How to use Neuroscience in marketing AKA No be Juju be that? A CXL review
On friday 15th of October 2021, A twitter space had 16,000 Nigerians. What were they listening to?
- A moaning competition
The day is a thursday and the time is 6:45pm. Everyone is going about their normal bants and cruise on twitter when a lady who sells sex toys drops a tweet that causes a bit of commotion and has people surprised, curious, angry or excited. It’s an online event she wants to host on twitter spaces by 9pm on Friday.
The event? A moaning competition. Yup! You read right, a moaning competition, winner takes home a 15k sex toy. This gets people even more angry and outraged, “ordinary 15K sex toy to moan in public?” they complain, and of course there are people (mostly men) who wax strong with purity culture and complain about how our generation is useless. God is watching, women no longer feel shame, young people don’t have focus, the country is in shambles and look what you’re doing” Really, just a lot of complaints. Still, there are people who are excited and even set reminders for the event.
Friday comes and there’s a lot of drama, people trickle in slowly, the host experiences a couple of technical issues. At this time, there are about 8000 people in the space, she moves it to clubhouse but that doesn’t work either. All of this back and forth takes about another hour to set up, people begin to complain about how she’s wasting their time but they stay patient until a friend of hers hosts the space for her then it starts.
I won’t get into the details of the space as that’s not what we’re here for but at some point, there were about 16,000 people in it, that’s 16,000 twitter users gathered together for one event, and as at 9pm when the event was about to start, the host had about 16,000 followers. When it ended, she was at 28,000 followers, that’s almost double. In just a few hours.
Marketing twitter goes into full analysis mode (they wouldn’t be marketers if they didn’t), they’re surprised a sex toy vendor achieves their 6 months KPI in one day. One twitter user says “sex sells” then goes on to advice that people build products around sex.
Before I started with the CXL digital persuasion course, I really would have thought this was also something magical or rare but it isn’t. Once I saw what was happening, it occurred to me that what happened was simply their curiosity being triggered.
It’s true that sex sells, but I think just about anything sells as much as sex if you know how to trigger your prospects and apply neuromarketing tactics into every part of your product/business.
Because that’s all that happened. I don’t see any sporadic growth as juju or magic. Infact, what happened that day was that everyone’s middle brain was triggered enough to make the old brain decide that that space was going to be useful for them. Remember what I said last week about people always looking out for themselves and making decisions that benefit them? That’s exactly what happens.
For every decision we make, our brain has thought it out, weighed the pros and cons, is it only a great use of brain triggering. Ultimately, the emotion everyone was experiencing was intrigue and that’s a very powerful emotion. When a person’s brain is intrigued, it usually has questions and wants to know why or what.
All of this leads to excitement or should I say thirst to kill that curiosity and curiosity doesn’t go until to feed it. Everyone’s brain wanted to know what “fake moaning sounds like?’’ they also wanted to know if it was real, if people were going to actually show up and moan, how were they going to do it? What would they sound like? Would it be believable enough? This were the questions that took 16k people to a twitter space.
So basically, Neuromarketing is simple understanding how to use asnd trigger the brain in marketing.
There really are no limit to the use cases of neuromarking. As long as you’re building a product, a landing page, writing a sales copy, content and social media marketing, as long as you apply them rightly and trigger the right stimuli where approcpriate, you’ll get a sense of what your prospects think, what they want and how they want to be sold to.
But what if you don’t sell sex then? How do you get those results using neuromarketing.
The first step is by understanding how to get build products that draws peoples attention. The human brain is constantly in a “what next” state, when users land on your website or copy, their eyes don’t always focus on the screen, instead, it skims and darts around looking for something, a phrase, an image, a video that’ll hold it’s attention. so unless your website and copy grabs users attention long enough, visitors will keep dropping off your site after a few minutes.
To fix this
- Use Visual cues;
graphics you use on your website, landing page or app which help guide or direct visitors and users to take the action you want them to. It can be a finger point to a button, an headshot looking directly at your most important copy. Visual cues are important in the early stage of design because they make your audience take action on your desired goal, it grabs their attention and goes “look at me, look at me”. So think about what you want your users to do, how you want them to interact with your site and how easy you want them to take said action and pick a visual cue that suits this and tie these goals while you design. Some elements that holds user attention on web are, bold words, underlined texts, words in colour, writing 8 instead of eight, words in caps, long works, quotation marks, words with trademarks.
2. Figure out the the amount of time and mental energy your website visitors or prospects will need to process and understand your website or copy; in neuromarketing, it’s called cognitive laod and while designing, your goal should be too reduce your prospects cognitive load or difficulty in understanding your offer or product. Because your website is your sales page, it should never leave users confused or with more questions, no matter how technical your product might be.
3. Always simplify processes and actions, break information down into small and simple steps. This is particularly important for a lot of business to business companies who sell softwares. Sometimes and convinced it’s a criteria for them, their websites are filled with tech jargon nobody needs and signing up takes days.
To stay ahead, simplify! A great use case for simplicity would be to use Schema; an object or idea that tells us what to expect when we encounter it in the future, if it’s a registration process, consider letting your prospect know in your sales copy how easy your registration process is, how many steps they might need to take to register. That way, they are making the decision with full knowledge of what’s next and they even trust you more.
3. Learn how to structure a solid value proposition: Your headline should be a hook that states the benefit of your offering in one sentence. Remember that the goal is to get their attention so unless you show them how their lifes will be different with your product, you won’t have their attention. Use your subheading to show what you offer, who it’s for and its usefulness using bullet points.
When you’ve designed for attention, the next step is to figure out how to persuade them that out of all the other people out there offering and prosimisng the same solution, yours would be more beneficial to them.
Notice I said “beneficial” “not best” because great persuasion copies don’t focus on why the offer is the best, but on why it’ll positively change the prospects life. That’s what the brain and in extention, people care about.
5. Use a persuasion slide to decide on what to include where to get the customers motivated enough
A great persuasion slide focuses on getting your prospects motivated by addressing their wants, needs and goals. It shows people how you can help and answers the question of why they’re reading your copy, their pain point using conscious motivators like your broduct benefits, features, discounts or gifts and non conscious motivators like trigerring their emotions, cognitive biases like Fear of missing out, bandwagon effect, repeating important things you want people to know and psychology.
This is where I end today’s piece but I will be writing more on neuromarketing next week because I’ve not learnt anything as mind blowing as all I’ve been learning in the CXL digital psychology program in a while.
