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. 

Want to learn more?

Click Here to learn the factors of effective emotional selling!

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We are all aware of the power of language; good jokes make us laugh, sad stories make us tear up, and curse words make us cringe. But that’s just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. The stories you hear, articles you read, and conversations you have day-to-day hold the power to inspire, repulse, or galvanize you, your community— even the society you live in.

Despite the immense amount of power language holds, companies still manage to continually miss the mark when entering into a conversation with their prospective clients. Dry, banal vocabulary riddles websites across industries, describing products and services in a manner akin to your standard operating manual: “here’s what we do and here’s how we do it”. The end.

Taboo Triggers

Luckily, large amounts of psychological research exist to describe the emotional weight of specific words and phrases. For instance, many studies have effectively demonstrated the physiological arousal experienced by subjects who hear or read curses and taboo phrases (Harris, Gleason & Ayçiçegi, 2005). In this specific study, subjects showed higher galvanic skin response (or electrical conductivity of the skin) when presented with a taboo word or phrase. Put simply: telling someone to “shut up”, for example, has the ability to increase heart rate, raise blood pressure, and heighten respiration rate. From there the science is quite simple; when you are in a state of physiological arousal you’re alert. You’re focused.

The Unexpected Power in Negativity

But we ask that you please not curse at your clients! The point of this data is merely to demonstrate the affective power of emotional language and its ability to push a prospect from a passive state to an active one. This leads us to the next point: in a similar study, it was found that people spend longer processing and paying attention to emotionally negative and taboo words than neutral —or even positive— ones (Eilola & Havelka, 2010). In this study, subjects were asked to identify the font colour of words presented to them on a screen. Neutral words had a reaction time of 698.2 ms (with 3.4% errors), whereby subjects took 764.8 ms (with 4% errors) to recognize the colour of the taboo words. So what does this mean for you, someone who’s looking to increase margins on your product or service? When messaging is framed from a perspective of loss, prospects will statistically spend more time engaging with it. For instance, a message to the client outlining a product or service’s ability to save shrinking margins or fix a convoluted sales cycle will be more effective than a message simply outlining how robust or effective a product is.

Who, Me?

Finally, language appeals most to the emotional buyer’s brain when it uses “terms derived from interpersonal communication”, like the words “we”, “you”, or “us” (Sela, Wheeler, & Sarial-Abi, 2012). Language that refers to the customer from a detached, third-person point of view is much easier to forget or ignore according to psychological research, whereas language that is interpersonal is reported by subjects to be more satisfying and interesting to consume. Therefore, it’s much wiser to include language on your website or in your promotional material that says something like “We work hard to provide you with an effective solutions package”, as opposed to “we work hard to provide our customers with effective solutions packages”. Language like this immediately activates the emotional centres in our brain, as we begin to make unconscious associations between the personal pronouns in marketing material and the personal pronouns we hear in day-to-day conversations.

To recap: we’ve seen data indicating that negative words physiologically arouse us and capture our attention, and interpersonal language is people commonly considered to be relevant and important to them. And these are only a few examples of the potential power language can have over prospects; more studies exist that outline the importance of poetic devices, trust-based language, and bilingualism in written material. This type of research is virtually endless, but one thing we can be certain of in the midst of it all: to not utilize the simple power of language in your PR, marketing, and relevant sales strategies would be an awful waste of words.

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