July 14, 2019

In today’s online landscape, neuromarketing and neuroscience can largely boost your return on investment. Any firm or business must also take into consideration how the new buyer behaves and pays for products. Furthermore, the background of tech consumers is largely changing. Marketing efforts should adjust accordingly. 

Previously, before the spread of digitalization, customers used to purchase products in one lump-sum payment. While marketing campaigns took longer to prepare, a single sale covered most of the associated expenses. Moreover, a customer sales rep that knew how to utilize a sales script and deploy selling psychology proved to be a valuable asset. 

Having said that, this strategy is almost ineffective in the online marketplace. The neuroscience behind digitalized sales is completely different. Not only do buyers prefer to remain anonymous, but the absence of physical interaction makes it more difficult to retain their attention online. 

How You Sell 

By the time that a digital buyer contacts a firm’s customer sales representative, they already went though 60-85% of the decision-making process. This makes engaging and attention grabbing content incredibly valuable. Neuroscience and neuromarketing techniques are a central part of making this process successful. 

Digital consumers rely more on self-education than those who walk into a store. This means that they research products online and consult with their network before contacting the seller. Consequently, any business that motivates consumers to engage with their content is more likely to increase their sales. Even more when their product descriptions are easy to understand. 

One way of being digitally effective is through video content. Unlike static pages, videos do a much better job at highlighting a product’s features while retaining users’ attention and keeping them engaged. A short, descriptive video makes it very easy to connect with customers and helps them make a buying decision more quickly than an article does. 

Why You Sell 

In the tech industry, IT professionals and chief information officers (CIOs) dominated the traditional marketplace. Today, however, business executives make the majority of software product purchases. It is important for marketers to understand the different psychologies of these two sets of consumers. 

IT professionals are mostly interested in technical product descriptions. Business executives, on the other hand, have one thing in mind: How does this software help my business? Neuroscience requires marketers to focus on practical and direct details. 

For example, instead of advertising a payment processing software as “WordPress friendly”, sellers should highlight how the product can lower transaction fees or accept all major credit cards. Similar features to focus on are how quickly the funds will be available for withdrawal or that they can be connected to a Paypal account. 

When You Sell 

In a physical store, consumers buy products in one lump sum payment. This immediately covers all related marketing expenses. Online buyers, on the other hand, prefer to pay through increments and monthly installments. 

While this diminishes immediate returns, neuroscience and neuromarketing will boost your overall number of sales. In turn, this increases both short and long-term returns. The key to success in the online marketplace is creating engaging content that showcases the right product features. 

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July 14, 2019

The online landscape is changing the marketing world in three key ways. Consequently, a business that applies neuromarketing and neurology strategies witness better results. Just as importantly, firms can set themselves up for long-term success by understanding the new online consumer. 

Practical vs. Technical 

First of all, research shows that most online buyers are business executives. Their purchase and decision-making process is much different than chief information officers (CIOs) and IT professionals. Neuromarketing requires advertisers to adapt to this change.

Instead of focusing on the technical features of a product, sellers must focus on its usefulness to the buyer. This is because business executives are mostly concerned about how a software or product can help their firms succeed. In contrast, traditional IT buyers are more interested in technical product descriptions and features.

Anonymous Customers 

When neurology is applied, marketing campaigns can be very efficient at catering to the new type of buyer. Even more when advertisers consider how the online selling cycle is different than the traditional, face-to-face one. Studies show that consumers go through 60-85% of the decision making process before they make initial contact with the seller. 

In large part, this is because buyers prefer to remain anonymous, educate themselves, and conduct online research before purchasing a product or software. Rather than making sales scripts a priority, sellers should focus on creating user-friendly websites that visitors can easily navigate through.

Meanwhile, engaging product pages and attention-grabbing visuals can go a long way. Including video content, rather than static pages, is a great way to retain visitors’ attention and showcase products. This gets them to spend more time on your website and increases the likelihood that they will share product pages with their colleagues. 

