in this episode i'm going to unpack 15 different psychological triggers and cognitive biases that we as marketers use on a pretty much daily basis to help influence and persuade and guide people in the direction that we want which is typically to buy stuff now if you have a business and want to get more customers more clients and more sales these will help and if you work for a business and want to get them more customers more clients and more sales well these will help and if you've ever shopped at a business well these cognitive biases
and psychological triggers are important for you to know so you can arm yourself against unethical and unscrupulous marketers trying to sell you things you just don't need but i must say these principles these psychological triggers and these cognitive biases are so powerful that even when you know they're actively being used against you you still can't stop them like some kind of weird marketing magnet that just draws you in and takes all your money all right so let's get to it alright so the first psychological trigger cognitive bias that you need to be aware of is
something known as the halo effect essentially the halo effect is really just a fancy term for that first impression bias or the fact that the first impression that you have with a brand or a business or a person well it's going to influence all of your future interactions with that brand or person or business and is going to influence them a lot basically that first impression that first exposure to a message or a person or a brand or a business is so heavily weighted that it's going to color and influence and really direct all of
your attitudes and beliefs and understandings about this person and about this business moving forward and well into the future even even if they're wrong this is why as marketers it is incredibly important to really make sure that you're evaluating all of your marketing specifically those first touch points those first interactions that someone could have with your brand or with your business and really make sure that you're putting your best foot forward but there's another advantage as well to really making sure that you're making a positive first impression with someone and that is that it's going
to buffer against any future possible negative experiences and really that's where a lot of brand loyalty comes in is that if you're able to get the relationship started on a really solid foundation and really get it started on that right foot well it's going to help protect if something just doesn't go quite right moving forward your client your customer are still going to perceive you and your brand and your business as more positive overall if that first impression worked out well thank you halo effect alright and while on the topic of first impressions the next
cognitive bias we need to take a look at is the serial position effect the serial position effect essentially just says that the very first piece of information and the very last piece of information are going to be taken and remembered and viewed as far more important than basically everything else in the middle this is why as a marketer i'm so obsessive about the customer journey and about the marketing funnel and really dialing in not just every step but specifically that first step where we're putting our foot forward a lot of stuff about feet today and
introducing ourselves in the best way possible with a strong message and a really clear call to action as well as that final piece of the puzzle that final call to action that gets them to essentially take some kind of purchasing or buying decision or whatever it is that's in your conversion funnel in fact i'm using the serial position effect right now it's the reason that i started out this video with the halo effect because i know that it's an important one for you to remember and it's going to help to guide you and sort of
push you in the direction of prioritizing your marketing really making sure it's dialed in and then i'm going to wrap it all up with what i believe is one of the most important things that you need to be aware of as well so that it sticks in your memory and on the topic of creating memorable experiences and things that are actually going to stick with and resonate with your clients well it leads us to the next psychological trigger or cognitive bias known as the recency effect the recency effect essentially just says that we as humans
well we tend to give higher weight or more authority or more importance to the most recent bit of information that we've received rather than all the stuff we've heard before this is the reason that one of the core strategies or core principles behind pretty much everything i do when i'm creating strategic marketing campaigns comes down to ways of increasing frequency and increasing touch points and essentially increasing the recency or how recently someone saw or heard or engaged with some kind of marketing content to put this in perspective let's just say that we're thinking about your
client or your customer out there living their lives doing their thing and you've got your business and your competitor's business both try to get in front of them both trying to win their business well if one of you is going to be creating more content more marketing and more messages there's a higher chance that they're going to see these things more recently which is going to impact their decision making and essentially evaluate the information they get more recently is more valuable i think that all made sense basically if they see your stuff most recently they're
gonna think it's more important but there's another way that you can take advantage of that cognitive bias and turn it up a notch making it even more effective with our next psychological trigger known as the mere exposure effect essentially what the mere exposure effect says is that the more somebody sees something the more familiar they are with it the more often you're appearing in front of your clients and in front of your customers well the more they're going to naturally like you and trust you both of which are unsurprisingly incredibly important to build a solid
and sustainable business so by trying to appear more often in front of your customers and in front of your clients you kind of get to kill two birds with one stone what a terribly morbid analogy you get to show up more recently meaning that they're going to trust your message and view it as more important and holding more weight and you're also going to take advantage of the mere exposure effect by showing up more often which naturally leads to an increase in likability and trust this is why when it comes to marketing more really is
more especially if we're trying to increase frequency and increase touch points now this doesn't mean you need to create completely unique content across all of the different platforms you can re-share and recycle and take away pieces from different parts and share it on different networks and automate the entire process so the whole thing happens on autopilot behind the scenes but you do need to do it and this means a little bit of groundwork right up front to set up the whole system and then it can serve you for weeks months and maybe even years to
come all right now let's hit our next one which is all about loss aversion this one is relatively simple and should come as no surprise that people hate missing out on stuff fomo or the fear of missing out that's real this is why one of the most important and one of the most valuable tools that you have at your disposal as a business owner an entrepreneur or a marketer is using some form of scarcity or urgency or essentially some kind of incentive that's going to disappear if they don't take action and take action soon what
