Designing for sales: Neuromarketing tricks to apply as a web designer

A website isn’t just a website and it’s not just a place where people can read your “about us” or compare your pricing plans. It’s your sales page. It’s what makes/helps total strangers trust you enough with their money and with the ability to deliver on the solution to whatever problem they sought you out for in the first place. Think about it, out of all the countless websites promising prospects the same solution as yours, why did they choose you? What makes them trust you? What are you doing differently? Is it better pricing? Convincing website copies? relatable/emotional team or founder story? What is it and how do you design landing pages or websites your users actually need and are compelled to buy from?

To connect your business model to the brain, you need to understand how it works.

The brain has a lot of power and influence when it comes to our decisions and actions. It’s only natural that you understand how to make it work for the growth of your business. There are three key parts of the brain that’s relevant for marketing.

The old brain; which is directly connected to our body functions.

The middle brain/system one; responsible for automatic and reflex behaviours like sneezing.

The new brain/system two or limbic system which controls our emotions, produces endorphins, dopamines and also controls negative emotions.

What separates us from other species is that we’ve the new brain which is the cerebral cortex. This part of the brain allows us to think, process information, calculate, build rockets and do complex tasks.

Now the interesting part is that with system one, there’s almost no effort, everything happens automatically and we don’t have to think or put in extra effort but on system two, then our brain has to put in the work, dissect information, weight it’s pros and cons, and figure out how to build rockets using scientific formulas.

Naturally, system two needs a lot of energy to get things done (which it doesn’t like to do) so unless you make it a lot more easy for system two to take action or understand what it’s your product is about, it’ll automatically leave the decision making to system one without doing any thinking.

This is why it’s important you learn to apply implicit codes in your marketing and web design process. With implicit codes, you pander to your prospects’ desires and values in respect to your product, so it’s not you listing your product features or what not. Rather, it’s showing them what the product does to them, who are they when they use it? Are they just ordinary people or do they become superman?

One thing you can do while trying to optimise your site would be to show your website to people who’ve never seen it for 5 seconds and ask them to tell you the first few words that come to mind or that they associate with your site.

Then, you can understand how to control their attention on your site long enough that they make decisions. To do this, everything needs to be relevant. Relevance in this case is more than just great customer service, logo or even design. It’s a combination of great content, relevant value proposition using implicit codes and is emotionally relevant to users because users don’t differentiate your content or design or picture except they’re marketers, they see everything at once so you must try as much as you can to make every aspect of your website communicate the implicit value of your customers, they must be able to perceive, on landing that your website has products that can change their lives.

One important tool for emotional relevance mentioned in the CXL institute applied neuromarketing class is the Limbic map, it’s basically a collection of values or motivators spread in ways which are important for human behaviours with core parts like dominance which is triggered with words like power, prestige, fame, class. balance; triggered with words like home, safety, family and lastly, stimulants which is focused on trying new things words like fun, adventure, experience, newsness etc. understanding how to trigger implicit codes(people’s core values) with things like website colour, design, hero shot, font, even the little things. Understanding your customers and prospects’ implicit value helps you deliver your message in a language they understand, perceive and trust and leaves less room for miscommunication.

So ask yourself if you’re prioritizing test ideas?Will people perceive what I’m doing?Is it relevant, do I have enough traffic on that page?Am I using any cognitive biases?Make a score out of it, and calculate it together with the effort, you get the principle I’m sure. So basically this is the principle behind that, it means stimulus is perceived and is processed by an organism and leads to a reaction.SOR paradigm.O stands for organism which is the brain here,and basically psychologists call it reaction,for us as optimizers it may be R for ROI.

Next, you want to make sure your website resonates with your customers emotionally. When it comes to understanding how to make your site emotionally resonant, you want to know your customer persona in and out. CXL institute applied neuromarketing tutor Andre Morys says he finds the typical customer persona unhelpful in situations like this and I agree because in typical personas, we’ve the name, their interests, status, relationship, all of these are great, but they don’t particularly point to their implicit values? They only indicate possible values and behaviour but they don’t necessarily give us insight into what they truly value. So based on the different indicators on that personas, you can focus on one emotional value or motivation and apply it to your product and messaging and address motivation objections.

So basically, focus on these;

1. Eliminate conflicting values and focus on one value

2. Set a clear value type

3. Remove unneeded information

4. Deduce specific information about your product/service

And find out your key emotional drivers for your audience, use AB test to find out what’s important for your audience, optimize with using google ads to better understand how users relate to your copy and messaging.

Lastly, understand that you’ve very limited time (5 seconds) to grab attention and make your prospects feel like they’ve landed on the right page so your customers really perceive a lot from your website, even for ones you’re not aware of and so you must focus on all aspects of your website and deliver the perception you need them to have of your site. This ensures that you’re communicating what your in clear terms, what you want your customers to know about your business and they’re not thinking of it as something else.