Unlock the secrets to captivating the hearts and minds of consumers with Josh Strawczynski, the managing director of JMarketing, who shares his expertise on the psychological underpinnings of customer decision-making. Our discussion ventures beyond the surface, exploring the subtle art of influencing behavior and ensuring that your marketing strategies aren't just shots in the dark, but precision-targeted moves that resonate with the human psyche. Grasp the predictable patterns of consumer actions and learn how to channel them into conversion gold for your business.
Have you ever considered the lightning-fast judgment your website undergoes when a new visitor lands on it? Josh and I dissect the critical first impressions that can make or break a potential customer's trust and pinpoint the 'nine frictions of resistance'—the subconscious criteria that dictate whether a user engages or clicks away. By harnessing the secrets of professional web design and strategic content placement, you'll soon be crafting digital experiences that speak directly to your audience's needs and pain points turning browsers into buyers easily.
Rounding out our deep dive, we tackle the art of evaluating and refining your digital marketing endeavors to cut through the noise and waste no dollar unturned. From website performance to the subtleties of crafting a compelling headline, Josh imparts wisdom on creating a roadmap that guides you and guarantees a robust return on investment. For those eager to catapult their marketing effectiveness to new heights, Josh extends a warm invitation for further discussion. Tune in and transform your online presence with the potent combination of marketing savvy and psychological insight.
Unlock the secrets to captivating the hearts and minds of consumers with Josh Strawczynski, the managing director of JMarketing, who shares his expertise on the psychological underpinnings of customer decision-making. Our discussion ventures beyond the surface, exploring the subtle art of influencing behavior and ensuring that your marketing strategies aren't just shots in the dark, but precision-targeted moves that resonate with the human psyche. Grasp the predictable patterns of consumer actions and learn how to channel them into conversion gold for your business.
Have you ever considered the lightning-fast judgment your website undergoes when a new visitor lands on it? Josh and I dissect the critical first impressions that can make or break a potential customer's trust and pinpoint the 'nine frictions of resistance'—the subconscious criteria that dictate whether a user engages or clicks away. By harnessing the secrets of professional web design and strategic content placement, you'll soon be crafting digital experiences that speak directly to your audience's needs and pain points turning browsers into buyers easily.
Rounding out our deep dive, we tackle the art of evaluating and refining your digital marketing endeavors to cut through the noise and waste no dollar unturned. From website performance to the subtleties of crafting a compelling headline, Josh imparts wisdom on creating a roadmap that guides you and guarantees a robust return on investment. For those eager to catapult their marketing effectiveness to new heights, Josh extends a warm invitation for further discussion. Tune in and transform your online presence with the potent combination of marketing savvy and psychological insight.
Business owners. Do you want an unfair advantage over your competitors? Do you want to dominate in your area of expertise? You were listening to Business Life Hacks. Learn to influence consumer psychology and shortcut your way to business success with tips, tricks and hacks from award-winning digital agency J Marketing.
Alex:Do you want to know the secret to making every marketing strategy a success? There's so much you could invest time and money into, but before you do, listen to our guest today, managing director Josh Stropinski, talk about the hidden science of how to influence customer thinking and, in the process, ensure your marketing efforts succeed in their mission. Josh, thanks for coming on the podcast today.
Josh:The pleasure to be here Today. We're going to talk about one of my favorite topics, which is how do you influence customer decision making? Not just, hey, we're doing marketing for the sake of it, but what is the hidden science behind making that a success?
Alex:Yeah, exactly, it's one of my favorite topics too, and that's something that really sets us apart here at J Marketing this understanding and application of consumer psychology. So let's start with a quick overview of the subject. So how does understanding consumer psychology play a role in influencing user behavior online?
Josh:So let me answer that in two ways. The first one is humans massively overestimate how unique our thinking is. The reality is we are just another mammal and we can be very predictable and very influenceable. If you've ever met someone that's really suave and good with people, it's not that they have a bigger vocabulary than you do. It is that they have studied people and they can spot trends over and over again and they know when they say these words they get one of two or three different responses. That is understanding human behavior, and if we understand it, then we know what are the small steps we can make to influence it.
Josh:So let's answer in two ways. And the other way I want to want to mention right off the top, so that we get this idea into the podcast, this overarching idea Most marketing is done, it is poorly thought out by people that are just doing what everyone else has done but don't really have a deep understanding of human behavior. And so if we can understand what is the science, what is the process that someone is going through to make a final decision, or even make a decision of whether they should walk into a store in the first place? What impact would that have on how you then invest your money in marketing and advertising activities. Yeah, absolutely, it's got a massive impact.