A Shorter Campaign Cycle 

Lastly, the new marketing paradigm became much faster and more immediate. This is especially true in the tech industry. Traditionally, it used to take advertisers several weeks or months to prepare a marketing campaign. Likewise, tracking its results and effectiveness took a long time. 

Today, creating and launching an online ad is very quick and easy. Similarly, marketers can measure its performance immediately and have more tools at their disposal to do so. They can reach their audience through emails, social media promotions, search engine campaigns, and so forth. Advertisers can also monitor the number of people who visit their website, the average video view time, where users hover their mouse, and more.

Most noteworthy, online campaigns are cheaper than traditional ones. Yet, the costs aren’t as immediate. In a face-to-face selling environment, consumers paid for products in one sum. A single sale was enough to cover all marketing costs. On the internet, however, users prefer to pay monthly increments. Firms and businesses that account for and understand this are a step ahead of their competitors.

All in all, advertisers can prepare for the future by adapting to the new buyer, selling cycles, and marketing timelines. Applying neurology and neuromarketing boosts engagements and returns. 

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July 14, 2019

If you run a marketing team or business, you probably focus on three key metrics: revenue, profit, and cost.  No doubt, your goal is to minimize cost and maximize revenues. You may be considering working with a finance leader to help you set long-term growth goals for your organization.  

This mainly covers tasks that involve pricing service and products to add value to your business and make profits. But how can you do that effectively? What are the strategies you can use to price your product to increase sales and profits with little effort? 

One way is to master the skill of pricing your product. And to do that, you need to not only understand psychological pricing but also leverage the right strategies.

Below we discuss some key strategies deduced from the theory that certain prices have a huge psychological impact than others. Whether you’re a customer service manager, business leader, or professional service leader, the strategies are helpful for all. 

Psychological Pricing Strategies 

1. Charm Pricing

A research study conducted on psychological pricing found that consumers perceive prices lower as compared to prices that are one cent higher when you change the left-most digit to a lower level.  

The strategy is also referred to as charm pricing as it involves prices that end on “9” or “99”.  In this strategy, businesses reduce one digit in price by rounding off one cent.  For instance, the human brain processes $4.00 and $3.99 as two different values: to your brain $3.99 is $ 3.00 and is cheaper than $4.00.    

2. Prestige Pricing 

This strategy is an opposite of charm pricing. It makes values into rounded values, like $19.99, can be converted into $20.00. It happens because rounded numbers, like $20.00, are more appealing to consumers than non-rounded numbers (e.g., $19.99). That means rounded figures “feel right” to consumers. 

3. BOGOF– Buy one get one free

This is one of the most popular pricing strategies where customers pay the full price for a service or product to get another one free. Many entrepreneurs make some changes, like: 

• Buy one get four free
• Buy one get 25% off on the next purchase
• Buy one and get two bonuses valued at $70, for free

4. Visually Highlight Prices

According to Keith Coulter and Robin Coulter research, this strategy triggers an immense fluency effect.  The consumers interpret any visual difference to a big numeral distinction. That means, if you change the color, font, and size of the signage for the existing price and place it away from the previous price, it will likely increase the number of purchases.  

The customer sees the new price as a better deal than the last placed price. 

Final Thoughts 

Overall, the given psychological pricing strategies are effective for various types of businesses, but it is important to test different strategies on different products to determine if they suit your business.  

Sources 

• https://production.wordpress.uconn.edu/businessmarketing/wp-content/uploads/sites/724/2014/08/size-does-matter.pdf 

• https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/678484?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents 
• https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2005-05742-007 
• https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/279464 

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Unless you can read your customer’s mind like Dr. Xavier, you’ll have to rely on other skills to avoid being taken advantage of during IT negotiations. If you’re not careful, your approach will lead to one of two results: you lose the business, or win but leave money on the table. As a lawyer for IBM and Thomson Reuters, and as a purchaser for numerous billion-dollar corporations, I’ve negotiated for 25 years on both sides of the table for large IT acquisitions and sales teams. And I’ve seen negotiators crash and burn by making these self-destructive mistakes:

1   Arrogance

You’re negotiating for a big company, and your attitude is, “Hey, we’re great, and you’re stupid if you don’t pick us.” No one wants to do business with someone like that. The customer expects you to be arrogant, and you confirm their bias. Imagine how they’d react if you surprised them with some humility.

