11 Marketing Psychology Tips to Tap Into Buyers’ Minds

Perhaps unsurprisingly, psychology has emerged as one of the most useful tools used by marketers. It gives us a glimpse into workings of the human mind, along with some useful techniques for subtly influencing it. Below are 11 useful tips that you can use to improve your customer engagement and your conversion rate.

1. Engage the Senses

Buying anything online can be a tricky proposition; people don’t necessarily have a chance to really see or touch the product before they commit to buying it. As a result, you’ll want to help your customers feel as though they know the product intimately. This can include high-quality product shots or testimonials from other customers. In other words: make them feel as though they already own it.

2. Use Emotion to Your Advantage

Humans are emotional creatures, and our range of feelings can be easily played to. The most effective marketing techniques have nothing to do with spewing product specs or shouting about how low prices are; instead, they’ve become about telling a story, about making the audience feel a deep and personal connection with the brands they interact with.

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3. Assuage Suspicions

Most of us are naturally suspicious; after all, the Internet is full of people who are only too willing to take advantage of overly trusting people. To that end, guiding customers along toward conversion involves no small amount of reassurance. Try to anticipate potential doubts or suspicions, and then do your best to reassure your customers. There are many ways to do this, such as backing up your claims with authoritative sources and providing reviews from existing customers.

4. Offer Exclusivity

There’s no getting around the fact that online retailers and “big box” brick-and-mortar stores can be both cheaper and more convenient than buying direct. The solution to that problem lies in exclusivity; offer something that they can’t get anywhere else, and you’ll tap into customers’ love of owning something uncommon.

5. Provide Flexibility

If there’s one thing online shoppers hate, it’s a lack of flexibility. This can include everything from the checkout process itself to shipping and payment options. Don’t force customers to register; allow them to check out as a guest if they wish. In addition, offer a variety of payment options to make sure that nobody is left out.

6. Offer Fewer Choices

This one might seem just a little bit strange, but it definitely plays to a well-established phenomenon in psychology. People tend to get overwhelmed when presented with more than one or two choices, which is why it makes sense to simplify your product offerings. By offering just a few very clear-cut choices to customers, you’re helping to ensure that they don’t lose their momentum in the face of an array of potentially confusing options.

7. Draw Comparisons

Customers want to know that you stand behind your product. One way to demonstrate that confidence is to compare your offerings to those of your competitors. Show them in black and white why your products stand out from the crowd.

8. Take Advantage of Crowd Mentality

The reason why social media marketing is so effective is because people love “belonging” – that is, they love being a part of emerging trends. If you can, find a way to tie social media into your product offerings; reveal just how many people have clicked that “Buy” button, or how many people in their networks have subscribed.

9. Explain the Benefits to Your Customers

Whether online or offline, impulse buying is an important thing to capitalize on, and tends to be fairly effective in the eCommerce world. That said, more expensive or involved purchases need to play the game of reciprocity. If you’re expecting your customers to commit to making a big decision, whether it’s parting with their money or simply giving up their personal information, they need to have a very clear idea about what’s in it for them. Don’t by shy about explaining, clearly and concisely, in a way that will provide a feeling of self worth, precisely what they’ll be getting out of the arrangement.

10. Don’t “Sell” – “Impress” Instead

People staple their wallets shut and it takes a crowbar to get them open. The crowbar is, in this sense, direct advertising and propaganda. Show people the same ad enough times (20+) and they might finally cave in, at least once. However, there are other less intrusive and arguably more commendable paths to get wallets open without even showing them a product. This is content marketing psychology working at its finest. For example:

This infographic showcases, as you would guess, the world’s fastest roads. It’s filled with beautiful visuals and insightful statistics. This is content marketing. But, at a more subtle level, there is a psychological process going on. We are engaging the brand by sharing the infographic on social media with our friends and peerswhich is a type of referral. We comment about it which is a type of rating. By creating referrals and ratings in a setting free of “get your wallets out folks!” we soften the staple and remove the need for crowbar marketing.

11. Stop Forcing the Issue

It’s only too easy to start thinking that you have control over somebody’s behavior. The truth is that all we can do is attempt to influence, guide, and inform; when it comes to clicking the “Buy” or “Subscribe” button, only the customer can make that decision. Anything that attempts to push them more forcibly is only going to come across as off-putting or desperate. What you have to do is state your case clearly; what they do with that information is ultimately up to them.

