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You must laser target your website visitors

19th April 2012

Multiple Targets mean Multiple WebsitesWebsite visitors know what they want. They come to any of your web pages for one specific thing – often a highly specific thing. If they can’t see it immediately, they are off to another web page, in an instant. But how do your website visitors focus in on exactly what they want, when your web pages are full of so many interesting diversions and distractions? How do people see the “wood for the trees” and determine whether your web page offers exactly what they are after, in such a short space of time?

A clue is found in some remarkable new research involving probing the brains of people with epilepsy using neurosurgical techniques during which the patients were conscious. The scientists found that even in noisy environments people were able to focus in on specific sounds they wanted to hear. That’s long been known in psychology and is called the “cocktail party effect”, where you can hear someone from the other side of the room mention your name above the sound of the people closer to you. But, this amazing piece of new research found that the brain appears to actually only be aware of the sounds it wanted to hear. Indeed, further than this, the researchers were able to use the recordings they made of their patients’ brain activity and work out the actual words they were really listing to.

It appears that the individuals in this study had already decided what they wanted to listen to amongst the various conversations they could have heard. But – and this is the crucial bit – their brains only focused their hearing on the bit they wanted and only processed that. In other words, they ignored everything else going on around them not only at their conscious level, but also deep within their brain. The stuff they were not interested in was not being heard.

The research highlights one of the issues which have puzzled psychologists for decades – the way we can selectively pay attention to things. As you sit reading this, there are several other things around you to which you could pay attention, but you are focusing solely on these words. So, are you ignoring everything else around you, or are you aware of it but using your ability to focus  to carry on reading this, in spite of something else going on?

This new study suggests our brains concentrate only on the material we want, to the detriment of everything else.  There is clearly much more neurological research to be done, but the study implies that when we consciously choose to pay attention to something our brain helps us achieve this by ignoring everything else. And that simple process has important implications for web design.

It means, for instance, that if prior to visiting your site your visitors have thought that all they want to do is read your latest blog post, their brains will focus on exactly that – ignoring your adverts, not being aware of your sign-up forms for your newsletter, nor even considering travelling to other parts of your site perhaps.

Our brains appear to have the ability to have laser sharp attention – and that means web design must be similarly laser sharp. Looking good is not enough; focusing specifically on exactly what your website visitors have decided, in advance, what they want to do is vital for success in the instant-decision online world. It is just more evidence that one website aimed at a rather generalised target audience is simply not good enough. We need highly targeted, highly specific web pages which focus exactly on what our visitors want to pay attention to.

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Categories: Internet Psychology Tags: , , , , , , ,

Scarce products sell more in economic troubles

17th April 2012

Last Chance to ButWhen you visit trade shows or local markets you will often hear the cries of the sales people saying things like “only a few left”, “last ones available”, or “buy now as I’m down to my last box”. We all know that hidden from view they probably have another truck-load of products to sell, but we are drawn in by the relative scarcity of what’s on offer. Humans are fundamentally focused on scarce items. It goes back to our time as hunter-gatherers when our very survival depended on making sure we had brought in all of the foodstuffs that kept us going. It caused our brains to concentrate on things in short supply which were necessary for our survival.

Nowadays, that throw-back to ancient times is still hard-wired inside our heads. When something is scarce we want it all the more. Online you find several Internet Marketers using this “trick”. They tell you there are only 100 copies of their ebook available and they’ve already sold 72 of them so you had better buy one quickly before the stock runs dry..! We know that they may well release another 100 next week, another 100 the week after, or that they may simply be lying to us…! But the implication of scarcity is enough to make us interested.

Now, new research shows that we are even more interested in scarce items during economically tough times. The world has been in various states of economic problems for the past four years, with recessions, downturns and rising unemployment.  The study found that when we perceive ourselves to be in some kind of economic deprivation our visual system becomes more focused on scarce items. This can be both good and bad.

For consumers it may well mean they end up buying things which are not really necessary, so they start spending their own scarce financial resources on unnecessary items, which seem appealing because of their relative scarcity. For marketers, there is the obvious opportunity to increase sales by emphasising the scare nature of what’s on offer. For instance, instead of having 100 products available, drop it to a mere 25. Making things even more scarce will increase overall sales, the study suggests, during recessions.

However, the problem for the Internet Marketers who lie about the scarcity of their products is that eventually we stop taking notice of them. We realise pretty quickly we are being conned and as a result they lose trust and credibility. You should only emphasise scarcity of your products and services if they are truly scarce.

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Categories: Internet Marketing, Internet Psychology, Online Business Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

Buying from social networks could make you sad

10th April 2012

Money does not equal happinessMoney and happiness do not mix. There is plenty of psychological research on the connection between your financial wealth and the degree to which you have a happy life. It is not a straight relationship. When people are in absolute poverty they are frequently happy; they know no other life and they tend to have significant social support. When people have some money, they often want more – believing that the extra cash will make them happier. But as they gain higher incomes, their happiness frequently goes down and so they simply need more money (they think) to make them happy. And the billionaires? Well, it’s not the money that makes them happy. Rather, it is the power, the influence and the sense of achievement that drives their happiness. Overall, research tends to show that acquiring greater wealth is unrelated to happiness. Indeed, there are findings which suggest that the richer you become, the more depressed you get.

Now there is new research which looks at the connection between money, materialism, happiness and social activity. And it is not a pleasant finding.

