Neuromarketing, emotional content strategy and influence design — Review

An overview of my third week at the Conversion Optimization Minidegree, provided by CXL Institute.

Since the beginning of September, I have received the amazing opportunity to access the Conversion Rate Optimization Minidegree and committed to producing 12 articles sharing my main learnings.

Last week, I learned a little bit more about neuromarketing, emotional content strategies, and interactive design. Here are the highlights from each journey!

Intro to Neuromarketing

Show hundreds of features to prove the technical superiority of the product, offer discounts and give free delivery. These are some of the actions that come to the minds of marketers and entrepreneurs when it comes to increasing online sales.

What many ignore, however, is that more than 90% of human behavior happens unconsciously. In practice, humans are very good at deciding based on their emotions and using reason only to justify their choices.

According to Roger Dooley, author of the book “Brainfluence” and instructor of the Intro to Neuromarketing course, ignoring this fact is what makes many marketers fail when they are trying to sell something. By focusing exclusively on the rational aspects of the product or the service, they ignore the brain’s functioning and miss the opportunity to sell much more.

Schools of thought

Continuing his explanation, Dooley states that different schools of thought can be used to a better understanding of how the human brain works.

According to Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, our thought process is divided into two different types of thinking: system one and system two. While system one is fast, unconscious, emotional, and effortless, system two is slow (but smarter), conscious, logical, and effortful.

BJ Fogg, in addition, developed the Behavior Model and stated that we need three things to produce the desired behavior: motivation, ability, and trigger. Basically, motivation is an intrinsic factor to the individual and concerns how much he wants to take a certain action. Ability, in turn, is related to the ease of taking the desired action. Finally, a trigger is something that compels the person to take action — like an e-mail, a phone call, or a button with a call to action in the right place.

Dooley also mentioned Robert Cialdini, the inventor of the science of influence that created the seven principles of persuasion: authority, reciprocity, social proof, liking, commitment, scarcity and unity

Regardless of the point of view, one pattern is clear: all mentioned authors agree that, during the majority of the time, our decisions are influenced by unconscious factors and do not necessarily follow logic. Understanding how to use this to our advantage is frequently selling more.

The Persuasion Slide: Roger Dooley’s framework

To try to simplify all the possibilities and discussions on the topic, Roger created his framework: the Persuasion Slide.

In a clear reference to a children’s playground, Dooley uses four elements to incorporate some of the persuasion principles: gravity, nudge, angle and friction. Each of them contemplates conscious and unconscious aspects.

• Gravity: is what makes slides work and what makes the user go to your website. Represents initial motivation and contemplates needs, wants and goals. It is intrinsic and cannot be created (only raised). It can be conscious, like what happens when a company offers discount codes or free shipping, or unconscious, like what happens when you buy something to feel safe or loved.
• Nudge: it corresponds to BJ Fogg’s trigger. Can be an e-mail, a phone call, or a button with a call to action in the right place. As an optimizer, you have to make sure that the nudge is going to be seen and will start the process.
• Angle: it is the motivation you provide. You can use conscious motivators, like free shipping, discounts, and money-back guarantee, or nonconscious motivators, as emotional appeals and persuasion principles. Usually, conscious motivators affect your margin.
• Friction: it is related to the lack of ability or to the difficulty to do something. There are two different types of friction: perceived and real. The first one has to do with cognitive fluency: hard-to-say names, non-readable fonts, and websites with low fluency are some of the factors that cause this type of friction. The second one happens when you have too many form fields or steps in a checkout process, for example.

Developing & Testing an Emotional Content Strategy

If more than 90% of our decisions are influenced by an emotional aspect, why don’t we always take this into account when defining and creating our content strategy?

In this introductory course, Talia Wolf, founder of Conversioner & CMO at Banana Splash, explains why brands should be targeting the emotional value of the product rather than benefits derived from features.

According to her, regardless of how rational we think we are, most of our decision-making is ultimately informed by emotion. This is the reason why worldwide brands like Lego, Nike, and Sony have been using emotion to sell more for decades.

