The Psychology Of Marketing And Attention

Most entrepreneurs have visions, but they lack the understanding of marketing and psychology to bring their offer to the market successfully.

Look at a software startup for example, it’s great that your product is revolutionary and all, but if you can’t put it in front of customers effectively, it doesn’t matter.

So let’s break down the basics of marketing and human persuasion so you’ll never suffer from this.

Markets & Niches

A market is a specific group of people who share the same desires, characteristics and pains, the big three are Health, Wealth and Relationship, every single other market are zoomed in versions of these three.

A niche is a segmentation of the market based on specific characteristics that may vary in the market like strength training in the health market for example.

I won’t go into sub-niches, but you get the idea, we can zoom in as much as we want.

Business must not only identify the market that needs their solution but actively target a group of potential customers that are the perfect fit for the solution. Each group can be divided into smaller segments based on demographics like age, location, income, lifestyle.

Awareness & Sophistication Spectrum

It is essential to know how to communicate your offer to the target market, identify where they are in the spectrum and use it to guide your message.

• Unaware: No knowledge of the problem or the subject.

• Problem aware: They recognize there is a problem or challenge but may not know much about it.

• Solution aware: Aware of the potential solutions or approaches available for the problem.

• Product aware: Aware of YOUR solution to the problem.

• Most aware: They know the vast impact the problem is having on their quality of life.

Are they problem aware or solution aware? How educated on the subject is your audience?

No matter where they land on the spectrum your job is to educate them, by pressing on their pain, leveraging their desires and showing how your product is the right one for solving their problem or alleviate their desire.

Where Marketing And Psychology Meet

The markets and niches are based on human needs and motivators. People don’t take actions based on logic or facts, people take action based on emotion.

• How strong is their pains and the need of a solution?

• How strong is their desire for the solution?

People are either running from pain or running towards desire!

Most have tried something to solve their pain or alleviate their desire. The issue is they’ve found a roadblock so they have plateaued.

• What is keeping them from achieving their goal? What mistakes are they making? Understand the solution.

• What do they need to do to achieve their desired outcome? Attach the product, to the solution, to the roadblock.

Human Motivators

People only pay attention if you are presenting value, and the attention is always, ALWAYS connected to their pains, desires and roadblocks.

Cycle of persuasion

This is the path you must take your audience for them to take action, but first you must understand how attention works.

The brain is hard-wired to pay attention to two things.

Opportunities

Anything that’s based on the Maslow hierarchy of needs.

Threats

Anything that’s gonna threaten them, their needs or their place in society.

Newness & Change

That’s why new things and changes can mean opportunity or threat so this is a trigger to attention. If your environment doesn’t change, the details start to fade away i.e look at posts on X now, everybody leaves blank spaces in them, what stands out now are the blocks of text.

Identify the norm in the market and become dynamic and disruptive to trigger attention.

Curiosity

Curiosity is a desire to know or lear about something. It can refer to an eager wish to know or learn about something or something that is interesting

Curiosity triggers

• Subvert expectations: “How to increase sales 50% in just 15 minutes a day” instead of “ Increase sales making more sales calls than other people.”

• Tickle the information gap: “5 Marketing lessons you can learn from a weird “Real World” business.” Instead of “5 Marketing lessons you can learn.”

• Know when to stop: “ You don’t have to reveal everything straight away. Telling them to read till the end to discover what they want to know can nudge them sufficiently into the body of your copy (DON’T TEASE ABSTRACT STUFF!).

5 Ways I use to Amplify Curiosity

• Tease it or tell them what it is not

• Tap into what their are already curious about

• Use paradox questions like “ Why when we’re a kid we learn languages so fast and when we’re grown ups is so hard?

• Conflict and drama

• Make them feel like the belong to the group that KNOWS the truth “If you knew what they knew, you could have what they have, to be who they are”.

Curiosity through the persuasion cycle

1. Tease the solution

2. Close the information gap

   1. Even closer

3. Give them the solution

   1. Make it a step by step journey

Simple enough right? But as a writer you don’t create desire or pain, you can only link to a state they already have. You must reignite this feelings to induce them into taking actions.

Pro-tip: Stack more desire/pain over the pre-existing one so it becomes more powerful.

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A great week is ahead of us amigos, talk soon.

- Fred Spinelli