Erin’s session will dive into the psychological side of marketing. She will discuss what types of emotions trigger purchases, how UX experience relates to how we market, and how all of these issues can be implemented into your SEO strategy
33. #SEJSummit
@erinever
And people they don’t even know
• 79% of consumers trust online
as much as personal
recommendations
• 90% of customers say online
reviews influence their buying
decisions
• Reviews can produce, on
average, an 18% increase in
sales
Photo Credit: Provided by the speaker
36. #SEJSummit
@erinever
Photo Credit: Provided by the speaker
“You can make
more friends in two
months by
becoming
interested in other
people than you
can in two years
by trying to get
other people
interested in you.”
-Dale Carnegie
We don’t know how to be entertained by one thing at a time now. We’re constant consumers of content and that’s made it harder for us marketers. Users have more control over when, where and how they consumer content. They can even choose not to be advertised to. We have access to content on our own terms. And we like it, and we’re not going to give it up.
Now, we’re not just competing with other marketers and advertisers.
We’re competing with things that have never historically been competition. Video games. Social media. News. Text messages. Snap chats.
Sometimes we’re even competing against ourselves with other types of our own content on our other media channels.
We’re not competing for media placement anymore. We’re competing for attention, and frankly that’s an even scarier competition.
It also doesn’t make it any easier since no one gives marketers any credit right? I wish my job was just liquor and guessing. It would be a hell of a lot of more fun.
But the problem persists because non-marketers over simplify the shopping experience.
I wanted a vaccuum for Christmas, which is by far the saddest thing…..
It also doesn’t make it any easier since no one gives marketers any credit right? I wish my job was just liquor and guessing. It would be a hell of a lot of more fun.
But the problem persists because non-marketers over simplify the shopping experience.
That’s when a Roombo commercial came on Hulu while I was watching Jimmy Fallon one night and I was looking at my dog-hair invested carpet that I swore up and down to myself that I had just vacuumed last week. Yup, it was time: I needed a new vaccuum.
Saw the ad of what you were binge watching on Hulu. Rumba ad comes up. Lots of different ways of getting to the same purchase place.
So what did I do? I went to Google, but I didn’t search “vacuums.” I don’t want just a vacuum, I want the best vacuum. So I scroll a little bit, see what’s interesting, oh hey I like this one let’s see what happens.
And I did read that article. But I also ready no less than 4 other source on vacuums because my journalism professors taught me better than to just trust one source: I needed to validate their data.
And I got a group text and got distracted
OK back to Reddit. And that’s a place where one can seriously get lost. I looked at three different forums, from everything to an AMA about a vacuum repair technician to the frugal subreddit because I’m always looking for a good deal.
I then looked at 11 different websites where I could have purchased a vacuum. And that’s not even including the 10 or so sites and forums I read before I even got to what/where I could buy said vacuum.
There is no such thing as a linear path to purchase anymore because users are influenced at any time of day by any particular medium that triggers something in their pyshce of “hey I need that.” It’s not just a second screen we’re battling. It’s a second, third and fourth screen and that has a tremendous impact on the way we market to customers and the way we leverage our channels.
Multichannel – everyone is competing against each other in their own swim lanes. No mixing.
Omnichannel is a giant pool party. Your channels aren’t going off and doing their own thing and never interacting with one another. They’re all mixed in together having a great time, each doing its own part to dissimeninate its message and reach the customer at the right part in the customer journey.
And so if we stop thinking about channels in silos, we have to stop thinking about customers just in demographics. They’re not segments based on the device that they’re using, their age, their HHI. We have to think about marketing to customers based on what they need at that moment because customers interests and behaviors are going to constantly change.
We have to stop thinking about our users defined as segments based on their device type and demographic and have to start thinking about them as it relates to what are they seeking for at that moment. We’re not static consumers; interests and behaviors are going to constantly change and messaging should try, as much as possible, to do that too.
People live in so many different segments based on the time of day, where they are and what device they’re using. These are the moments that people are living in
When I’m looking at vacuums at work, I’m looking at them as competitive research. When I went home, I was looking to buy one.