2   Acting Like a Robot

You’re not a machine, and neither is the customer. It won’t kill you to act like a human, and you may even enjoy it. Instead of getting right down to business, ask them about their family, where they grew up, what they do for fun. It’s a small thing, but you’d be amazed at how some friendly chit-chat at the beginning of negotiations will help you get what you want at the end. They say once you learn how to fake sincerity, you’ve got it made. Not true. Real sincerity and interest in another person will serve you well. Remember, if you do this right, your customer will buy from you again and again. It’s not a one-shot deal.

3   Acting Like a Used Car Salesman

There is nothing weaker than a salesperson who repeatedly says, “I think we can agree to that price (or that term), but I have to run it past my manager first.” It sounds like you’re buying a car, and soon they’ll ask you to add floor mats and undercoating. As a seller, go into the negotiation with a bottom-line price or set of business terms in your head, knowing you can make decisions up to that threshold. Otherwise, you may as well bring in the decision-maker early.

4   Stepping Over Your Line in the Sand

Never say, “This is absolutely my best offer,” unless it is. Once you lower a price you said you could never in a million years lower, you are at the mercy of the negotiator (and customer). Forever.

5    Filling Every Silence With Talking

“The next one to talk loses,” is a common negotiating maxim. Sometimes, it’s better to say nothing, and wait to see what the other person says, especially when the silence becomes uncomfortable. The customer may be ready to say “OK, I’ll buy,” but you keep talking until you’ve talked yourself out of the deal.

6   Trashing the Competition

You know how your mom said, “If you don’t have anything nice to say about a person, say nothing?” Well, that works in business too. The moment I hear trash-talking about a competitor, I have serious doubts about the ethics and professionalism of the negotiator. Long-term relationships don’t start there.

7   Being Afraid to Walk Away

Everyone wants to hit their number for the month, the quarter, the year. You always want the deal, right? But if you sound desperate, the customer will surely smell blood; before you know it, you’ve made huge concessions. Be willing to walk away – not fake walking away like you’re buying a rug in Marrakech – and you’ll either get the deal you want, or avoid a poor deal for your company.

In Conclusion

Are there only seven big negotiating mistakes, you ask? Of course not. There are as many negotiating mistakes as there are stars in The Cloud. Stay tuned for the next seven. And the next seven….

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Emotions play a powerful role in the buying experience. If we can pinpoint what emotionally motivates prospects in the industries that we are focused on, then we can generate marketing content and sales conversations that are meaningful to them. This will ultimately lead to the elusive and coveted position of differentiation in a saturated marketplace.

When partners are asked the question: “Why are you different?” Typically, most will retort a logical or rational differentiation answer, sounding something like:

“We have a phenomenal product, a fantastic reputation locally and geographically, and great people who have been in the industry for years. Most importantly, we have the right price point.”

But when I talk to buyers and ask the question: “What do you feel differentiates one potential vendor from another?” , customers use a very different set of vocabulary to describe the differences. A typical customer response to this questions would be:

“The vendor really understands our industry and I felt good about the engagement experience I’ve have with them so far. The vendor was able to clearly communicate how the solutions they offered had impacted other organizations that look like ours.”

That’s Emotional Differentiation.

When you think about logical versus emotional differentiation, think about an iceberg. The tip of the iceberg sitting above the water line is the logical representation – the piece that we can see, we can touch and we can feel. It’s actually what sits below the water line, the emotional component of that decision making process that’s most important.