To help optimizers better understand their target customer’s emotional triggers and decision-making, Talia shared her 4-step framework.

Talia’s 4-step framework:

The 4-step framework suggested by Talia Wolf helps us to develop and test an emotional content strategy that works. It consists of the four steps described below.

1. Emotional Competitor Analysis: the first step is understanding where the market is emotionally and where your brand should fit in. For that, you have to analyze 10–15 competitors according to four aspects: message, colors, images, and emotional triggers.
2. Emotional SWOT: the second step is going to help you to clearly understand how your customers feel about your brand and your market. During this moment, you have to register the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of each competitor. Only after that, you can decide if you should imitate your competitors or try to stand out with your emotional content strategy.
3. Emotional Content Strategy: the third step is to create a powerful emotional message that can address your customer’s biggest fears and make them feel the right emotion. During this step, you need to ask yourself how you want your customers to feel while they are exposed to your brand.
4. Testing: Finally, it is time to run meaningful tests. To register your hypotheses and brief your designer, Talia suggests you fill a framework with 5 columns: emotions, elements, words, visual, and color.

Framework suggested by Talia during the Conversion Optimization Minidegree.

Influence and interactive design

During this course, Dr. Brian Cugelman, a Senior Scientist at AlterSpark, presents his original framework synthesizing research on behavioral patterns. His model helps optimizers to keep their customers repeatedly engaging with their products or services while applying concrete tactical design strategies.

Stages of behavior change

Before introducing any design principles, Brian proposes that we understand and define our intended consumer outcomes. This is the reason why his framework breaks down on the stages of behavior change.

• Concentrating: your goal is to make your visitor conscious aware;
• Learning: your goal is to make your visitor informed of what your product/service is;
• Desiring: your goal is to make your visitor motivated to follow your funnel’s next stages;
• Deciding: your goal is to make your visitor intent your offer as a potential solution;
• Trusting: your goal is to make your visitor more confident about your brand;
• Acting: your goal is to make your visitor act in short terms (buying for the first time or signing up a form, for example);
• Maintaining: your goal is to make your customer act in long terms, building loyalty;
• Abandoning: when people stop taking action.

How to use design principles to direct attention, advocate ideas and facilitate actions

The second part of Brian’s framework is to understand different design principles that you can apply on your website or online campaigns to direct attention, advocate ideas and facilitate actions.

• To direct attention, apply “pre-attentive processing”, a design tactic used to control where users look on a page by manipulating patterns;
• To inform visitors, simulate the experience of the product or service as closely as possible, visually showing features and benefits;
• To get users motivated, promise what they will get if they get your product or service. To make your promise stronger, Dr. Cugelman suggests that you should understand the hierarchy of needs and test principles derived from evolutionary psychology;
• To help users to make a decision, avoid the friction generated by too much choice, not enough choice, or options that don’t make sense;
• To establish trust, make a good impression at the first moment, and establish credibility with perceived expertise, honesty, and integrity;
• To help users to take action, establish a clear path, and make it easier as possible, eliminating friction points.

This article was originally posted on fefy.com. It is part of a series of 12 posts sharing my main learnings during the Conversion Optimization Minidegree, provided by CXL Institute.

You can read the previous articles on the links below.

• Week 01: 5 conversion rate optimization best practices to increase your results
• Week 02: The (almost) mathematical formula behind millionaire salespages
• Week 03: Neuromarketing, emotional content strategy and influence design
• Week 04: Google Analytics for Beginners: an almost illustrated guide
• Week 05: Landing Page Optimization and Conversion Research
• Week 06: Google Analytics 4 and Google Tag Manager
• Week 07: User Research and Fast and Rigorous User Personas
• Week 08: Heuristic Analysis, Google Analytics Audit and Voice of Customer Data
• Week 09: A/B Testing Foundations, How to Run Tests, and Testing Strategies