Maximize Affiliate Sales and Small Business Profits using Neuromarketing.

If you are a small business owner or run a blog or website, the above headline would have made you quickly apply breaks to your Internet surfing Ferrari and made you click on this article. And rightly so because just like any other business we too want to maximize our profits. So to take first step towards understanding what this article is all about, lets first understand what neuromarketing really is -

What is Neuromarketing?

Have you ever wondered …

• Why even the highest priced or lowest quality products sometimes outsell their competitors’?
• Why and how your prospects buy the products or services they do, even if their choices seem irrational or impractical?
• Why some brands have a devoted cult-like following while others have zero loyalty?

A new field called NeuroMarketing - combining neuroscience, marketing and technology, has generated a buzz across every industry and every business sector.

NeuroMarketing uses high–tech brain scanning techniques, such as MRI and EEG, to investigate brain activity. This neuro–imaging hardware enables us to examine and analyze what really drives our behavior, our opinions, our preference for Corona over Budweiser, iPods over Zunes, or McDonald’s over Wendy’s.

Keys to Neuromarketing and applying Neuromarketing for Affiliate Conversions.

Christophe Morin, co-author of Neuromarketing: Understanding the Buy Buttons in Your Customer’s Brain, says entrepreneurs can improve their products, services, marketing and advertising by learning six keys to neuromarketing. These tenets stem from Morin’s argument that most purchase decisions are made subconsciously, in the nether regions of the mind he calls the primal brain, areas where basic fight-or-flight instincts kick in. We buy, he says, out of fear.

• We’re self-centered: Nothing triggers self-centered action like a transaction. “People are completely egocentric and all they want is something that will create a difference in their lives, eliminate pain and possibly bring them more pleasure,” Morin says.
• We crave contrast: “The bottom line is, on any given day, we will receive about 10,000 ad messages, and only the ones that are huge contrasts will get any attention,” he says.
• We’re naturally lazy: Abstract advertising and marketing won’t get through. Keep it simple, but strong. “Most companies tend to create abstract messages and use too many words,” Morin says. “Reading is much more a function of the ‘new brain.’ We recommend that, of course, companies use a lot of concrete visuals.”
• We like stories: Advertising and marketing with strong beginnings and ends create anchor points that we latch onto, so Morin advises entrepreneurs to sum up and recap their strongest selling points at the end of any promotional material. “The brain has a natural tendency to pay attention at the beginning and end of anything,” he says.
• We’re visual: Appealing video and graphic presentations can make the difference at cash registers where price and reason can’t. “We process and make decisions visually, without being aware of them,” Morin says. “Only later do we rationalize decisions we made.”
• Emotion trumps reason: Give us the right emotion to ride on, and we’ll buy what you’re selling. “When we experience an emotion,” he says, “it creates a chemical change in our brain, hormones flood our brain and change the speeds with which neurons connect, and it’s through those connections we memorize. We don’t remember anything if there isn’t an emotion attached to that experience.”

There is a very fascinating book entitled Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy, by Martin Lindstrom. We often discuss why our online visitors/clients/consumers do the things they do.  Lindstrom, an international marketing and branding expert commissioned a three year study that goes beyond the usual qualitative, quantitative and tracking methodologies to look at how our brain architecture activates when we make behavioral decisions or respond to a marketing strategy.

This is a great book and I would recommend this book to every small business as well as website / blog owner.

Buy from Amazon: Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy

Some of the amazing findings mentioned in the book are that cigarette warning labels, no matter how graphic, actually stimulate the part of the brain responsible for addictive behavior; that appeals which engage our emotions trump “rational,” cognitive appeals in the brain’s responses; and that product placement in movies and TV shows probably do not motivate buying behavior in this day and age!  The book also contains additional interesting marketing facts, such as that new product launches in Japan fail 9.7 out of 10 times, and that by age 66 we will have viewed nearly two million commercials on TV!