Leverage the power of emotions to enhance your marketing

Every decision your customer makes consists of many conscious and subconscious emotions. The key to success in any business is an understanding of psychology and human behaviour. We all have the same basic mental triggers and needs that drive action. If we understand these psychological triggers, we can craft more effective marketing messages and increase sales. Below is an introduction to 7 important psychological and emotional triggers that can increase your sales, backed up with examples and further reading.

1. Belonging

Human nature gives most people a strong desire to belong to something; a group, a clan, a gang, a family, or a social network. Call it what you will, but very often customers purchase goods and services to show and feel a sense of belonging to their chosen ‘thing’…be it real, or fabricated. They even carry out some highly illogical activities just…

Innovative techniques and examples of engaging web and mobile designs

Gone are the days of promoting your brand face-to-face or through those mailbox flyers and ads in the local newspaper that no one reads anymore. And unless you have a marketing budget equal to the "big boys" you won't be buying commercial time at the next Super Bowl. Today, you will have to be "lean and mean" with your marketing dollars and get very smart and creative about the design of your content, so that you achieve continued customer and potential customer engagement.

Engagement is an Emotional Phenomenon

People "Engage" when their emotions are triggered, either positive or negative. Thus, the goal of content design must be to stimulate emotions that will influence behaviours and motivate customers/potential customers to act. As important as it is to define your target market, then, it is just as important to stimulate emotional engagement, happiness, excitement, surprise, and satisfaction. When these…

6 tactics to get started with Customer Activation

As a marketing leader you know that each customer experiences numerous touch points with your company throughout their lifecycle. With Lifecycle marketing it’s the job of marketing to ensure that each interaction has a positive impact and moves the customer on to the next stage. But how can you measure the success of your combined efforts and their impact on your customer’s lifecycle? It's time to think about Customer Activation... Customer Activation means motivating customers to move to the next stage of their lifecycle faster than they would on their own.

But, how do you activate your customers when you’re interacting with millions?

You need to think about your customers' lifecycle from potential customer to eventual advocacy. Cultivating relationships with your customers throughout their lifecycle is key to extracting maximum value from them. Unfortunately many marketers fail in activation through not delivering effective, relevant emails. The problem…

5 areas to invest in, to improve your online audience engagement

Never in the history of marketing have methods changed so rapidly; the fluid nature of the Internet requires constant innovation and flexibility. While 2015 will bring plenty of changes in the coming months, there are a number of things you can do now to maximize your success using some available tools.

Tip 1: Invest in 'Contextual Marketing'

OutMarket CEO, You Mon Tsang, believes 'contextual marketing' is the key to Internet marketing success this year. In other words, you should be pursuing data-driven marketing that leverages the information you’re able to gather from your customers. He claims this will allow you to 'deliver personalized and relevant content at the right place, at the right time.' The question is, how do you accurately gather that information? Depending on the tools you have available, it might be as simple as tracking social…

A summary of new research giving the CMO viewpoint 

In our Managing Digital Marketing 2015 report we summarised our recent research into the changes to processes, structure and teams needed for managing digital marketing. A broader viewpoint is available in this new research, The Next Era of Marketing (free download, registration needed) from The Economist sponsored by Marketo. This new report included responses from senior marketers in larger organisations worldwide. 478 CMOs and senior marketing executives worldwide were survey. More than 50% of respondents hold the CMO title or top marketing position. Respondents wee located in North America (33%), Europe (30%), Asia-Pacific (29%) and Rest of World—which encompasses Africa and Latin America (9%). More than 50% of survey respondents (52%) hail from companies with more than US$500m in revenue; 20% have revenue of over US $5bn. Here's my brief summary to the implications of the report.

Changes to the structure of the marketing organisation

A…

Simon Swan's interview with Andrew Nicholson, Founder of the-Guku showing how behavioural economics influences customer online purchases and growing demand for Data?

Andrew is the founder of the-Guku, a digital marketing consultancy specialising in behavioural economics and the relationship this plays in influencing customers through their online purchase patterns. Guku combine #DigitalMarketing, #BehavioralEconomics & #Psychology know-how to understand your customers better than they understand themselves! In my interview with Andrew, he lifts the lid on the growing demand for data on behavioural economics,  real-life examples of companies already successfully using these techniques and Andrew’s personal journey of  launching his very own consultancy…

Q. You seem to have uncovered an interesting niche in web psychology, can you summarise what this is all about?

Absolutely.  As I progressed through my MSc, it became clear that there was a huge understanding of marketing technology, but a relative dearth…

How I boosted my lead generation with visitor tracking software, in conjunction with blogging, pay per click, email and social media outreach.

When you’re growing an audience, and converting website visitors into customers, you need a watertight marketing funnel.

The sad truth is that most of us convert less than 5 per cent of our website visitors into contacts, meaning that more than 95% of visitors leave our sites, potentially never to be seen again.

So what steps can we take to improve our website marketing, tighten up our funnel, and generate more leads from what we have already?

I faced this challenge earlier this year, and have written this post to share my experience with you. 

My website was only four months old, so I had insufficient visitor data in Analytics, and I was up against a tight deadline. My challenge was that I needed to…

Introducing the 7 principles of engagement marketing

Just a few generations ago, the world of doing business was driven by face-to-face relationships.  Many of us have heard stories from grandparents who talked about their butcher or baker as if they were old friends. These unique and intimate relationships were powerful, built strong relationships with customers and ultimately drove customer loyalty. This concept was one of the main casualties of the digital revolution – as buying moved into online channels and a plethora of new tools and channels became available to marketers to help them to communicate with customers in a digital world. Databases were blasted, demand was generated and victory was achieved – in the short-term at least. But in today’s digital world, buyers are more becoming ever more empowered.  Steadily, buyers have acquired the power to define their own buying process so the days…

New platforms and techniques for rapidly engaging online audiences

The increasing pace of life means that what little time we have is becoming more and more squeezed. This compression of time is leading to a compression of communication which has some notable implications for brands. One of the big trends for 2014 is the rise of image centric sites such as Pinterest which according to the Global Web Index grew 150% in 2013 and shows no signs of slowing. This format of image based content represents the ultimate distillation of information and ideas.

Density of communication

We’ve gone from reading websites and blogs, to scanning tweets to glancing at rapid sequences of images. It’s the editorial equivalent of skipping a fry up for a breakfast bar on the train.

Video continues to grow as shown in …

How to create a water-tight email marketing strategy for building customer loyalty

The traditional definition of customer loyalty is a financial one– your most loyal customers are clearly those who keep returning to do business with you. But loyalty in the digital world has much wider implications.  For some organizations it can be the bald metric of how frequently their customers do business with them. For others, such as online retailers, it is also a measure of how often customers share favourable reviews or feedback on the organization or brand. However you define and measure customer loyalty Customer satisfaction vs. loyalty At the heart of any loyalty-driving campaign lies the need to raise customer satisfaction levels.

Ten steps to building customer loyalty

Step 1. Gain senior management and cross-business commitment to raising customer satisfaction across the enterprise.

Focus on the channel that lets you build intimacy. One of the most effective…