All Marketers are Liars
Persuading Customers when they ignore your marketing
By Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg
“Any conversion process is like a leaky bucket – you pour water in and water spurts out all the holes. You can keep adding more and more water, to the bucket, or you can patch up the holes. Clearly, patching the holes first makes more sense.”
First off, a lot of this information is probably very relevant to B2B marketing where one is going to run into a lot of very considered purchases.
This is a follow-up to “Call to Action – Secret Formulas to improve online results”. Here, after covering how marketing has changed with new media, and why customers respond differently than they used to, it goes on to discuss how you can anticipate what they require, and use “persuasion architecture” to ‘bridge the new marketer/consumer gap.
The first few chapters cover things like branding, Maslowe’s hierarchy, and other marketing concepts just about anyone reading this, or this book will probably be familiar with, although this helps set up the context.
In the view of the Eisenbergs, the goal of branding is to plant your solution in the customer’s brain so that when the problem arises, the customer recalls your brand as the solution.
New media means the web marketer must go beyond their traditional roles of raising awareness and driving traffic and extend themselves into sales and customer relations.
Lack of customer confidence is a key customer risk.
Done right, a website can increase the intimacy of the experience and set up a greater customer connection to your product or service.
Customers are looking to answer their own concerns. If you do not answer their questions, they will get information elsewhere.
Focus on the problem recognition phase – If you can focus on this, you can create the right content and branding message and present the right information. The further they are into this process, the more difficult it will be to present your product as a solution. Know how customers frame their questions
Persuasive momentum is essential – what information do you need to get customers to the place where they will feel confident in taking that next step?
Feedback loops are important. Don’t push customers beyond where they are in their buying process. Look outside the company for info, not inside.
Create personas that focus on modes of customer behavior – use psychographics and other information. Methodical, Spontaneous, Humanistic, and Competitive. Divide and answer their questions.
What seems like late in the book, the authors get into some solid persuasion scenarios that give one an idea of what they feel will be the most effective websites.
Marketing is about spreading ideas, and spreading ideas is the single most important output of our civilization. – Seth Godin
