Career Changes: Different Perspective
There was no thought to product-customer match, nothing about meeting the customers’ needs, and market research wasn’t even considered, talkless conducted. Just go out and sell, sell, sell. I barely knew what I was selling or why anyone would need it. It was a horrible experience.
I can honestly say that I never would have guessed in a thousand years that I would willingly consider going back into marketing of my own accord. But that’s what essentially copywriting is. It’s marketing. What makes conversion copywriting so interesting to me is the infusion of psychology, research, and writing skills to craft copy that gets customers to take action.
As a Conversion Copywriter, you have to know your customers better than they know themselves. You have to understand what triggers them and pushes them towards action, their motivations, fears, uncertainties, and doubts. These are things many people don’t even know about themselves.
That’s what I do for fun in my day-to-day life for free. I look at my neighbor and wonder why he would think it’s ok to blast music in the middle of the night. When my boss is applying pressure at work, I wonder what’s going on to make him behave in such a manner.
I can’t believe I now have the opportunity to study consumers and figure out what makes them tick and use that information to propel them towards better versions of themselves. The more I get into the Conversion Optimization mini degree from the CXL Institute, the more intrigued I am by it.
People and Psychology
This week we dove deeply into Psychology and looked at different persuasion techniques — yes, Robert Cialdini’s 7 Principles of Persuasion came up, yet again (I really need to read that book!). We also looked at the Fogg Behavior Model (Behavior = Motivation x Ability x Trigger) which says desired paid behavior happens when motivation, ability, and trigger all happen.
We talked a little bit about Neuromarketing and how our brains are dominated by the old brain, which is responsible for our decisions. I’m not entirely sure I 100% believe this whole new, middle, and old brain stuff but I’m open to learning more about it. I have so many questions like, who or what taught the Old brain all the stuff it knows? Does the Old brain govern instinct? Is that what instinct is, the Old brain at work?
This is all just so interesting.
The longest unit of this module was “A Big List of Persuasion Techniques.” I thought it would never end. As the title states, it was a big ass, long list of persuasion techniques. Thankfully, I was taking notes because I’m not going to lie, as soon as I finished writing down my notes, I promptly forgot everything.
Social Proof
The social proof — any third party’s unbiased proof that’s outside of a claim your company would make — module looked at the importance of social proof in the purchasing decisions of customers. As I was going through the module I found myself thinking about how dependent I am on social proof when making buying decisions.
If I’m going to buy something on Amazon, I’ll definitely check out the customer reviews section. If I want to purchase a book on audible.com, I’ll check the reviews of others who have already purchased and listened to it. On more than one occasion I’ve changed my mind on a purchase due to a negative review.
If I want to make a purchase and the item has NO reviews, I immediately move on. Why doesn’t it have any reviews? What’s wrong with it that no one thought to comment on it? Too many unknowns for me to proceed with the purchase.
The module advised that we take social proof up a notch by including full names and pictures. I’m a little iffy on this because I wouldn’t like having my picture and name on some random feedback that I’ve given and I’m inclined to believe that others won’t either.
Even negative social proof helps, in that it makes positive social proof more believable. This is so true as I’ve found myself not trusting overly glowing customer feedback on some sites. I would swear that the company sent staff online to write glowing reviews.
Intro to Neuromarketing
Neuromarketing applies neuroscience to marketing. It looks at behavioral science and neuroscience in a bid to do a better job at marketing.
This is the area of Conversion Optimization that gets really scientific with tests like EEG, Biometrics, Eyetracking, and Facial Coding (looks at the expressions on people’s faces, even very fleeting expressions called micro-expressions to determine what their real thoughts are).
I think it was during this module that my perception of marketing changed altogether. I mean, if companies are spending so much money and effort to study human behavior and track brain activity to figure out which brain areas are activating just to predict behavior, there must be more to marketing than I previously thought.
Now, much of Neuromarketing is still being touted as a bunch of bologna, but it’s slowly gaining credibility.
Learning Methods
One thing that I appreciate about the CXL Institute is the way they continuously change up the learning methods. From module to module, it’s something different. One module could require a lot of reading and another would be mainly video. Just when I think I can’t take another wall of text (not exactly a wall because they strive to keep the paragraphs short, and easy to read), they change up the next module with a video.
Even with the video modules, most of them have text translations at the bottom. So I find myself watching and reading along, which helps me digest the information. Yes, I do realize that I just finished complaining about reading a wall of text, but as I’ve been learning on this course, human beings are complex creatures.
I’m excited to go through the rest of the modules because I find that the topics I think I won’t be interested in, are the ones that resonate with me the most.
I think what surprises me the most is how much more complex marketing is than I originally thought or was led to believe. My (traumatic) experience with marketing is going around asking people to subscribe or open an account (I worked in a bank). It was demoralizing, to say the least, and I did NOT have a flair for it.
There was no thought to product-customer match, nothing about meeting the customers’ needs, and market research wasn’t even considered, talkless conducted. Just go out and sell, sell, sell. I barely knew what I was selling or why anyone would need it. It was a horrible experience.
I can honestly say that I never would have guessed in a thousand years that I would willingly consider going back into marketing of my own accord. But that’s what essentially copywriting is. It’s marketing. What makes conversion copywriting so interesting to me is the infusion of psychology, research, and writing skills to craft copy that gets customers to take action.
As a Conversion Copywriter, you have to know your customers better than they know themselves. You have to understand what triggers them and pushes them towards action, their motivations, fears, uncertainties, and doubts. These are things many people don’t even know about themselves.
That’s what I do for fun in my day-to-day life for free. I look at my neighbor and wonder why he would think it’s ok to blast music in the middle of the night. When my boss is applying pressure at work, I wonder what’s going on to make him behave in such a manner.
I can’t believe I now have the opportunity to study consumers and figure out what makes them tick and use that information to propel them towards better versions of themselves. The more I get into the Conversion Optimization mini degree from the CXL Institute, the more intrigued I am by it.