The study, conducted at Northwestern University, shows that as people acquire more wealth and increasingly buy more things, they get more depressed and less social. In itself, that finding does not add a great deal to the existing knowledge on the relationship between happiness and consumerism. However, there was a twist to this study. Rather than being a look backwards at what people did, it was conducted using experiments which revealed that even if people were not materialistic in nature and did not actually buy things, simply being exposed to the “make more money” or “have more stuff” kind of advertising also made them sadder and less social.

So, what do we see online – particularly on social networks? There is advert after advert telling you how to get rich quick, plus there is the social pressure to buy things because your friends “liked” them. Not only are we surrounded online by advertising and social pressure to increase our materialistic desires, we feel pressured into doing so because our friends have bought things.

This new research implies this is a toxic mix – simply being surrounded by consumerism makes us sadder – but it also makes us less social. The advertising social networks carry could also be their downfall. For social networks to work we need to be as social as possible, but as this research reveals the more materialistic advertising we are exposed to, the less social we become. Hence, the more social networks carry advertising, the less social activity we will undertake, defeating the entire object of the social network itself.

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How to engage your website visitors

9th April 2012

Students who send text messages during lectures are much less likely to do well with their studies than the youngsters who stay focused on what their teachers are saying. According to new research, students who are highly “self regulated” and who therefore stay focused on the lesson – instead of texting their friends – are able to learn more and do better in exams and tests as a result. None of this is much of a surprise of course. Before SMS text messaging was invented – when I was a student – some of the more easily distracted individuals would pass notes amongst each other, or simply daydream. It’s probable that ever since people have been attending classes, some people have paid less attention than others.

A mobile phone, however, makes it easier to be distracted and is much more exciting than a note on a piece of paper. Plus it is interactive – it involves the user.

And that is why they are distracted from the lecture. People with low attention spans need greater amounts of interaction to keep their brain stimulated. So rather than telling students they should stop texting if they want to learn more, what we should be doing is telling lecturers they should be more engaging by increasing the amount of interactivity they have in their lessons. Interactive lessons are better for all students – the “self-regulated” and those with low attention spans. The poor performance of the in-class texters is more the fault of boring, poor lecturers, rather than the students themselves.

This is all a lesson for website development. Online, the typical attention span is measured in seconds – often fractions of a second. Apart from the fact that people want to know – instantly – that the web page they have arrived at is exactly what they were looking for, website visitors are keen to know what they can DO with a web page. When you visit Google you know what to do – type something in that search box. With Amazon you know what to do – click on something and buy it. With Facebook you instantly know what to do – discuss things with your friends. Each of these sites is immediately and obviously interactive and people pay attention to these sites in their millions.

However, many websites have little interaction built in and so rather like a boring lecturer they tend to get lower levels of engagement. Signals that people can comment, or that they can share your content, or that they can download things are all clues to interactivity and thereby help engagement. But if your website can increase levels of interaction, so much the better. For instance, if you run a finance site have some kind of calculator available, if you run a consultancy site, some kind of questionnaire will help and if you run a review site allowing others to add their own star ratings will help. In other words, seek to increase the amount of interaction with your website and you will raise the engagement. And if you do that, you’ll avoid people sending out text messages whilst reading your web pages..!

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Want to make money online? Think about the future, not the past

6th April 2012

Think about the future not the past for internet marketing successThere is a real problem with Internet Marketing; it is focused on the past. Google Analytics, for instance, provides you with history, telling you what people DID on your website. The various books and guides you can buy or download tell you how other “marketing geniuses” MADE their money. And all of the market research information you can lay your hands on is based on what people did in the PAST. Nothing really tells you what you should sell or do in the future.

That is a real problem; you cannot sell to people in the past, you can’t do what people did in the years gone by to make your fortune in the months ahead. What we really need is some kind of soothsayer who can predict what people will be buying in the future to help us set up websites and create products that people WILL want to buy. We don’t need advice telling us that this is what people USED TO buy.

Toy retailers know the problem well. They know what people bought for their children LAST Christmas. But they have already placed their orders for toys they will be selling in six months time – hoping that their predictions of what people will want turn out to be correct. Each year it is a big gamble. But when they get it right, goodness me does it turn into massive financial success. When their predictions of future toy-buying are correct, their tills are ringing constantly, demand is high and stocks run low.

For toy shops, thinking about the future is a way of life. But for many Internet Marketers, thinking is focused on the past – where people WENT on their website, what they DID and what they USED TO buy. And as many psychologists will tell you, past behaviour is only a weak predictor of future behaviour. What your customers did in the past is not necessarily what they will do in the future.

Successful businesses focus much more on the future than they do on thinking about the past. However, in these recessionary times, many companies are focused on the previous good times – how they can get BACK to those days. “If only we could get the good old days back,” they whine. But there are hugely successful firms doing well even in an economic downturn and they are spending most of their time thinking about the future.

This is backed up by interesting new research which shows that the GDP of a country is directly related to the kinds of Google searches which take place within that nation. When the bulk of searches are future related, GDP is high; when the searches are mostly about the present and the past, GDP is low. There is a clear and consistent link between search behaviour and economic success of a country. When most people are focused on the future, the economy thrives it seems.

So, if you are having troubles with getting your online business working effectively, or you wish you could make more profits than you did in the past, start thinking more about the future and your online success is bound to follow you.

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