Being Relevant Means Understanding Consumers’ Goals
And your CRO strategy needs to reflect that
In an earlier post, we established that character and context are inextricably linked; that being able to harness the two simultaneously was the future of CRO; and that I could quite comfortably beat up a Gorilla. However, in of themselves, character and context aren’t necessarily enough to truly optimise performance. Of course they would boost conversions — really rather a lot, most likely — but there is another element to the equation: relevance.
Now we talk a lot in marketing about ‘relevance’. But it turns out this is another slightly under-defined concepts. The fact is, lots of things are ‘relevant’ to a consumer which have no relation to sales — or brand building, for that matter — and therefore simple ‘relevance’ will not suffice. It is another problem with simply focusing on psychographics — relevant, in abstract, just means connected (however tangentially) to some or other facet of a person’s life.
So when we talk about ‘relevance’, what we mean is relevance to an individuals’ goals.
The Boostify Behaviour Formula
Put simply: humans are goal-oriented creatures. At any given moment, an individual will have a series of goals — these might be lofty, abstract goals like improving herself or becoming happier, or it might be more mundane, like satiating her hunger or filling her afternoon — and these goals fundamentally drive all of that individual’s behaviours.
Our goals dictate what we want and what actions we think of taking. Time and again, research has demonstrated that consumers are willing to pay more and find more value in products and services which help them peruse their goals. It has also been demonstrated that our goals determine what our attention is drawn to and what commands it, meaning that content and messaging irrelevant (or counter) to our goals may not even be taken in, let alone being effective.
“Whatever the basic, surface reason for that might be, the ultimate underlying reason for that will be that is not relevant to any of their current goals.”
However much we want them to, some consumers will simply never want the specific product we are trying to sell. And whatever the basic, surface reason for that might be, the ultimate underlying reason for that will be that is not relevant to any of their current goals.
Understanding goals, therefore, is just as important as understanding personality and context; being able to match the three up, so that you are targeting specific individuals in specific context according to specific goals is how we take the previous article’s insights about targeting and turn them into a truly evolved CRO strategy.
We call it The Boostify Behaviour Formula:
Behaviour=Character + context + goal.
Now, you might be thinking, ‘this is a very plausible way of understanding behaviour, but practically speaking, how could you possibly know what individuals’ goals are? And it’s a fair question. The answer, however, is that it simply isn’t as hard as it might sound to do.
Reading Goals
The assumption that all behaviour is goal-orientated — which is backed not just by modern neuroscientific research but goes back as far as Freud as a way of understanding human behaviour — implies that all behaviour therefore also signals an individuals’ goal-orientation. We know this from very basic aspects of our lives — we see people constantly doing things and don’t even have to think to figure out what they’re trying to achieve. That’s how we’re able to hold open doors for colleagues and help old-people cross roads. And as facile as this might sound, it actually holds as a fairly general human truth.
“With a certain amount of lateral thinking, we can look at behaviours and predict with pretty great degree of accuracy what the individuals’ goal was in that situation.”
It has been demonstrated, for example, that strangers are just as accurate — if not better — in their predictions about the future behaviour of someone they meet for five minutes than the person is at predicting their own behaviour. And again, we experience this in our lives constantly: we know that bloke at the bar isn’t going to hold to his New Years’ Resolution long before he does, and we know the vaguely bored-looking couple at the restaurant won’t go the distance long before they admit it to themselves.
This might be a slightly galling proposition — that we are more transparent than we would ever like to admit. But from a marketing point of view, it’s great news! It means that, with a certain amount of lateral thinking, we can look at behaviours and predict with pretty great degree of accuracy what the individuals’ goal was in that situation. And what we find is that certain behaviours are very trustworthy indicators of specific goals.
For example: how often does a customer in a shoe shop ask the clerk if they ‘have these in a size 12’ with no intention of buying those particular shoes? Sure, they might enjoy giving workers the run around, and they might be trying to impress their date (ahem), but in the vast, vast, vast majority of cases, they’ll be wanting to buy those shoes.
Behaviours like this — we call them ‘tells’, because we wish we were cool enough to play poker — are way more common than you might think. And when we add data into the mix — along with really robust deciphering of data via Machine Learning, for example — we can find all sorts of patterns to behaviour which show staggeringly clear correlations between x behaviour and y goal. And once we find those, we can start to really get our CRO cooking.
Imagine it like this: a shop assistant is limited by social etiquette. S/he can’t be seen to too actively or invasively attend to a customer who’s ‘just looking’ — if s/he did, the customer would likely be put-off by it in principle. But with online browsers, we can follow their activity without any of those problems, meaning we can find all sorts of indications about consumers’ goals. And then we can serve them content specifically relevant to them.
The deep implication of this is that not taking advantage of this possibility — not making use of the ability to read goal-orientation in our consumers — means we are missing out on endless opportunities to nudge our customers further through that all-important purchase funnel. Once we realise that our customers are constantly giving out signals which we could well be reading and making use of, it surely makes little sense not to.
The final stage in this CRO process is to take our insights about consumers’ goals, along with our understanding of context and personality, and to test our theories to make sure we’re maximising effectiveness. But while most marketers will be well accustomed to MVTs and all that go with them, the CRO Evolved way of testing is a little more involved than what you might be used to — and that is the subject of the third and final article in this series.
