The Revolution in Online Marketing: Neuromarketing — a Review

Today, I’m going to talk about the emerging field of neuromarketing.
Did you know that marketers are amongst the least trusted professionals according to a survey?

Almost next to politicians, and salespeople. And we all know nobody trusts them. Now add that approximately 95% of all new products online fail. 98% of direct mails get no response. And 98% of all sales emails don’t convert. Or in short: most of the money spent on advertising is wasted.

That’s some miserable numbers right there. And that’s what neuromarketing is trying to solve. Giving you the right tools and knowledge to understand the behavior of your potential customers. And more importantly to CHANGE their behavior to make a sale, collect an email, and whatnot…

That’s why we need a revolution in marketing.

Welcome back. I’m in week 4 of the digital psychology & persuasion certification from the CXL Institute. On my journey to transition from a science to a marketing career.

This week I learned from one of the pioneers in neuromarketing, a guy called Roger Dooley. And the funny thing is…

Roger worked as a chemical engineer before he went into neuromarketing (if I remember correctly). Why is that funny?

Well, I feel like I saw myself…

I studied nanoscience (= chemistry & physics), but I was always heavily interested in psychology. In fact, the day I discovered copywriting, I started reading blogs and books about it. Just because I thought it’s amazing.

Something about it really got me, but I never saw myself as a writer. And so, after a while, I haven’t looked much deeper into it… but I always came back to it from time to time.

And he had a similar story. He went out to the library to read about advertising instead of learning for his courses at college. I actually did the same once.

And now I want to change my career completely just like him. Roger also published two books himself. And I feel tempted to read his books now lol.

Anyway.

This week was one of the best so far. I really start to like neuromarketing myself. And there were two courses in total as an introduction to neuromarketing. The first course went over the fundamentals of neuromarketing. Things like…

• How scientists measure emotional response
• The state-of-the-art tech & best practices in neuromarketing
• How to create a persuasion slide so people do what you want them to do

The Persuasion slide was interesting, especially the part about friction. For example, do you know these annoying auto logouts on websites or reCaptcha codes you have to type in to get to a website? The ones nobody can read anyway and only makes you want to quit the site?

It’s all friction. The friction that hinders potential readers or customers to do what you want them to do. One common one is required logins on eCommerce sites at the checkout. Or never-ending form fields that look like they want you to confess all your personal secrets.

They all are quite obvious. But it’s having a higher awareness for these ‘obvious things’ you get, while you work through the content. And it’s this awareness and constant repetition that helps to really understand and see what key principles actually affect your website performance. And how much they influence it. Presented in real, tested numbers. This alone gives you a much better feeling for what to focus on for better conversions.

And then, ladies and gentlemen, there was a second course called ‘applied neuromarketing’. This one was taught by a German guy just like me.

This course was even better in my opinion. I got to see a lot of psychological principles in action with real-life examples. And the most exciting part? He shows you a couple of websites for just a few milliseconds. He then asks you what you’ve seen and what ‘FIRST IMPRESSION’ you got of the website. The thing is, that’s how fast people form their first impressions about your website. In approx. 50ms. That’s all you’ve got to make a positive first impression.

But the real best part of it?

A breakdown. So in one video he again shows a specific website for just 50ms. He then asks again what your first impression was and what main emotional response this website is creating.

Afterward, he reveals the site. It’s a Hugo Boss website. He then precedes by explaining all the details on the website. Details you probably don’t even think about as a website visitor. Details that affect you unconsciously. Things like the background picture, the copy, the colors… all the cognitive biases in action.

I always love learning about such `invisible` things consumers aren’t aware of in advertising. They were called ‘IMPLICIT CODES’ inside the course. It’s kind of like the implicit associations I already wrote about. But this time they went deeper explaining them.

And what’s better than just knowing about them? Exactly, getting someone to explain to you how you can deconstruct websites and understand these elements yourself. I totally loved this lecture.

He then also explained all the tools you have to control attention. Like, what can you do on your website to get people’s attention and direct it? This was similar to the attention basics course in week 1. So it’s a good reminder as well as a great demo with some good examples of attention principles in real life.

Another positive thing was the short exam at the end with about 20 questions to answer. As I mentioned in another post, I really like these to deepen my understanding of the things I learned. So I was happy to see such an exam here as well.

The same speaker actually has at least one more course inside the certification program. I can’t wait to see his frameworks for conversion optimization and what else he has up to his sleeve. So totally looking forward to this.

And one more interesting thing… he seems to be from the same city as me. At least, one of his companies is located here. I honestly think I will try to apply there for an internship for 3 months. I read they offer one on their website. And who knows, this might be my chance to enter a new career. Let’s see. :)

So, this concludes my experiences and thoughts on week 4.

Next week is going to be the one I was waiting for all the time. I’m going to deep dive into cognitive biases and nonconscious motivation. Can’t wait.