Web Marketing with Neuroscience – Tip of the Day #4

There are so many studies that rely on our understanding of neuroscience – marketing is perhaps the most prominent of these (outside of brain surgery!). Today we are looking at how you can improve your connections with customers, your web marketing in general, and of course your SEO performance, by paying attention to how your customers minds work and tailoring your website to make them take action.

Redback spider's mating ritual effectively combines all three important elements ... mating, food and danger!

Can I eat it? Will it eat me? Can I ‘mate’ with it?

The neuroscience: Whenever our brain encounters something new in the world, it tries to determine three things of it. These three things are closely linked to both personal survival and the survival of our species, which is an innate drive:

• Can I eat it?
• Will it eat me?
• Can I mate with it? (alternatively known as ‘Will it mate with me?’)

The web marketing tactic: Where you can, try to incorporate elements of each of the three ‘items’ these questions represent into your web content and marketing for it. If you can relate your product to food, love or danger, your visitors’ brains are wired to instantly pay attention. They will be more likely to read more content, more likely to explore the site further, and more likely to engage with your message than if you have a dry, corporate site. To incorporate food, love and danger into your website, you can do things like:

• 1. Use photos of attractive women or men in your marketing – or even ordinary women or men with suggestive expressions or poses
  2. Use a little lateral thinking to connect pictures of food or people eating with your products or services. Happy people are usually a good illustration for a wide variety of products – juts pop a little food in their mouths!
  3. Use a little lateral thinking to connect pictures of dangerous things with your content
  4. Highlight in your web copy how your products either help you become more attractive, avoid danger, or remain able to feed yourself (usually related to earning or saving money).

Of note: As with all of these neuroscience tips, don’t overdo it. People can see straight through it when you stretch logic to fit one of these characteristics in, and it usually garners more derision than genuine interest.