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- How To Increase Buyer Motivation
Hello to every unicorn in the galaxy.
It’s been an intense week, marketing-wise.
I spent about 15 hours contemplating buyer motivation and devising a new strategy around it.
You know what I realized?
Conversion Rate Optimization as most people think of it is a poor-man’s version of Maximizing Buyer Motivation.
But don’t worry, I’ll give you the secret sauce.
Today’s growth strategy is: increasing buyer motivation
Let’s dive into it…
Growth stage: Any
Difficulty level: Medium
"If you can define the problem better than your target customer, they will automatically assume you have the solution."
Conversion Rate Optimization
There are two basic ways to increase the rate at which your visitors turn into customers.
1) Reduce friction: eliminate unnecessary mental hurdles, cognitive load, bad user experience and unnecessary steps. You want your user experience to be intuitive, simple, seamless, and easy.
This is the type of stuff many people think of when they think of CRO. Hacks, tricks, button colors, UX changes, universal conventions.
These are all important considerations and there’s a lot of product-agnostic “best practices” that are worth trying across many industries.
Reducing friction alone can easily 2-5x your conversion rate if your user experience sucks.
Don’t overlook these.
Yet there’s an even more powerful way to unlock growth:
2) Increase motivation: the secret to increasing motivation is to align your product or service with an unmet need that’s actively causing some sort of psychological or emotional unease.
Sounds weird.
But let’s walk through it.
What is a Buying Trigger?
What we’re really talking about are buying triggers.
Think of a buying trigger as an event, mental or physical, that triggers a negative open loop. Our mind wants resolution and we’ll feel some level of discomfort until it’s resolved.
You might think this is weird or esoteric, but I’ll show you it’s not.
Example:
Take something as benign as concert tickets.
When I hear that Radiohead is playing Madison Square Garden, I get nervous.
I picture myself in front of my laptop, staring at Ticketmaster, wondering if I’ll be able to get seats before it sells out.
In that moment, my fear of missing the concert generates a giant open loop in my mind. I need it resolved to ease my anxiety.
I become willing to pay ridiculous fees just to avoid that feeling of loss and to know that I will be at the show.
My motivation increases exponentially because of those silly yet unpleasant feelings.
The interesting thing about buying triggers is that you don’t need your customers to be experiencing them in the moment. You just need to remind them, to awaken that increased motivation.
This headline would do it for me:
“Avoid the Ticketmaster hassle. Get great Radiohead seats instantly, guaranteed!”
How to Uncover & Use Buying Triggers
Here’s a prompt you can use to uncover your target customer’s buying triggers:
PROMPT:
I'm a marketing selling [product or service]. What are the most common buying triggers that compel consumers to buy [product or service]?Example:
PROMPT 2:
Which of these buying triggers are likely the most stressful to a consumer, such that they would be willing to spend money to alleviate it?
PROMPT 3:
Now generate ad headlines for each of these buying triggers.
These headlines are lame…
But they are very useful.
They show how you can tap into a buying trigger with a simple phrase, and ChatGPT will often give you some valuable phrases for this purpose.
Examples:
“Don’t let pests…”
“Take back control…”
“Sell faster…”
“Your dream yard…”
“Busy schedule?”
It’s hard to predict what will stick and what will scale, but this approach will help you come up with ad angles you probably haven’t thought of.
The good thing about ChatGPT is that you can bother it again and again and ask it for more details in different ways.
You’re bound to uncover some gems.
✨ That’s it for today!
I hope this helps you in your growth journey.
-Brian
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