You’ve seen the headlines. You’ve heard the buzz. You’ve had the conversations about what AI could become and whether it’ll replace humans in this role or that one. You’ve likely even played around with making AI a part of your workflow in some form or another (whether or not it sticks is still TBD).
Nowadays, AI is all the rage. Prior to AI’s emergence in the digital age, Google was king. And while Google still reigns — so much so that businesses spend countless hours and dollars trying to please its algorithms — Google is even more confounding now that it has been supercharged with AI.
But what if I told you that Google and AI — and whatever will come next! — are just smoke screens?
They’re simply the latest and “greatest” thing to pique our curiosity and stir up fantasies and fears for the future.
Google & AI are not the things you should be most concerned about.
Sure, there’s a place for the Google ecosystem and tools like ChatGPT — but they’re not the be-all, end-all.
Most importantly: They’re not the thing you should be most concerned about.
So what should you be concerned about?
Humans.
Way back in 2007, I embarked on a journey that would forever change my life — even though I would eventually abandon its course. For three years, I made Santa Clara University my home and graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology. From there, I moved back to San Diego and earned a dual Master’s degree in Marriage and Family Therapy and Professional Clinical Counseling.
Finally, I switched coasts (virtually) and earned a Master’s degree in Criminology from Florida State University. All the while, as I marched obediently toward being a counselor in the prison system, I was putting myself through school and life by earning a living as a freelance writer.
Why am I telling you all of this? Because it wasn’t until I’d burned out in the mental health world and used all of my textbook knowledge and deep intuitive and experiential understanding of human behavior and cognition to launch a full-service content marketing agency that I finally understood technology’s place in marketing. In working with the companies I consult on their marketing strategies, the most common question I get is, “What should we be doing?” But marketing isn’t just about “doing” certain things or being on certain social platforms.
At its most basic level, marketing is a dialogue.
Marketing is the way businesses and organizations communicate with individual humans. At its most basic level, marketing is a dialogue.
As much as we like to busy ourselves with fancy tools and algorithms to “gain an edge” over our competition, no human likes to feel like he or she is talking to a machine. Once our initial fleeting curiosity has dissipated, we find artificial conversations hollow and meaningless.
Rather, it’s the emotion, the complexity, and the possibility for connection that truly — and exclusively — hold our interest. So as you’re building your business and finding your path toward living the dream, I encourage you — actually, I beg of you — to set the shiny objects aside and make the humans you seek your priority. Here’s how.
The Psychology of Marketing
Despite the fact that my higher-ed-obsessed, law enforcement parents were disappointed that I abandoned the world of traditional employment and instead took the path of digital entrepreneurship, my path to CEO & Marketing Strategist was exactly as it needed to be.
Those degrees and internships and the months I spent working as a triage specialist at a mental hospital gave me the real-world experience I needed to nurture my appreciation for the human psyche. And my natural inclination for writing gave me the medium to master that understanding.
Mastering psychology-driven marketing comes down to taking a human-centric approach across your marketing methods, messaging, and mechanisms.
If you’re going to build a marketing machine for your organization that not only works (i.e., generates an ROI that makes your heart and shareholders happy) but also serves as a magnet to long-term, loyal customers who will sing your praises to their friends, family, and colleagues, then you need to prioritize human psychology.
Mastering psychology-driven marketing comes down to taking a human-centric approach across your marketing methods, messaging, and mechanisms.
Methods
Marketing is a psychological game — one that most businesses play very, very dirty. But if you’ve ever been on the receiving end of those dirty tricks — FOMO, scarcity persuasion, the “bait and switch” — you know it’s a lose-lose situation. You as the buyer end up flooded with stomach-churning remorse, and the company you gave your hard-earned dollars to is forever icky in your mind.
So if you don’t like being fooled and forced into buying situations you end up regretting, why would you use those tactics on your customers? Think about the companies that you like — the ones that even though you know they’re marketing to you, you don’t mind. In fact, you actually enjoy seeing their ads, commercials, or emails in your inbox.
Marketing methods that work and last make people feel good, not bad.
What do these companies do that makes you like them?
They make you feel good! They make you laugh, they tug at your heartstrings by sharing an adorable story, or they make you feel good about your purchase because you feel like you’re giving back, contributing to something greater, or making a smart choice for yourself, your family, or your business.
Effective marketing methods leave a powerfully positive impression that consumers cannot shake. The end result? They tell their friends. They leave rave reviews. They return to buy again. And anytime they see your logo, they think, “I like that company,” even if they can’t articulate exactly why that is.
If there’s just one thing I can leave you with, it’s this: Marketing methods that work and last make people feel good, not bad.
Messaging
Have you ever been in this situation? You’re working on your website or discussing it with the person you’ve hired to make it over for you and you think to yourself, “What do I want to say on this page?”
You think and think and think about what you want people to know about you, the value you provide, and the goods or services you offer.
You jot down some key selling points and flesh out some copy around it, maybe send it to a professional writer for a tune-up, and then get it up on the page.
