Tools For Clients: Video

This week I will be sharing the work of Dr Robert Cialdini and his 5 scientifically proven ways to increase the likelihood of your customers saying “YES”. These highly powerful tactics can be deployed directly into you marketing today with virtually instant results.

With every persuasion rule that this blog post outlines, I will also provide accompanying direction on how you can implement these tried and tested methods into your business marketing yourself. I must warn you, I think you may begin to notice an eerie degree of familiarity as these persuasion tricks have been used by the world’s leading brands since the day you were born. Pens at the ready!

 – RECIPROCITY –

Rule #1: People feel more obliged to give when they have received something first

For you and your business this means giving your customers an unexpected present that they will genuinely value and appreciate.

Whatever you choose to give, make sure it makes them feel exclusive. The more personalization and exclusive your initial giving is, the higher chance of reciprocation.

 

What could you give your customers as an unexpected and exclusive product or service? Perhaps you could give a product sample? Maybe you could pass on a strong business lead or how about some expert advice or consultation?

– SCARCITY –

Rule #2: People fear they may lose out on something

For this rule you need to create a fear of loss within the customer. This principle is probably the most widely used and is seen on a daily basis. How often do you see the Exeter High street decorated with the messages of ‘Sale ending soon’, ‘Closing down sale’ and ‘Limited stock’.

 

Unfortunately as ‘used car salesmen’ as it sounds, study after study has proven we are evolutionary wired to value something more as it becomes less available. There is a reason designer clothes stores only have 1 or 2 items on display and why booking.com likes to inform you that only 2 rooms with a sea view are left at this exclusive price.

 

If you are an ecommerce business selling products online, why not try implementing time sensitive discount coupons? The shorter the time frame the greater the chances of increased conversion. I recommend that you experiment sharing 6, 12 and 24 hour discount codes across your social media and email subscribers.

 

If your business is more focused on offering services, the rule of scarcity can be applied in terms the scarcity of your businesses availability. By making it known that your businesses services are often booked up in advance due to your popularity and high demand still adds the sense of potential loss if they do not commit to your proposition today. This also leads us nicely on to Dr Robert Cialdini’s next rule of persuasion – Social Proof.

– SOCIAL PROOF –

Rule #3: People trust the actions of their peers

As much as we would hate to admit it we are all led by other people’s opinions. As fundamentally social beings it is in our nature to take cues from the actions of our fellow peers. A famous experiment cited in 1982’s Journal of Applied Psychology, saw a group of researchers posing as a charity going door-to-door asking for cash donations. With every person they asked they varied the length of a mock up list of neighbours who had supposedly already donated. The researchers discovered unanimously that the longer the list of donors, the more likely people were to donate.

 

In terms of implementing the rule of social proof into your businesses marketing I recommend looking into your review strategy. Firstly, make sure you display some form of testimonials or reviews on your website and encourage your happiest customers to leave reviews across the internet – with a particular focus on google+, facebook and yelp. Not only will this shower your business in social proof juice but Google have recently admitted review signals go a long way in improving your Local SEO rankings.

– AUTHORITY – 

Rule #4: People trust experts

Quite an obvious one, but people will listen and trust the advice of experts ahead of novices. Unfortunately many businesses simply state their services and believe their expertise is self-evident. Although I am not recommending an arrogant approach to your marketing I do believe businesses should expose their expertise and quality of service at every given opportunity.

 

The simplest way to add this persuasion tactic to your marketing is to firstly ensure that any impressive awards, memberships or certifications your business and/or products has, are included within the main content of your website. Once this is in place I would then recommend regular blogging on your website.  Start with a brainstorm of key ideas, terms and scenarios of your businesses arena, from this create a list of blog post titles and commit to writing one expert blog post per week. This will allow you to showcase your expertise and allow you to share valuable content across your social networks. Ask yourself, what are the most common questions my customers ask me? What advice can I give a customer who is potentially looking for my service?

– CONSISTENCY –

Rule #5: People love to be consistent with their commitments

When applying the rule of consistency to your marketing plan it is important to think long term. The rule of consistency comes into play when a person is presented with what may seem a fairly large commitment from the outset. An overwhelming amount of research has uncovered an interesting fact that if people make small active commitments towards your business they are far more likely to commit to larger propositions at a later stage.

 

A famous example of this was an experiment published in 1983’s Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. This experiment had researchers ask half the residents of an apartment complex to sign a petition favouring the building of a recreation centre for the handicapped. Two weeks later all residents of the complex were asked to give a cash donation to the cause. The result was astonishing, those who had been asked to sign the petition 2 weeks before had a donation rate of 92%, whilst those who had not been asked to sign the petition had a donation rate of 50%.

 

To apply this long term persuasion tactic to your marketing, I would recommend adding low commitment level products or services to your business. These products or services should not be seen as an initial revenue generator but a sales pipeline catalyst that will move your customer further down the sales funnel, one step closer to your high value sale.

Conclusion

Let me know how you get on, If you struggle to work out how to implement these principles into your businesses marketing please send me an email, I would be more than happy to provide specific guidance based on your individual needs