Let me ask you a question - how much effort do you really put into crafting your messaging? Your instant answer is probably, lots! After all, you sweat over your copy crafting beautiful prose, editing, refining and then editing again, and then getting buy-in from all of your stakeholders from sales to product development. So, perhaps let me ask you a different question - when you finally release your carefully sculpted new campaign into the wild are you SURE it is going to really resonate with your desired prospects and deliver you the sales result you are hoping for? The answer here may be - well how can you ever really tell? You might say that great copywriting is an art, not a science.
When the great retail magnate John Wanamaker uttered that now famous quote: “I know half my advertising doesn’t work, I just don’t know which half”, this was undoubtedly the case. But over 100 years on, the huge advances made in the field of neuroscience have given rise not just to new knowledge, but a new(ish) term in the marketing lexicon - neuromarketing. With neuromarketing, we can turn the art of copywriting into the science of message creation.
The basics
The good news is that whether you realised it or not, you have probably been applying some sound neuromarketing techniques to your campaigns for years. This is because unless this blog is being read a lot further afield than expected then we are, of course, all human. We are (most of us) blessed with common sense and an instinct for what will really resonate with our prospects. A good example is the ‘free gift, a time-honoured hook to reel in prospective buyers. And we just know that this works, right? Well, using neuroimaging techniques such as fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) we now know that parts of the brain actually light up when we are presented with the ‘free gift’ and we have an actual chemical response that compels us to take advantage of the offer.
What does this mean? It means we can, if needed, use tools such as fMRI, which measures large areas of brain activity and EEG (electroencephalography), which measures external brain activity, to prove which messages will really work.
You expect me to do what!?
Don’t all leave at once! We are absolutely not suggesting that every time you pen a new Facebook ad you should be stuffing some unsuspecting member of the public into a brain scanner to A/B test the copy and design! Luckily there have been a myriad of studies published since the turn of the millennium that give us clear and actionable information we can apply when creating our own campaigns. Watch out for our upcoming neuromarketing tips and tricks series that will give you some experiments that you can try for yourself to supercharge your content creation.
