Advertise Like A Pro: Exploit Mental Models For Marketing Results

Classical conditioning means pairing your product with positive emotions or experiences. For example, you can associate your brand with trust or nostalgia with consistent imagery, music, and messaging. This builds an unconscious relationship with your customer. An emotional bond to your product or service. They love the feeling. Literally.

Leverage amplifies your marketing efforts. It refers to using the most impactful resources and tools available. Social media, influencers, and automation to reach a larger audience without requiring proportionately greater resources. You don’t want to advertise in a newspaper. Accordingly, incentives like discounts, rewards, or exclusive perks for customer loyalty make your campaigns more impactful. Both maximize value. One gets customers to see the door and enter. The other keeps them in.

Scarcity taps into the fear of missing out. It emphasizes limited availability and exclusivity. Your product or service should appear one-of-a-kind. Create that urgency. Compel your customers to act. To act now, because later the offer might slip out of their fingers. This is intertwined with loss aversion. Customers are more motivated to act when they feel they will lose an opportunity otherwise. Phrases like “Limited-time offer!” and “Only 3 seats left!” capitalize on these psychological triggers.

Reciprocity in marketing means giving value upfront. Don’t wait. Toss them the free trial, content, samples, the lite version. This works to build goodwill and a sense of obligation in your audience. They feel indebted to your nicety. Thus the likelihood that they will “return the favor” skyrockets, and so does the chance of them engaging with your brand and making a purchase. The Minto pyramid is similar in that regard: structure your marketing with the core value proposition upfront. This ensures clarity and grabs the audience’s attention. Crucial in the fast-paced, social-media-driven world.

Diminishing returns reminds you as an advertiser that overinvesting in one strategy, campaign, or channel eventually yields less or insignificant value. After saturating a particular audience, further spending produces minimal results. Opportunity cost complements this. Assess what you are forgoing by allocating your resources to one campaign over another. Maybe it’s better to place your efforts elsewhere for a bigger impact? Perhaps you can tap into a fresh audience? People get bored of repeat ads. Show them to people who haven’t seen them before. Boom.

What you show them matters. But how you present it might matter even more. The framing effect emphasizes this. Highlight benefits, like “Save 5,000 dollars per year by…” instead of concentrating on drawbacks “Don’t waste 5,000 dollars when…” This ensures positive and persuasive messaging. It gives a more favorable brand impression.

When you frame it positively with a sense of urgency, don’t forget to make them feel special. The false uniqueness effect reckons with this: people believe their preferences and values are more unique than they really are. Agree with them. Frame your products and services as exclusive. Tailor-made for them. Make your customers feel special and understood. Even if your product, in reality, appeals to a broader demographic. Draw out an empathy map while you’re at it. Understanding your audience’s feelings, thoughts, behaviors, and pain points serves for compelling, personalized messaging. When something feels like it is made for you, you are more eager to engage with it. Your customers are no different.

The luck surface area is a model that suggests you make your own luck. In marketing and advertising, this is doubly true. Your visibility and engagement raises the likelihood of your success. In marketing, this manifests as creating consistent, valuable, shareable content for your audience. The more, the higher quality, the better. Put differently, when you are out there, an influential somebody might notice you and propel you forward. When more of you is out there, there is a bigger chance of that happening. Luck surface area.

Akin to the least effort principle in sales, reducing friction is a keystone of marketing. Create seamless checkout processes. Make your documents easy to sign. Your website shouldn’t require a computer science degree to navigate. The call-to-action buttons should be clear as day. The easier it is for a customer to engage and purchase, the higher your conversion rates will be. Simplicity is key in marketing. More is not more. The impact-effort matrix underscores a similar idea. Prioritize marketing activities based on their potential return. Targeted email campaigns or retargeted ads can be easy ways to maximize return on investment and minimize resource drain. Don’t try harder than you need to.

The curse of knowledge and boomerang effect act as cautionary tales. The former is a reminder that your audience does not understand your product or message as well as you do. They probably never will. Effective marketing is clear and concise. Relatable language. Your value proposition should be as accessible to experts as novices. The boomerang effect cautions you against rallying with your customers. Don’t use aggressive tactics. They can backfire. Pushy sales and overloading your customers with options will make them switch to your competitors. Respect your customers. Craft campaigns that resonate. Frame them properly. Advertise enough for a large luck surface area. Give them value. Maintain a consistent brand image. A happy customer is a happy brand.