Finally, eager to see your work and words live, you go to your newly published web page and… meh. It falls flat. You’re underwhelmed. Dare I say… you’re disappointed.
But why?
Because you only thought of one side of the conversation. Remember: Marketing is a dialogue. You didn’t take the time to consider the person on the other side of the conversation.
Short of being a mind reader, how do you go about creating messaging that starts with your interlocutor? Rather than think, think, thinking about yourself and what you want to say, you need to feel, feel, feel what your customer wants to experience.
When you identify the words and phrases that carry a heavy emotional connotation, you’ve hit the marketing jackpot.
Start with the problem: What pains is he or she experiencing? What keeps him or her up at night? What frustrations make his or her job harder?
Then think about the experience of the ideal solution: What does he or she want to feel? What does he or she wish life was like? What does he or she hope to accomplish and embody?
When you can identify those specific words and phrases that carry a heavy emotional connotation, you’ve hit the marketing jackpot and can create content that will be unforgettable and undeniable.
Mechanisms
Now we get to the part that everyone thinks is the most important (even though it’s the last step in the process!): the “What should we be doing to market ourselves?” question.
The “doing” is the mechanism of your marketing. This could be email marketing, ads, social media, event sponsorship, account-based marketing, retargeting, SEO — I could go on and on.
You have to meet your people when the doors to a conversation are already ajar.
When choosing your marketing methods, think of a Venn diagram. In one circle, fill in all of the places you’d find your target audience when they are most receptive to your message.
This last part is key (hence the italics). When we’re shopping online for the perfect costume to wear to a theme party or present for our friend who just had a baby, we’re not open to thinking about what SaaS solution is going to make our operations team more productive. However, when we’re on LinkedIn and thinking about how we can make lucrative connections or be a better leader, we are open to thinking about how we can make our team’s jobs easier and therefore make the entire operation more efficient.
You have to meet your people when the doors to a conversation are already ajar — not when they’re slammed shut.
Next, in the other circle of your Venn diagram, list all of the things you’re willing and able to do to market your business. If you’re a small organization that doesn’t have at least $5,000 to throw at Google for advertising each month, then don’t put ads on the list. However, if you’re open to spending $10,000 per year on an event sponsorship where you know 80% of the people in the room will be your ideal customer, add it to the list.
Finally, see what your two lists in your two Venn diagram circles have in common.
That is where you focus your marketing efforts. That is where you will find your low-hanging fruit. That is where you’ll get your biggest ROI.
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If you want to master the psychology of marketing, your methods, messaging, and mechanisms will get you halfway there.
Yes, I said half.
The other half depends entirely on your motivation.
The companies that fail to build trust with prospects, the companies that make people feel shitty, duped, manipulated, and lied to… they all have the same motivation: sales.
Sales and revenue are the short-sighted motivations that cause businesses to disappoint buyers.
Psychology Corner
In 1970, psychologist Walter Mischel of Stanford University conducted what is known as the Marshmallow Experiment — a study meant to observe whether there is a longitudinal correlation between an individual’s ability to delay gratification for a larger reward in the future and success later in life.
In his study, children were put in a room and seated at a table with a single marshmallow on a plate before them. The children were told that if they could wait 15 minutes until the researcher came back, they would receive a second marshmallow. Naturally, some children couldn’t wait and gobbled up their one marshmallow before the researcher returned.
Over the next several decades, the researchers checked in on the children, even completing brain scans of the original subjects in 2011. The children who were able to delay gratification in the original study showed greater success later in life, including higher SAT scores, improved brain performance in the prefrontal cortex, and even healthier BMI.
If you want to set your business up for long-term success and build a steady pipeline that grows at a rate that’s stable, predictable, and healthy for your company to scale organically, your motivation needs to be building trust.
Sales and revenue are the short-sighted motivations that cause businesses to disappoint buyers.
With every marketing strategy you implement, every campaign you launch, every piece of content you publish, ask yourself: “What’s my motivation for putting this out in the world?”
If you find yourself defaulting to a short-term goal, like scrambling to make sales quotas or fearing a diminished pipeline, you’re setting yourself up for brief yields but long-term failure.
If, on the other hand, you can honestly say that your initiative is meant to do good in the world, build trust with your audience, and attract the attention of people you can truly help, then you’re on the right track.
Synthesize & Simplify for Success
There you have it: your feel-good marketing methods, your unforgettable and undeniable messaging, and your effective and sustainable mechanisms — and the bonus, your motivation litmus test for long-term success.
Put it all together and you have the schematic for a marketing machine that will feed your sales department and flourish exponentially the longer you leave it running. When I work with B2B businesses, this simple formula sets their marketing up to get the sale 80% to 90% of the way there so their sales team simply has to answer a few final questions and welcome the client aboard.
But how on earth could something so simple and untechnical be so effective?
Because the only thing more important to your marketing — and ultimately, your business growth — than Google, AI, or the next technological innovation are the humans who make the actual buying decisions.
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