4 Psych-Backed Marketing Techniques to Get Inside Your Buyer's Head

One of the fundamental steps in developing your Inbound strategy is identifying the right people your business should target (buyer personas) and crafting the right marketing messages to appeal to those people.

Although this seems like marketing 101, in practice, it’s surprisingly challenging.

Effective targeting requires you to get inside the head of the person you’re trying to sell to – that’s where Roger Dooley can help you.

Dooley is the author of Brainfluence: 100 Ways to Persuade and Convince Consumers with Neuromarketing as well as a marketing consultant, author of the Neuromarketing blog, and host of The Brainfluence Podcast.

Brainfluence combines research from the fields of psychology, neuroscience, and neuromarketing to help you understand how consumers make decisions and how to apply that knowledge to marketing. It can help you:

• Write more effective ad copy
• Describe your offers in a way that’s more enticing
• Choose design elements that spark certain emotions
• Increase the perceived value of your products and services

If you’re diving into the world of Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) or you simply want to increase sales, this book is a must-read.

You’ll have to pick up a copy to learn all 100 tactics, but this summary will cover four of the most valuable insights marketers should take away from this book. (There’s also a few more shared by a member of our team here.)

1. Reduce The Pain of Paying High Prices

In Brainfluence, Dooley discusses studies from Carnegie Mellon and Stanford University which analyzed the brain waves of people being encouraged to make a purchase.

When they looked at the brain scans, they found that when an offer didn’t resonate with the participant, activity was stimulated in the same sections of the brain as physical pain.

In other words, making a purchase that feels expensive (relative to each person) is literally painful to them.

Not only is this going to limit sales, but it will also lead to more instances of buyer’s remorse.

A simple trick to overcome this problem is to present the price in a way that’s less painful -- aka lowest terms.

For example, if an annual software subscription costs $240, to make the price more attractive, the software company could position it as only $20 per month (or even $0.66 per day, if they’re feeling wild.)

Another way to overcome the pain of a high price is to give your prospect a logical reason to support their purchase.

For instance, another study from Carnegie Mellon University found that when “thrifty spenders” were offered a massage, people were 26% less likely to buy if it was positioned for pleasure, while they were only 9% less likely to spend their money if the massage was pitched as back pain relief.  

The more ways you can help your prospect justify their purchase, the less painful it will be for them.

2. Baby Faces Sell More

Everyone love babies, so no big surprise here, right?

Research has found that emotional brain activity can be triggered from as little as 150 milliseconds of seeing a photo of a baby. Even babyfaced adults were found to have a similar effect.

The theory is that it is because babies are vulnerable and innocent and humans naturally have an emotional connection with children as an evolutionary instinct. Also, babyfaced adults represent youth, health, and energy – all traits that people of all backgrounds aspire to have more of.

Another tip that Dooley mentions regarding faces in your marketing images is that the face should look at what you want the viewer to focus on.

That could be the product, a CTA button, or anything else. Since faces are so engaging to us, we can’t help but look at what others are looking at.

3. Catch People Off-Guard

To learn more about the scientific reasons why you should catch your audience off guard, how to do it, and unlock the fourth brain trick, click "keep reading" below.