We know that we should switch our content messaging based on the big milestones of our consumers (they move, get a new job, get married, etc.) But what about when those same consumers move from the office to the gym? Or when they switch from reading about vacuums from a competitive level to reading about vacuums because they want to buy one.
Demographics don’t tell the whole story.
For one, you have to appeal to things beyond a customer’s sense of logic. When users become consumers, meaning when users start shopping for things beyond what they need for basic survival (food, water, education, shelter), they want things that make them look smart, look better, looking more powerful and they make purchasing decisions based on other organs of their body.
IPA dataBANK – 1400 case studies of successful advertising campaigns over 3 decades and those campaigns with emotional content performed twice as well as those with only rational content.
People feel first and think second. We can be swayed to make decisions, including purchasing decisions, without our conscious knowledge because we can process sensory information without cognitive processing. We can literally be “felt” to make a decision without even thinking about it because that part of our brain processes emotions 5X faster than our cognitive brain takes that same type of information.
The things are primal within us; we’ll always be wired to pay attention to our emotions and react accordingly.
Can you guys guess what emotion triggers the most social sharing?
It’s happiness. The more positive your content is, the more positive your messaging it is, the more likely it is to be shared.
And Ben and Jerry’s executed on creating content against this emotion flawlessly with their Capture Euphoria campaign.
Who remembers this? The Budweiser Lost Dog commercial last super bowl. When you feel sadness, you produce particular neurochemicals that promotes connection and empathy. There’s a reason marketers use puppies, like this one, in their content because you immediately establish a connection with that brand; you immediately establish trust in that brand, and it’s all subconscious.
I love this scene in Scrooged (which sidenote: Top 3 best Bill Murray movies ever. If you disagree, meet me out back and we’ll battle). But I love this scene in Scrooged when they’re talking about an ad for the live performance of A Christmas Carol and one employee makes the terrible mistake of saying “we don’t need to do much with advertising. The people already want to to watch show.”
Fear Marketing.
Legitimizing with authority/experts. Establish and back up your reputation
This same idea applies to the power of social influence too. There is a great TED talk from 2013 from Alex Laskey about how he used this power of social influencer to get people to save energy by a simple message: “Your neighbors are doing better than you.”
How can you take that same principle and apply it to the content you’re producing for your SEO efforts?
Dale Carneigie – How to Win Friends & Influence People
Benefits over features. Take the time to do consumer research to understand what they want to know and then create that content.
Reciprocity (tips up 3% when waiters gave them an after-dinner mint and said it was specifically for them.”) Go into anything with their interests in mind. Not yours.
That same principle applies to when you’re pitching SEO strategies to clients, bosses or other peers.
Not just relying on your team. Relaying on other people to help you do your job and you’re essential marketing SEO within the entire organization just as much as you’re markeitng your content our to your users.
Frame things in a positive light. “200 people will die” vs “400 people will be saved” – FIND AN SEO EXAMPLE (traffic decrease if we won’t do this vs traffic increase if we do do this)
Why are we just talking about SEO as a singular unit? We know that SEO doesn’t exist in a vacuum yet we’re still reporting and analyzing it that way. It’s the “not my job” phenomon, where you silo yourself because “you’re not responsible for what’s happening outside of the organic channel.” And that’s crap. Because it is your job. Because if SEO isn’t driving revenue, and if you’re not showing that SEO is driving demand, you’re not going to have a job. Saying SEO accounted for $20K in revenue is one thing, but saying that I was 45% of the total demand paints a much better picture for the executive.
The amount of data we have available to us as SEOs is astonishing. We have more actionable proof that what we’re doing drives more traffic, engagement and revenue than most marketing channels out there. Entries, visits, instances, page views, bounce rate, exit rate, pathing, conversion rate, AOV, revenue — each is important in their own regard, as they each tell a slightly different story. But the problem is we have so many metrics available that we’re drowning in it. This is enough to make my head swim. But reporting on all of these won’t do you any good. Bonce rate, conversion rate, entrances, exists, user feedback, form completion rate.
The problem is that we have no idea what to do with it, so we end up reporting on every number available. Just because you have the numbers doesn’t mean you have to use them.
SEO shouldn’t have the same success metrics as paid search. And online metrics certainly don’t live in a bubble.