BS meaning behavioral science…
At Smith, we see so many mediocre marketing communications that don’t make sense, aren’t persuasive and don’t stand out. And more importantly – don’t work.
For years, we’ve worked with our clients to embed behavioral science principles into all work we create.
It amazes us how many marketing or creative agencies don’t have any insight into how the human brain works.
If you don’t know how the brain works – your marketing communications are just guesswork.
Whatever your goal is with marketing communications, here are a few techniques that could improve them.
1 – SOCIAL PROOF
Sometimes your customers don’t know how big you are, how long you’ve been going, or the customers that you serve.
By utilising social proof, you can build trust and improve the chances of people getting in contact with you.
Examples of this could be: Your client list, sizes of projects you work on, how popular you are, how many products you’ve sold in a particular region, or the order value from the last 12 months.
2 – FRAMING
Sometimes it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.
How you frame a message is incredibly important. It can help make the trivial sound different and framing a message in a certain way can help it resonate with your audience.
We helped online component business Accu tell the world how popular they are by framing a message in a certain way.
They could have said, components delivered, or they could say they deliver 50 million ever year.
Which sounds more compelling?
3 – LOSS AVERSION
As humans, we feel losses twice as much as gains. If you were to lose £100, you’d feel it twice as much as gaining £100.
So many sales messages talk about what you save. But sometimes people can’t work out what is good and what is bad?
In your sales messages, rather than saying you’ll save £10 per day, say you are losing £20 per day, compared to other providers.
We recommended changing a client’s sales message from ‘run this system for 56p a day’ – to – ‘if you aren’t using this system you are losing £16 a day’ – see the difference?
4 – ANCHORING
Anchoring refers to information you read first that determines how you experience the rest of the information.
If I told you a product was going to cost £100,000
But for you, it will be £30,000 – the latter figure sounds like a bargain – because of the initial figure.
5 – SALIENCE
Something that most marketers don’t know, is we are hard-wired to pay attention to things that are different.
We find most organisations don’t adopt this as they are actually too scared of standing out.
Our brain draws attention to things that are different.
This is mainly due to a survival mechanism – things that are different, could be danger.
In a sea of sameness, doing something to be distinctive can help you get noticed.
A great example of this is our work for national hire company LOC Hire.
When the majority of the industry just adopted a small sticker on their equipment. We recommend
going bold on all their touchpoints. From their website, to their cabins.
The bold approach that LOC have adopted has propelled their sales efforts and help them become market leaders in Scotland.
LOC Hire had people saying their cabins were ‘too loud’, but people vote with their feet and customers said yes.
6 – THE CONTRAST PRINCIPLE
A great technique to frame value is to contrast things.
When we compare things, the value becomes clear.
Contrast a competitor with your service.
Contrast a cost, and then how you make it more valuable.
Aldi do a great job of this in their advert.
They clearly communicate their value compared to an other low-cost supermarket chain.
Aldi are winning in the mind, especially crucial when times are tough.
7 – EASE
From our experience, a lot of companies that sell business-to-business and technical products fall into this trap.
Find a B2B website and you’ll be guaranteed to see some form of acronyms and jargon, that makes sense to the company, but doesn’t make sense to the person who’s buying it.
Make it easy.
Use language that people understand.
Don’t add fluff.
Make your services simple.
For a multi-million pound highly manufacturer, we changed their entire product naming – to make it easier to understand.
From BIG SPACE 24, to Canteen Office Space 24ft.
This made more sense to customers and as the managing director said ‘we find it easier to sell our products’.
People are information rich, but time poor – make it easy for them to understand.
And don’t make these decisions in the boardroom, because you aren’t the customer. Test it with customers and get their opinions. Base it on insight, not assumptions.
Not all creative marketing companies are made equal. Some copy ideas, some base it on past successes and some just want to create something new, that they want to create – without thinking about the customer.
There’s only one thing that matters in business, and that’s results.
Effective marketing is based on how humans think.
Give us a call if you want discuss how we can help you be more effective, backed by research-led insights and evidence.