6 Emotions That Should Influence Your Marketing Strategy

Studies prove emotional campaigns are almost twice as likely to generate large profit gains than rational ones. As human beings we can experience a wide range of emotions from bliss to despair, but there’s only a handful of emotions that are responsible for creating and triggering memories. It’s these six emotions that we have to think about if we want to be memorable when engaging with the prospect:

• Fear
• Joy
• Anger
• Sadness
• Disgust
• Surprise

The three emotions that we really want to focus on when we start to contemplate how we are going to create messaging in dialogues with prospects are:

1. Fear
2. Joy
3. Surprise

Understand Customers’ Market Forces and Be Ready with Different Solutions

The first step in emotional messaging is understanding and documenting what external industry drivers and market forces are at play in the industry that we’re focusing on. This generally will fall into one of five categories, in order of emotional significance:

1. The Economy
2. Regulatory Compliance/Changes
3. Suppliers
4. Competitors
5. Customers

Let’s consider these five market forces for a Professional Services firm in the architecture, engineering or construction industry. They don’t have a relationship with the economy, but I can guarantee they have a relationship (positive or negative) with their competitors and they certainly have a relationship with their customers. The closer we get to the bottom of this stack, the more emotionally relevant the conversations become.

The Economy

What is happening at an economic level that is having an impact on the industry that we’re working in? Now, we don’t really have an emotional or personal relationship with the economy, which is why it’s on the top of the list. At an economic level, the engineering firm is starting to see a recovery, which means there’s more opportunities to bid on. They will need to staff up because they had to let people go for the last 4 to 5 years since the recession.

The Regulatory

What is happening at a regulatory level that is forcing our target prospects to do something different? For the engineering firm, at a regulatory level, there are all kinds of changes. There’s the building codes all over the world that they need to educate their people on. They will have to be compliant or there’s going to be some form of consequence.

The Supplier

What are the suppliers that work within that ecosystem or that industry? How are they changing in ways that are putting pressure on our target industry?

The Competitor

What are the competitors doing within that given industry that are going to put pressure on our target prospect? At a competitive level for this engineering firm, there is now a tremendous amount of competition from new entrants into the marketplace. There are competitors who have developed specialty skills in sustainable building, in ecological building and have even created new products that they use to support their engineering. This is putting pressure on the firm and their ability to win more business.

The Customer

The last and most important from an emotional perspective is customers changing their behavior. What are customers in that industry doing that is putting significant pressure on our target prospects? At the customer level, there’s no question that there are significant shifts in demand. Not only are customers demanding more sustainable or ecological building, but they’re actually demanding it at a price point that’s lower than what the firm produced traditional buildings.

All of those external impacts will put a tremendous amount of pressure on the leadership and senior executives of this engineering firm. Now they can’t change the economy, the regulatory, the supplier behavior, or the competitive behavior and they very seldom can change their customer’s behavior. They have to react to it and that’s the key. As these forces continue to compel organizations to adjust, you will see material changes to some of their operating impacts.

During these changes, their win rate may go down, their pipeline may go up, their project profitability may go down, their compliance training may go up. So each of these forces is going to have a material impact on individual key operating metrics. Most organizations can survive just fine with all of those different forces, but at some point there will be more pressure than before and it will result in a trigger event – making them seek a solution from your business.

Capitalizing on Emotional Trigger Events Creates Differentiation

My belief is that every project that you ever pursued – whether you won or you lost – had an emotional trigger event behind it. Most of the time, you never figure out what it is. An emotional trigger event is a very discrete experience. A minute before it didn’t exist, a minute after they’re now starting to react to it.

Imagine you are going to focus on the particular sector of architects and engineers and construction firms. You know what all of the external industry drivers are and you know what key operating metrics are being impacted by. You also know how those show up in relation to an emotional trigger event within that industry and how you are going to functionally solve that problem.

Your Next Step: Assess Your Emotional Engagement

Neural Impact has developed a proprietary Emotional Messaging Framework that helps you get to the root of what your prospects truly care about, then convert that understanding into digital assets that emotionally resonate with your target industry. Emotional Marketing drives relevance, differentiation, and a steady flow of engaged prospects.

Start with an assessment of your current marketing messaging with an Emotional Digital Engagement Website Audit today! The emotional website audit will assess if your digital content truly engages with prospects. Once you have this information, Mark Stuyt, Chief Engagement Officer can help transform your content and drive focused emotional messages with an on-site Emotional Engagement Workshop to inline your emotional marketing and sales strategy/execution.

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