How to Make Marketing Messages More Pervasive.

So basically I went through the alphabet from A to Z and for each letter I told the audience about a behavioural science principle that they could use to make their marketing messages more persuasive. So for example A was the authority principle and we went all the way down to Z which was the Zygarnik effect and everything in between, one for each letter of the alphabet. I just said use these. They're easy to apply and you'll start to see very fast results. Awesome. So if you could narrow down some top tips for using persuasive language to drive engagement in marketing, what would you narrow it down to? So a lot of times we're trying to get people to engage with our emails or with our blog post or even our direct mail for that matter and there are some words that qualify as what I call eye magnet words and I call them that because they can literally leap off the screen or the page and attract the eye and so some of those words include the word easy, the word quick, the word improved and the word secret. The interesting thing about secret is human beings find information that they don't think is widely available to be more persuasive. So we're more persuaded by information that's not widely available. So you say that you've got the secret or the inside story or a sneak peek or the look behind or the real story. Those are things that peak people's interest and people just go to it and consume the content and engage. Have you seen like an evolution kind of because video, obviously we're a video marketing platform, right? Has video changed a little bit with how we like dissuade people? Yes and no because I say no because a picture has always been worth a thousand words, right? That's what they say. But yes, even worse, these days video is huge. Video we're watching it explode. So many people would prefer to get the information they want via video and so there are certain video techniques or I should say certain visual and imagery techniques that work very well with video. I mean certainly we talked about copy and you could use those for supers and art cards but what we have found is human beings are hardwired to look at other people's faces. So if you have the opportunity to use faces, use the eye contact, people follow eye gaze so have people look towards the product, the service, whatever it is that you want the viewer to look at. Charts and graphs work very well because they add instant credibility so there are a number of different things that we can do from a visual perspective to tap into some of these automatic behavioral science based decision making shortcuts. What are some of your favorite campaigns in the last year that have used really good resources whether with your own clients or any just seeing? Oh gosh that's a tough question for marketers. So one of them, we just finished a campaign for one of our clients and they got more response in the month of January than they had gotten the previous 12 months so the whole last year didn't beat what they got with the campaign that we launched for them in January and that used a lot of behavioral science, social proof and loss aversion and things like that which was awesome. One of the things that I think is interesting from a content perspective these days is what I think it's GE is doing with some of their videos and their what would it be like to be campaign. I think that's very intriguing and I think that's pulling people in. I didn't work on it but I found it to be very interesting. So obviously it's important to write persuasively but how do you measure it? How do you see it's actually working? Yeah that's the million dollar question isn't it? So I think there are a series of answers. If you're sending out emails, you're looking at open rates and bounce rates and click through rates. If you're sending out videos, you're looking at what people watch and how long they watch and do they rewatch and do they forward. At the end of the day we're always looking at sales numbers and of course it's hard to do complete attribution like which channel gets the credit. I'm a big believer in multi-channel actually but at the end of the day what we really want are those sales and I think that's the final proof point. What's the future of writing persuasively, content marketing and marketing in general? Good question but I have my take on that. My take on that is the future is going to have a lot to do with applying behavioral science. Social scientists and behavioral economists are uncovering more and more information every day that indicates that we all have these automatic reflexive behaviors, these decision and we as marketers need to harness that and use it. If we were playing baseball and I were a pitcher and I knew that the batter coming up was likely going to bunt, I would adjust my pitch based on that. That is the extent of my sports analogy and my sports. I'd go red socks. I'm not a big sports person but this analogy I think works because as marketers if we know that someone is likely to do something almost without thinking, almost reflexively, if we serve up X then let's serve up X so that they'll do what we want them to do. So I think that the future for marketing is going to see more and more behavioral science and behavioral economics woven in.