “Applied Neuromarketing” from CXL , CXL is an accredited study partner with LinkedIn too so you can proudly display any achievement to your peers showing new level of experience.
Photo by Tyler Nix on Unsplash