this means is setting some kind of deadline or some kind of limited supply obviously make it real make it genuine make it authentic there's no room for fake deadline timers or any of that nonsense here but given the option of taking action now or putting it off until later most people put it off to later and typically later means never all right next let's take a look at the compromise effect now the compromise effect essentially just says that well people are busy and got a lot of decisions to make and often it's hard if not
impossible to evaluate all kinds of different selections and options and criteria so if given the choice they'll tend to compromise what this means for you is that if you have a product or a service or something you're trying to sell well you're typically better to break it into two or three different options maybe a low priced option a middle priced option and then a high priced option the key here is to put the one that you want to sell most in the middle as the compromise option essentially because this is the one that's going to
get the most clicks the most traction and the most sales there's an added bonus as well in that by having a higher priced option well you're gonna capture ten to twenty percent of the market that always wants the premium option and ten to twenty percent of the market that always wants the budget friendly or more economical option and there's a way you can make that middle option the compromise option even more appealing simply by labeling it most popular which takes advantage of the bandwagon effect but i'm getting ahead of myself we'll get to that in
just a second the other way to make that middle price option seem that much more valuable and that much more of a good deal is by putting that higher priced option well quite a bit higher and taking advantage of a principle known as anchoring essentially what anchoring does is it takes advantage of the first piece of information or the first price that someone sees as kind of a mental anchor that they're going to use to compare all future prices or future options against this is why if the first price that you can present to someone
is incredibly high or incredibly expensive well everything that comes after that is going to seem a whole lot more budget friendly a whole lot more approachable plus when comparing things side by side let's say you do have those three different priced options and the high priced option which was anchored first is just incredibly high priced well it'll make that compromise option seem like a really really good deal plus anchoring like most of the psychological triggers and cognitive biases i'm sharing with you here today well there's a little bit of overlap between the serial position effect
which gives more weight to the first and last pieces of information someone sees as well as the recency effect which is the most recent piece of information that someone's heard basically with anchoring like with the serial position or with the recency effect people tend to be a little over reliant on this kind of information which again biases their future decision making okay let's move on to the next one which is all about choice overload so in the previous couple examples we talked about three different options low price middle price high price but what if you
want to go more what if you want all the prices all the choices all the options well you may be shooting yourself in the foot this is because when we have too many choices well essentially we limit the odds or the chances of someone doing any of them at all and if they do take action it's more likely they're going to be disappointed with the choice that they made it's the ultimate lose-lose where they're unlikely to make a choice and if they do make a choice they just ain't happy now there are a number of
studies that go over this the most famous one is the jam tasting study where they laid out a ton of different jams and they laid out just a few different jams and when they laid out all of the choices very few people bought and when they laid out just a few different kinds of jams many people bought as a marketer your job is to eliminate the confusion to simplify things for your customer and for your client not because they're not smart and unable to do the thinking for themselves but because they are smart and the
way that their brains naturally work will be to overanalyze and over process things which will often lead to inaction so that's where you step in you design a customer journey you think through the process through the choices they would need to have the information they need to receive at every stage and then you design the marketing funnel or the sales funnel or the customer journey to help walk them through every single step all right next up we have the framing effect this well i guess like all of them is kind of another favorite and one
that i use pretty much every single day which is essentially just framing or positioning your offer or your message in a way that makes it more attractive to the person that you're trying to talk to here's the classic example that's often used to describe the framing effect let's imagine for a second that you've recently been diagnosed with a terrible medical condition sorry to hear this isn't a very fun exercise and two doctors come in to sort of lay out the options and let you know what the odds of success are for a couple different kinds
of treatments dr a says well with proper treatment you have an eighty percent chance of recovery going on to live a happy normal life dr b comes in and says there's a 20 chance that it's not going to work out so well for you and we better start making final plans now here's the thing both of these pretty much said the exact same thing 80 chance of recovery or a 20 chance of death and yet because they were framed in the possibility of a recovery versus being framed as a very negative outcome well most people
like a lot of most people well they went with dr a this is why it's important when you're creating your marketing message that you're framing things appropriately in a way that connects with your clients and with your customers and yes of course talks about their problems and their pains and their frustrations but also frames them in a way kind of spins and positions them in a way where success and a solution is possible and is possible for them after all one of the biggest and most important lessons in all of marketing is that it's always
about the client it's always about the customer it's always about who you're speaking to what their needs are what their pains are what their frustrations are and how you can communicate the solution to them and on the topic of them and the people you're trying to serve we'll move on to the next cognitive bias which is the ikea effect the ikea effect is an amazing phenomenon where essentially people just value things more when they get to play a part in its creation the classic study that was done on this is they had a group of
participants build a bunch of little lego creatures little bionicles anyway people built these things and then were asked to assign a value to them and unsurprisingly they assigned value to the ones that they created as worth more money essentially the mere fact that they spent time they spent energy they were now a part of this process made them perceive that these little lego creatures were worth more than they actually were now the marketing key here is to incorporate and to include elements of engagement and connection and including your clients and your customers and your audience
