Fifty milliseconds ⏱
That’s how much time a person takes to decide if they like your website or not. A visitor may bounce – or become a new customer – in 0.05 seconds.
The purpose of neuromarketing is to provoke an emotional reaction in a person’s brain using information such as websites, logos, and social media material. With neuromarketing, brands can easily understand what their clients feel — and what drives them to buy.
Neuromarketing has become a standard model for companies and private institutions looking to reach new audiences or target specific demographics in specific markets with a higher conversion rate. Changing consumer habits and ever-shifting economic conditions means that companies have to invest in more comprehensive marketing tactics to be able to compete with rival businesses and maintain a growing market share of increasingly conscious customers.
What is Neuromarketing?
Neuromarketing refers to how companies and other institutions apply psychological principles when promoting products or services to consumers to improve on the traditional models of advertising. Practices such as using certain logos, images, branding, and colour selection are some of the ways that companies use neuromarketing to reach customers by creating and testing different models that catch the eye.
What are the Examples of Neuromarketing?
Website design
When creating websites, the decision to use specific layouts, color schemes, font size, and other visuals is based entirely on neuromarketing. Most of what appears on many websites are meant to target the website visitor by applying features such as visual cues, standard font size, customer testimonials, and using a variety of eye-catching content that keeps the user scrolling.
Bold Headlines
The headlines used on marketing content tend to cause an emotional reaction to the reader or target audience and this is just one of many ways that marketers drive traffic to their websites. To use headlines effectively, companies invest a great deal of time and resources in studying consumer behaviour to learn how they can create headlines that capture the reader’s attention.
One example of this is when the phrase “Practice makes Patron” was used by a well-known brand in their marketing campaign. The effect of modifying the simple phrase was found to pique the reader’s interest and increase the number of people that saw their ad.
Directed Eye Gaze for Ads
Marketing experts have long known that using images of people in their ads led to higher conversion than posting product images and brand names alone. This principle is most commonly used when selling pet food or baby products. Researchers found out that when they posted images of adorable babies in their ads, it led to higher consumer engagement and a boost in sales – but this wasn’t enough.
If they used a close-up of a baby’s face, it drew attention away from the product as people focused on the baby. However, through eye-tracking technology, marketers quickly found that when the infant gazed directly at the product, viewers were also likely to notice and purchase the products in the ad.
Brand Packaging
Brand packaging is one of the most important aspects of neuromarketing. It employs a variety of neuroimaging techniques to create packaging that can appeal to consumers in a way that the average consumer finds easy and convenient. Large companies have entire departments that research the best product packaging for their brands and this alone plays an important role in how these products perform once they go to market.
Color Selection for Ads and Products
Color selection has a direct influence on consumer habits in a way that can increase sales for a business or lead to significant losses. Marketing experts know that people are emotionally affected by color and they use this knowledge to create color schemes that make products stand out in a supermarket or instil a theme or message that goes with a particular product or service.
Some brands spend more time and money creating color schemes for their packaging than they do on the content inside the packaging — and this is especially true for companies that sell products like water or ice cream. When the actual product is the same across different brands, the packaging and colors become the primary focus for marketers.
How Does Neuromarketing Work?
Neuromarketing focuses on how the human brain responds to specific stimuli — which is achieved by conducting qualitative and quantitative surveys across entire industries. Consumers make choices that are triggered by subconscious action through neuromarketing even though many times they don’t recognize the connection.
To set up effective neuromarketing techniques for things like product messaging and point-of-sale, companies must be able to gauge customer behaviour either through qualitative research or the more revolutionary fMRI scans. There is tremendous marketing-level research and data that has already been published on the potential impact of neuromarketing for broad industry and consumer needs; however, emerging businesses require more narrowed studies of consumer behaviour before investing in new products or services.
For instance, the kind of approach required for a company that wants to learn about digital marketing in Malaysia won’t apply to an e-commerce store located in Mumbai due to differing nuances in consumer behaviour. Companies are therefore required to hire a third-party marketing firm that can help address those concerns and create a customized neuromarketing plan that will have a stronger impact on the market audience.
Once they gain this knowledge, market experts such as Daiki Media provide solutions by creating working models that refer to real-world scenarios and implement proven neuromarketing strategies to affect user behaviour and improve the website and social media conversion for companies and organizations.
To learn more about how neuromarketing works for modern companies and brands, follow this link.
Here are a few key points about neuromarketing and how it fits with consumers in real-world scenarios:
- Test duration and sample size are important markers for determining the validity of statistical data. For this reason, extensive research is required to gain conclusive data on a market segment.
- A/B test case studies are not as accurate as real numbers when attempting to showcase consumer habits.
- Your website is an important tool that can be used as a sales platform through the study and implementation of cognitive biases – but this requires an accumulation of market data as a precursor.
- Avoid theoretical test studies and focus on real-world assessment of human behaviour before making conclusions on your market base or target consumer.
Cxl.com is a good resource if you’re interested in learning more about digital marketing in New Zealand and finding out how to implement proven methods for neuromarketing.