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7 Reasons Why You Should Start Your Own Internet Business

Too many people view Internet business through an extremely narrow lens – either you’re pawning off your personal possessions on eBay or you’re trying to be Mark Zuckerberg with the next big Internet thing. The reality, of course, is that there are as many different ways to do business online as there are people making this lifestyle work for them.  For example, as an Internet business owner, you could:

• Sell your handmade arts and crafts on Etsy
• Run an informative site that generates revenue through advertisements
• Provide professional services to clients around the world
• Generate client leads for offline businesses
• Sell other peoples’ products and earn a commission for each referral

But the “how” of Internet business isn’t important – there are enough different Internet business models out there to suit any particular combination of strengths and weaknesses.  What really matters is the “why” – that is, why you should consider pursuing online business in the first place.

The following are just a few of the benefits of owning your own Internet enterprise to help encourage you to make the leap:

 

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Reason #1 – Find the ultimate job security

Ask a handful of people what they think about the idea of pursuing Internet business, and you should hear at least one person respond with, “It’s too risky!” I have to disagree. When you learn how to do business online, you’re actually training yourself to create ultimate job security. If you learn how to sell products online, chances are you’ll be able to repeat this process – even if your original idea doesn’t pan out.

The same goes for finding freelance service clients, sending traffic to ad-based sites and successfully re-launching every other Internet business model out there. Now, contrast the ability to generate income online over and over again with a steady day job held at a single employer. Considering how many companies go under these days, putting all your eggs in that single basket ultimately sounds much riskier to me than learning how to make money online!

Reason #2 – Work on projects you’re passionate about

As someone else’s employee, you aren’t working on the projects you’re passionate about – you’re completing tasks in order to increase somebody else’s bottom line. And while this arrangement works for some people, most chronic employees don’t know what they’re missing when they trade the passion of working for yourself on projects you care about for the “security” of the daily grind.

If you aren’t personally satisfied by your current day job, you owe it to yourself to at least investigate the potential fulfillment that comes from running your own online enterprise.

Reason #3 – Access a wider network of clients and buyers

If you already operate an offline business that either sells products or takes on freelance clients (for example, as a freelance writer, web designer, programmer or accountant), transitioning your business online will give you access to a much wider pool of clients and buyers. No longer are you competing against other agencies in your area for the same small network of customers – instead, as an Internet business owner, you’re free to think as big as you want. This could mean accessing buyers a few towns away from your own or even “going global” in order to expand your business’s reach dramatically.

Reason #4 – Cut your child care expenses

With childcare costs rising steadily and often topping thousands of dollars a month for the full-time care of infants and toddlers, you may find that running an Internet business allows you to both cut your costs substantially and spend more time with your children. For most dual-income families working today, that’s a pretty big win-win!

Reason #5 – Explore your interests

One of the greatest advantages of running your own Internet business is the flexibility this arrangement provides. When you work a day job, you’re tied in to a set schedule that in no way corresponds to the amount of work you have or the hours in which you’re most productive. Unless you have a very understanding boss, you aren’t able to drop everything for a two-hour hike when the weather’s nice or start your day at noon because you aren’t a morning person.

Running an online business gives you the flexibility to set your own working arrangements based on your particular needs. It allows you to travel more (as most Internet businesses can be operated from anywhere in the world), to work when you’re most productive and to pursue the hobbies and interests you care about alongside your business pursuits.

Reason #6 – Enjoy low startup costs

If you’ve always had an entrepreneurial bent, know that business owners who choose to launch their ventures online enjoy substantially lower startup costs than those in the real world. Think about it – the “real world” business owner must pay for commercial space, physical inventory, printed stationery and more.

As an Internet business owner, your only real expenses will be a domain name and hosting account. Even if you do decide to purchase inventory outright or invest in tools that will make running your Internet business easier, your overall investment will still be much less expensive than maintaining a physical presence offline.

Reason #7 – Increase your earning potential

If you’re employed in a full-time day job, your earning power is limited by your field and your experience. If you work as a teacher, for instance, you can accrue all the experience and certifications you want – you’re still never going to hit the same million dollar salaries that investment bankers or lawyers will. But with online business, the sky’s the limit.

If you sell one product online, you can train yourself to sell fifty. If you decide to expand your service offerings significantly, you can always take on additional employees to help manage the workload. Instead of negotiating a pithy 3% raise with your boss, you’re essentially creating this increase (and much, much more) for yourself – a truly empowering experience that makes all the risk and uncertainty of Internet business worth it.