and the people you seek to serve in as much of the creation process as you possibly can this is why i'm such a big fan of asking for feedback and asking for comments and asking for surveys and guidance and advice and anything i can do to keep the conversation going on that note be a perfect time to ask you to smash that thumbs up button and make sure to leave me a comment below this video with what your biggest takeaway is so far from all of the different cognitive biases that we've talked about and just
for doing that i want to thank you in advance because you're such a smart and capable and amazing person now of course i believe that i know you're smart i know you're amazing and i know you're capable but what i also just did there was take advantage of a cognitive bias known as the pygmalion effect so let's talk about that now the pygmalion effect also known as the rosenthal effect is essentially the cognitive bias psychological trigger where high expectations lead to better performance and better results basically when you put higher expectations on the people that
you serve on your clients on your customers as well as on your friends and family well the result tends to be higher performance this is why treating your clients and customers as smart and capable and respectable people well it's not just kind of common sense but it actually turns out to be pretty good business practice as well because in return they're more likely to act smarter and more capable and more respectable which is good for you good for them good for everyone but you already know that right and that leads us perfectly to our next
cognitive bias confirmation bias what the confirmation bias says is that we as humans when we receive new information well we tend to run it through a certain kind of filter where it confirms and sort of affirms the beliefs and the identity that we already have basically if you read something that's relatively neutral doesn't take a position one way or another well you're more likely to view it as taking your position and supporting your views whereas someone else who has the complete opposite mindset or complete opposite beliefs provided that article or that piece of content is
relatively neutral well they're going to believe that it supports their views and their beliefs understanding this and you can really start to see how people get into such hot water with different views and different beliefs now the key here and the way to tap into confirmation bias is to first really understand your ideal target market that person that you want to serve and that really wants to do business with you and understand what makes them tick what do they believe who do they feel they are what do they want and what do they not want
when you do this you're able to frame pretty much all of your future content and really allow them to just start nodding their heads in agreement with everything you say because you're confirming things that they already believe making you seem more relatable and more authentic and more likable when you're able to confirm someone's beliefs as right and affirm their identity as right well they really start to buy in and this is powerful stuff alright next let's talk about the peltzman effect or risk compensation theory it's actually also known as the zero risk bias but names
aren't important here what is important is understanding just how much people don't want to take any risks now i kind of touched on this when we talked about loss aversion but this is essentially taking your marketing and your messaging that extra step further really making sure that your offer your business is as low risk or no risk as possible basically if given the choice between a business or an offer that had some element of risk and a business or offer that had basically no risk well most people if not all of them are going to
go for the no risk one so how can you overcome this level of risk well the obvious answer is by including some kind of guarantee money-back guarantee 30-day guarantee whatever guarantee but sometimes you're not in a position to offer a guarantee in which case you really have to double down on your marketing specifically the social proof elements by providing testimonials and case studies and proof of results and basically just saying that what you're claiming is true is actually true also doing your best to establish trust early and often throughout the relationship and taking advantage of
that halo effect by making sure that that first impression is a good one by again putting your best foot forward begin with the feet with a nice and clean and professional design and message and essentially presentation to your market the beauty is is that when you do this especially when you're able to tap into elements of social proof which is essentially just showing that other people like the people you're trying to serve have done this and they've been okay well you're also tapping into another psychological trigger known as the bandwagon effect the bandwagon effect is
all about doing what other people do like my mother used to ask me if all the cool kids jumped off a bridge would you jump off a bridge too and according to the bandwagon effect yes yes i would and i wouldn't be alone most people would join me if all the cool kids were doing it because that's what we do as humans we look to other people especially people that are like us or that we aspire to be like in order to help us make decisions this is why providing elements of social proof and testimonials
and showing others who've gone before done the same things and had great results from it is such a powerful motivator to get someone to take action the more proof that you can show that other people have had success the better and the closer that these people match the identities or beliefs or values or appearance of the people you're trying to reach well the better as well after all what you're trying to overcome here is the objection that people like me don't do that and if you're the one that's able to say oh yeah they do
people like you do that all the time your business will grow alright next let's talk about blind spot bias which of all of the biases and psychological triggers we've talked about this one is perhaps my favorite and also the most interesting basically what the blind spot bias says is that all of the things that i've just talked about including a ton of other cognitive biases and psychological triggers i didn't have time to get to well all of them are invisible to the people that you're trying to talk to they don't know they're happening they're so
deeply rooted in our fundamental makeup and our psychology as human beings that we can't recognize when they're actively being used against us even when we're being told they're being used against us yes that's right even if someone is to come out and tell you hey don't let anchoring impact your future decision well it still seeps in this is because our brains are busy busy places and we have to rely on these mental shortcuts to quickly evaluate information and help us make decisions now of course the best way to use all of the cognitive biases and
psychological triggers that i've discussed with you here the best way and also importantly the most ethical way is to make sure that you're building them on a solid marketing foundation and this is why the next thing you're going to want to do is check out the video i have linked up right here on introduction to marketing so make sure to check that out now and i'll see in the next episode marketing helps people solve their problems by clearly defining and delivering solutions and really explaining the benefits of those solutions so they can get better results
