Brands were challenged to think seriously about their mission and quality of content at the second and final day of The Inbounder conference in Valencia. Here’s what you need to know…
What a brand stands for and why it does what it does was a key theme of day two of The Inbounder conference in Valencia. While the role of the audience, context and content design were key themes on day one, on day two speakers really asked the audience to focus on understanding human nature to persuade.
Understand your audience’s psychology
Lisa Myers’ impactful speech challenged audiences to think about why their brand does what it does. Brands know what they do and how, but rarely why. When it comes to persuasion, the decision is emotional. Myers explained that while the Neocortex area of the brain controls rationale and language, the ‘Limbic brain’ drives decision-making.
“Facts and figures don’t drive people to buy, ‘why?’ does,” Myers said. Her company, Verve Search, focuses all its work on these elements:
- does it support our vision and values? (Why)
- simple yet meaningful core idea (How)
- easy-to-use, great design and execution (What)
And you need to be ready to pivot, because “plans do not work in the battlefield,” Myers added. Look out for an upcoming podcast with Lisa next week.
The psychology piece was emphasised by web psychologist Nathalie Nahai, who focussed on how to build trust and drive persuasion. She focussed on the ‘Big Five’ personality traits, which I have also used in campaigns at previous agencies and found them incredibly impactful.
The Big Five are:
- Openness
- Conscientiousness
- Extraversion
- Agreeableness
- Neuroticism
Campaign messaging and ads should be tailored to speak to each audience, and optimise headlines to increase curiosity and drive clicks.
The day’s first speaker, brand specialist Joanna Lord, reminded the audience that a brand is not logo, it is a point of view, a customer value, logic and emotion that takes time and commitment to create.
Given 54% of people do not trust brands (HBR) and two-thirds (64%) of people cite shared values as the main reason they purchase from a brand (AdWeek), Joanna made the case strongly for brands to be benevolent – a view echoed later in the day by Nathalie Nahai – and to use analytics.
“If you’re not using data to build the brand you’re not making good decisions,” she said. [Continues…]
Lisa Myers presents at The Inbounder
Involve your audience
Why would a brand continue to sell products on its Facebook page when all the comments from users are customer service questions? This is something which Rich Millington, founder of Feverbee, raised. That brand should ask itself; “What challenges can I solve today?”
His message is sound: stop convincing and try to persuade instead. Focus on the emotional connection, focus on how people feel, motivate them, make them feel like experts.
The more you ask for feedback, the more engaged people will be, Millington argues.
Google itself is prominent in learning from its audience. In his closing address, Rand Fishkin of Moz covered machine learning in order to satisfy searchers, and its artificial intelligence (AI) keeps growing in power.
“Engagement is becoming the universal quality metric,” Fishkin said, as publishers want visitors to stay on their sites. “The back button is sapping away at our reputation on every platform.”
Fishkin says you must serve as many of the searchers’ needs as you can with your content. [Continues…]
Fishkin says publishers should no longer expect to be able to point a load of links to a page that’s not performing, it is probably better just to start again. Better content is better than more content. Unique content that loads quickly and provides a great experience on mobile and desktop is key.
When you have a successful share on Facebook, your reach will be higher next time. This means you should post less on Facebook, if anything. Google loves engagement, and now our reputation is based on engagement, Fishkin said. The machines are judging us…
Many thanks to Gianluca Fiorelli and all the organisers, sponsors and staff at The Inbounder. It was a fantastic event and I hope to come back. Nos vemos en 2017…