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8 Strategies For B2B Marketing

Here we are in the back half of the year. Chances are, you’re thinking about how to guide your team toward hitting your numbers for 2012. Marketing-generated revenue is on the line, and the task of planning next year’s marketing budget is looming. The good news is, now is a great time to get your team thinking about both short-term goals and long-term activity. Here are eight concepts to focus them on.

Short-Term Winning Strategies

1. Play The Volume Game: Do your team members know exactly what they need to do to hit your marketing team goals? High-performing marketing teams understand the volume of marketing activity and precise actions they require to hit their targets. In fact, the best marketing cultures rally around these numbers, which are closely tracked and understood throughout the marketing department.

It is not difficult to run numbers through a marketing funnel tool. Many calculators exist for doing so, or your team can create its own using conversions at all stages (either your internal conversion rates or published averages). As a result, your team will be able to predict how much activity is needed in order to hit revenue numbers and plan its activities, such as number of programs, contact data purchases, and programs spend. Beyond running the numbers for the year and quarter, consider requiring team members to run the funnel numbers prior to the launch of each individual program. You’ll want to set the precedent that these figures will become the success measures for programs and individual performance of marketing team members.

2. Assess The Quality Situation: Great marketing campaigns start with great contact data, yet all too often the state of the marketing database is left to chance. In fact, according to SiriusDecisions Research, between 10 percent and 25 percent of B2B marketing database contacts contain critical errors. Imagine the net impact on marketing programs of a database that is only 75 percent marketable. A short-term fix is to assign someone on your team stewardship of the data. Having that person get a handle on the current state of the database and understand how to fix it quickly will prevent negative impacts of incorrect data on your campaigns. Be forewarned, however, that databases grow and change quickly, so your data quality efforts cannot be a point-in-time fix. High-performing marketing departments have assigned owners of the data, often part of the marketing operations function, and an ongoing plan for assessing and repairing data quality. Make this part of your long-term core strategy, and you’ll see positive results over time.

3. Take An Extra Step In Qualifying Your Leads: Are all of your marketing leads going directly to sales? Fully qualifying your marketing leads into sales-ready opportunities with the help of teleprospecting could dramatically improve the quality and conversion of leads that end up in your sales pipeline. Studies show that marketing leads sent directly to sales may not receive follow-up (as much as 50 percent, according to MillerPierce VOC) because sales folks responsible for closing business may not have the cycles to fully qualify and convert marketing leads. Employing a teleprospecting effort, with a dedicated calling team, ensures no marketing lead is left behind. This approach requires agreement with sales leadership on the specific definition of a fully qualified sales-ready lead and can be a great boost to help everyone meet their goals.

4. Get Feedback: In addition to reviewing metrics from the sales automation tool, make sure your team members are constantly engaging with sales to discuss their perception on leads passed and opportunities created. The definition of marketing success also includes the perception of sales, and it is important for marketers to understand the perceived value of the leads they are passing. Doing so will allow your team members to actively engage in dialogue with the members of the sales team about the real (rather than perceived) results and reset any misconceptions. The process will build the relationship with sales, and your team will likely get some good feedback about ways marketing can support sales through the selling process. 

Long-Term Gain Strategies

5. Assess The Targeting Situation: Ensure that you have crossed the “T” in targeting. With a large volume of marketing activity, both inbound and outbound, happening in your department, it can be easy to lose resolution on the target. To ensure you have all of the right target buyers in your database, encourage your team to analyze historical purchase data. Your team should use data from sales automation, marketing automation, and your CRM system to identify as much as possible about the target buyer and other influencers who were involved in the buying process. After all, the shortest path to a sale is to involve all of the influencers from the beginning to get them aligned. In addition, take note of the length of the buying cycle and average deal size. This information will help you frame the schedule and frequency for marketing activity required to hit future goals.

Once target buyers and influencers are determined, your team should evaluate your prospect database to confirm that it has these buyers--both the primary targets and influencers--in the right volumes. Your team can again leverage a marketing funnel calculator to determine the correct database size and take steps to grow the database if needed. This is a great time to append missing contact info (email/phone), add segmentation criteria, such as demographic/firmographic info (industry/title), or include behavioral data, such as installed technology data.

6. Persona Research: The emerging trend of B2B buyers’ decreasing their engagement with salespeople until they’ve narrowed their options to just a few solutions is not going away.

Now more than ever before, your company’s success requires content that is grounded in deep insight about buyers’ decision to choose you over a competitor, or to do nothing at all. Marketers on your team need to become experts in their target buyers, how they buy, and what is important to them in order to be successful.

