Marketing Persuasion 101

Every salesman knows the importance of the critical moment when he asks his customer to buy. Whatever is being sold – whatever the price – whoever the customer – to a consumer, or a business.

All marketing preparation builds up to that moment of active selling, when the prospect emotionally commits and moves forward in the purchase process.

Digital Marketing Today: Passive Preparation to Sell
Digital marketing has advanced our ability to sell tremendously. But oddly, the  focus of digital marketing technology remains very much on passive preparation for the pitch itself.

Most digital technologies are designed to increase the odds of selling by improving context – in the same way that prior to that moment of the pitch and the sale, every good salesman is inquiring for details about the customer’s needs to help him best make his case. 

• CRM and segmentation – tell you what stage of the buying cycle a customer is in, and which types of offers they may find attractive.
• Media buying & bidding enable you to price each opportunity to reach a customer.
• List management & media serving reach your customers and prospects and let you put your pitch in front of them.
• Tracking and targeting refine both your ability to segment, and your ability to reach. 

Nearly the entire digital marketing technology stack has now been deployed.  Through these many quantitative mechanisms, the odds of success have been improved as much as they can with passive preparation. 

And still, the customer or prospect has yet to receive the all important pitch.  Will they engage?  Will they purchase?  Or will they move on, unmoved? 

A Thousand Points to Pitch
The critical nature of this question increases when we expand our scope from the single moment of the pitch to the totality of customer lifecycle selling.  The pitch, as important as it is to your top and bottom line, does not just happen once.  It happens repeatedly, at every stage of every purchase, throughout the entire buying funnel. 

• During customer acquisition, you pith your audience to notice, to engage, and to learn more.
• At conversion, you pitch your prospects to commit and to buy.
• During merchandising, your pitch cross-sell and up-sell to increase revenue and profit.
• With loyalty and retention programs, you pitch ongoing customer engagement to maximize the ROI of past marketing investments. 

With the advent of digital marketing, total marketing opportunity has exploded in scale.  Now, you might have the opportunity to persuade your customers and prospects a dozen or a hundred times per day, as opposed to the cycles of weeks and months of the pre-digital era.  With increased digital volume -- an unfortunate double meaning of scale, and of noise – your imperative to deliver the best message to any customer, for any product, at any time, grows daily. 

From Passive Preparation to Marketing Persuasion
Marketing persuasion is solely focused on changing the odds of success at the most critical moment of the selling process.  Marketing persuasion focuses the attention of the marketer on what matters most – the moment of pitch and commitment – and recognizes that while buying happens within a framework of logic, it will always remain a fundamentally human, emotional decision. 

There aren’t just thousands of ways to ask a customer to buy.  There are millions.  Marketing persuasion is the structured application of contextual data, human emotions, product attributes, and language to finding and delivering the single best way to ask a customer to buy.  It is the quest for and discovery of the ultimate pitch for every selling moment, with the goal to work best on what matters most.  

The Testing Trap
A/B and multi-variate testing have become the digital marketer’s tool for improving the pitch itself.  Used well, they can improve results by identifying broken elements of a marketing process, through automated measurement.  But testing platforms change nothing about how the alternative test candidates are created.  Intuition – guessing – remains the norm, and a decade into the digital marketing revolution, “from the gut” still dominates how the persuasive pitch is created today. 

The result of guess-based test methodologies is that testing remains a small-scale, haphazard practice for most marketers , which yields incremental improvements at best. 

Persado:  The Power of Persuasion

Marketing persuasion requires that the full power of language be brought to bear, making what matters most – the pitch – work best. Every possible buying emotion and trigger must be tested, with methodologies that reflect the behavioral preferences of the intended audience. Millions of different language possibilities that express the different buying emotions must also be fully explored.  All this needs to happen within the confines of  campaign realities:

• Short timeframes
• Limited audience size
• Generating ROI, not just testing endlessly
• Working within strict brand guidelines of marketing communication

Persado’s marketing persuasion technology solves this crucial problem, bringing advanced data-driven algorithmic methods to sequence the genome of marketing language and generate the message that works best.  Learn more about our approach in Products.

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