While the advertising industry is often packed with buzzwords and fads that fall out of favour, the concept of neuromarketing looks like it’s here to stay.
The importance of marketing for any brand or business is that it makes both new and existing customers aware of your products or services, engages them and ideally helps them make the buying decision. Furthermore, a marketing plan is essential for creating and maintaining demand, relevance and reputation.
Despite its gravity, how we approach marketing has changed dramatically in recent years, particularly given the shift towards online trading. Technology aside, it is reassuring to remember that marketing is fundamentally all about making a connection and neuromarketing is a practice that uses science to encourage this.
Why Neuromarketing Is The Future Of Advertising
By definition, the phrase ‘neuro’ relates to nerves or the nervous system. While neurologists are specialists who treat diseases of the brain and spinal cord, peripheral nerves and muscles, neuromarketing studies those same nerves to gauge audience responses.
In fact, Harvard Business Review defines neuromarketing as “the measurement of physiological and neural signals to gain insight into customers’ motivations, preferences and decisions, which can help inform creative advertising, product development, pricing and other marketing areas.”
Emotional connections have been proven to drive people towards making a purchase, so neuromarketing aims to improve customer communications and advertising campaigns through utilising existing tools linked to neuroscience, psychology and other behaviours.
With the end goal being to understand a buyer’s decision making process in order to create compelling products and services with more effective marketing campaigns, completing research for this purpose via brain scanning was first linked to Gerald Zaltman.
As a professor at Harvard Business School and the author and editor of twenty books, most recently ‘How Customers Think’ and ‘Marketing Metaphoria’ – Zaltman studied the human subconscious and how specific images can cause a positive emotional response and affect purchase decisions. Since then, many similar experiments and studies have been carried out by other researchers, shedding light on many hidden consumer behaviour aspects.
Of course, not everyone has access to the equipment required to perform an MRI, which is why modern neuromarketing also includes other techniques to assess consumer biometrics to detect attention, anxiety or even arousal. Examples of these include eye tracking to measure pupil dilation and fixation points, facial recognition software to detect emotional responses, and even measuring heart rate changes that may indicate anxiety or excitement.
Not only are large companies, such as Google, Microsoft, Disney, Hyundai and Coca-Cola, conscious of the possibilities of neuromarketing and make use of this new type of research, but many new or smaller companies also carry out these types of studies to know more about the decision-making process, what motivates purchasing decisions and how to craft effective advertising campaigns. Whatever the scale of the brand, neuromarketing is often seen as an investment to minimise the chances of advertising falling flat.
For ordinary small business owners, using marketing methods that are designed to invoke a specific emotion is an incredibly effective tool to engage with people, grab their attention and drive them to take action.
Emotional advertising can be used to elicit an emotional response such as happiness, fear or anger in a consumer, which means the ad has a good chance of being remembered. When used effectively in content marketing, social media and even email campaigns, content with heart had a higher chance of being memorable.
Although original content that packs a punch is essential if you want to gain traction online, the downside is that producing quality content takes time, effort, experience and resources. While you’re not alone if you can’t quite commit to that, the good news is that there’s never been a better time to consider outsourcing to the professionals.
The Key To Good Marketing Is Great Content
Here at Content Hive, producing top quality digital content is exactly what we do best. We have itemised a list of digital content services, and allocated credits next to each of these. This means that each month, you can use your credits with us to produce digital content such as blog articles, social media posts, videos and even animated Instagram stories. By using this model, we believe that it enables us to produce high quality content with faster delivery times.
If you aren’t quite sure where to start on your digital marketing journey and would like to speak to a professional, why not book in a free discovery call with us at Content Hive today to discuss how we can get your brand buzzing online.