As a marketing leader, it is incumbent on you to instill the importance of this in your team and move them away from a culture of creating stuff that meets the sniff test of all the smart people on the team. Drive them to understand what each of your buyers wants to know at every step in their evaluation process and create relevant content to support it. Establish formal programs and ongoing measurement for team members who are responsible for researching, documenting, and communicating buyer persona information. To reinforce the desired behaviors, add to their performance goals metrics for number of win/loss interviews conducted and number of sessions where they communicate insights from the research across the marketing team.

7. Messaging Alignment: Marketing creates a lot of stuff. And it is easy to get in the habit of creating unnecessary new stuff to support new demand gen activity. One way to combat that is through planning. Once your team is aligned around the target buyer, conduct an inventory of the content you currently have. Have team members review all content, checking to ensure it maps to the messaging themes of the persona and establishing how the buyer expects to use that content in his buying process. The results can be captured in a simple matrix that will easily the identify gaps that exists and allow you to plan for content creation.

To further align the team and ensure on-point messaging, consider conducting a workshop where you identify all relevant messaging themes for your target buyer, as well as important messages for your business (e.g., to support product releases), and plot them on the calendar for the year, aligning all of your team’s marketing activity, such as events, demand gen, product launches, PR, social media, etc., under the messaging themes.

As your team works through the exercise, you’ll want to create repeatable top-of-funnel programs for messages that are important to the target buyer and can be repurposed throughout the year to net new prospects. You’ll also want to build repeatable nurture programs for leads that fall out of the funnel. Doing so will give economy of scale and remove the need to create unnecessary content. Plus, your team will have a messaging map that shows exactly what is planned for the year in terms of activity and how the pieces fit together.

8. Measure, Analyze, And Hold Accountable: With the tools available today, there is no excuse for not being nimble and adapting in real time, yet busy marketers can easily lose sight of tracking the effectiveness of campaigns in real-time and miss the opportunity to adjust to hit goals.

Today, marketing leaders need to foster a culture of numbers accountability, expecting their teams to understand the performance of their efforts and eventually be able to project results of future efforts based on past performance. And while it may be a new direction for some marketers, focusing on the quantifiable results will help them understand what tactics work and what do not so they will become more strategic about their future planning and decision-making. Make sure that your team formalizes around what it measures, having metrics for both overall macro performance, such as YTD numbers, as well as microlevel metrics for individual program performance.

-- This article was written in partnership with AG Salesworks.

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How Can I Get Started With Online Marketing?

Simply by asking this question, you are already ahead of the game. Instead of rushing headlong into online marketing, taking the time to step back and think about how you should approach it is key.

The first, and perhaps most important, aspect of launching into online marketing is to consider what your end game is. What goals and objectives do you have? Do you want to increase your Web traffic by 40 percent? Grow your Facebook followers to 5,000? Generate four new leads a month? Whatever your online marketing objectives are, make them measurable so that you can track your progress, gauge your efforts and make adjustments when needed. Before you make any efforts in online marketing, set up Google Analytics for your website so that you can track pageviews, traffic sources, number of visitors and other metric, and sign up for Google Alerts or Social Mention to keep track of when your business is being mentioned online.

Once you have your goals in mind and your analytics set up, the next step is to ensure that your website fits the criteria for modern marketing. Is your website contemporary and fresh-looking in color and design? Do you have up-to-date and well-branded content and writing on your site? Are you offering calls to action, such as downloadable white papers, e-books, newsletter sign-ups, etc.? Do you have a way to capture the contact information of the visitors who come to the site? Have you created a mobile version of your website so that it can be easily accessed from a cell phone or tablet?

In addition, consider using a blog as part of a content marketing strategy to provide visitors with specific information, tips, ideas, videos and industry information. Be sure to add sharing buttons to your website to boost brand awareness, since search engine rankings are partially determined by how much your content is shared. WordPress offers a whole slew of widgets for your website that allow users to share your blog posts and other content on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest and other sites.

Remember, your website is the hub of all your online marketing efforts, so there is no point in putting content out there if you aren’t driving potential clients back to a website that inspires them to buy.

At this point, you’re ready to jump into the social media fray. But start small. The big four social media players are, in descending order, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest. Before signing up and investing effort into pursuing these, take the time to review the demographics of each to determine which one or two sites would be the best place to begin. A recent Pew report gives a thorough overview of who’s hanging out on which site.

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7 Essential Free Tools for Social Media Design

Design plays a major part of any web or social media presence. Even though you may not have been schooled in the Visual Arts, these resources can help turn your Social Media content from mediocre to professional. Once you choose network and know the correct specs, read on to discover 7 resources that can help you create amazing Social Media content.

PIXLR

Do you need to resize, filter or make a collage out of photos? Pixlr is a free, Photoshop alternative that lets you edit images online via your desktop, phone or tablet browser. Pixlr’s interface resembles Photoshop’s toolbox, windows and includes all of the standard image adjustments (brightness/contrast, color correction, etc), layers and layer masks, filters, and healing/clone tools. Pixlr supports many image types including JPEG, PSD, GIF, PNG, and BMP.
Alternate Options: GIMP, Paint.Net, PhotoRaster

WhatDaFont

Ever wanted to identify a particular font? What the Font is very helpful tool which lets you upload an image to help identify the font. Free Font Options: Google Web Fonts, DaFont, FontSquirrel

THE NOUN PROJECT

Looking for a certain icon? Check out The Noun Project : an amazing site dedicated to providing users with standard clipart for every noun in the English language. Slick, consistent, easy to read, they are perfect to use in your custom designs.
Alternate Options: IconFinder, Icomoon

DESIGN KINDLE

Do you need a high quality pattern, texture or graphic? Design Kindle offers free design resources, including graphics, vectors, icons, patterns, textures and fully coded website templates.
Alternate Options: vecteezy, design.tutsplus

KULER

Stuck on color choices? Kuler is a web based app that allows you to collect themes and share them with the community. Download any public available themes and even upload a photo to collect a variety of palettes.
Alternate Option: COLOURlovers,  ColoRotate

COLORZILLA

Need to find the Hex # of an image? ColorZilla allows getting a color reading from any point in the browser, quickly adjusting this color and pasting it into any program.
Alternate Options: Stripe, EyeDropper

COMPFIGHT

Looking for a striking visual that isn’t too stocky? Compfight is a Flickr search tool that allows you to find great photos for your slides that the owners have shared for the advertising community including images of creative commons and public domain.
Alternate Options: CreativeCommons, CoolIris

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Starting an online business

Consumer habits have changed dramatically. By 2020, some experts predict that 90% of transactions will take place online or be internet-influenced.

Many businesses have long used their websites to generate additional revenue, yet in recent years there has also been significant growth in businesses that start up exclusively online, which can involve less risk, cost and effort.

Creating an online business

As with any small business, the first steps to starting to trade online involves conducting market research to identify your target market, assess demand, competition and reaction to your prices from potential punters. You also need to produce a business plan.

If sales are likely to exceed the annual threshold (currently £79,000), you must become VAT-registered. You’ll also need to pay tax, in accordance with your status as a sole trader, limited company, etc. Online traders must also observe data protection legislation, of course, when storing important information about customers.

Marketing will largely determine your business website’s success and search engine optimisation (SEO) is crucial to this. Basically, it means using words on your website that ensure high placing in lists on search engine (eg Google) results pages. You could also use paid-for advertising services such as Google Adwords, for which you’re charged on a pay-per-click basis.

Getting your site up and running

You must decide whether to create your own business website or get someone else to do it for you. Doing it yourself can save money, but the results might not be great.

There are many ready-made online solutions that allow people with little experience to create their own website. However, these are only likely to provide you with a couple of formulaic template pages with stock text and photos. With this in mind, you might prefer to pay a professional website designer. This should give better results, and will cost around £300-£600 per day. For around £2,000 you should get a service which includes design, domain name registration and arranging hosting of your site by an internet service provider. Setting a budget and a clear brief can help you minimise the costs. Read more aboutcreating a business website.

Website information you must include

Your business website must include your address and contact details, privacy policy, terms and conditions, exchange and refund policy, quality commitment and information about delivery and payment. Stock availability and pricing should be kept up to date and you must state how much VAT and post and packaging is payable per item.

To collect payments you need to include a shopping cart function, as well as a secure means by which customers can enter their card details when paying. Most website designers provide a shopping cart function and payment facility as part of their service. Online website-building packages do, too.

You also need a merchant account to collect payments. Providers such as PayPal are popular, but you should also enquire at your bank. You pay a service charge on each transaction, a set-up and monthly service fee.

Test and protect your website 

Be sure to test your website site thoroughly before you launch. Ask potential customers what they think, too, and act on their feedback if valid.

And remember – running an online business isn’t without risk. Serious technical or security issues can have a disastrous consequence, so make sure you protect your website from online threats and back up important data.

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Jim Rohn Setting Goals Part 1

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