Alex:So we've talked a little bit about sort of an overview, but getting down to a bit more of a specific level. So what are the key principles of consumer psychology that influence how people engage and turn into conversions on websites specifically?
Josh:Okay, well, before we talk about what the formulas are and there's several of them that I'll talk about today first of all, I want to talk about what happens when someone is using a website to find a solution. We don't think about this nearly enough. So you've decided that you're looking for something. Maybe you're looking for a cheap holiday, or a vacuum cleaner, or a company to act as union lawyer. It doesn't matter. Everyone does the same thing. On average, we open seven tabs with competitors, and our brain is immediately trying to get rid of as many of those as possible. Now, alex, before I go on, why is your brain so keen on spending so little time to get rid of as many options as possible? What do you think the main reason would be Well, if I put myself into that situation.
Alex:I just feel totally overwhelmed, like an onslaught of information. I want to simplify things and reduce the noise in my brain as quickly as possible.
Josh:That's right and that's the conscious you saying that. The unconscious you, which is your brain, is millions of years old and its job is to protect the heart. So if you're out in the cold, if you're out in the snow and you don't have a heat source, first thing to go will be your fingers and your toes We've all experienced this in skiing or whatnot and the reason for that is that the body is diverting that heat and energy to protect the heart, the organ which is most important. The same thing works when it comes to mental stress. Your brain is hardwired to protect you from that pain and thinking and making decisions and assessing things that are wrong. These are three historically built into us to avoid. So when your brain is faced with seven different options or even a wall of text, it immediately says how do I reduce this pain on me? And this is where the science gets really interesting. In the first 0.03 seconds, which is very, very fast, your brain makes a decision on how safe the site feels. Well, let's talk about safe. It's really just professionalism of design, and any really really high end designer, someone that specializes in how the reactions to designs from consumers, will be able to do this part really well, Some cheap designer from the subcontinent? Well, not so much. We've all had that experience.
Josh:In 2.6 seconds, your eyes are fixed onto the first thing on the page, and a really good design will have what we call an information hierarchy, meaning a headline basically as the biggest thing on the page, and it will be talking about how it solves the problem that you are searching. Now, this is really, really important. It's not talked about enough in marketing. In 2.6 seconds. I have to speed up that. Third one. You aren't doing a lot of thinking and you're certainly not looking down a full page. You are just looking at that headline. So, Alex, help me out with this one. If I was looking for a lawyer, would I be looking for just a lawyer for the sake of it, or would I be likely to have a problem that I need a lawyer for?
Alex:You would certainly have a problem. You need a solution for.
Josh:Great. So let's say that I'm being locked up for trespassing. Just a stupid example. Would you prefer to go to a lawyer or a lawyer that specializes in trespassing? A specialist, of course, Right. And so if the headline on the website that I went to said we're great lawyers, okay then lies that you can solve my problem. But which would you choose? We are great lawyers or get out of your trespassing fine today, the trespassing specific one. Why? Well, why does that appeal to you? And I know this is an obvious question, but say it out loud.
Alex:Well, I feel that they're experts in the specific area and they have a lot of experience helping people in the same situation as me.
Josh:Yeah, absolutely. And our brain is even simpler than this. I want you to really envision how a Labrador would think about this problem if it had just enough intelligence to understand the words on the paper. Because that is really what our brain is like. In that first 2.6 seconds, it's got these seven tabs open and it goes through them and it goes oh, oh, I'm being done for trespassing, right, these guys solve that. That is going to get me to give me enough confidence for the brain to say you know what I'm going to.
Josh:Rather than just conserve this energy, I'm going to choose to allocate another 10 seconds and this is a very critical amount of time 10 seconds to peruse the page and see if the rest of it feels good, like if you met someone at a cocktail party and they were very warm and hey, alex, how are you Nice to meet you.
Josh:You feel like you would be willing to invest another X amount of time in getting to know them. Now, in the next 10 seconds, they might say something hideously racist and you might then choose to turn you back, but you were willing to get to that stage in the first place, and this is why that first 2.6 seconds is critical. In the next 10 seconds we're looking for. Does this give us proof points? Does this feel like I have confidence in this situation? And then, if we can get another 10 seconds out of you 10 to 20, by the time we've hit the 30 second mark, if we have dealt with what we're later going to talk about, the nine frictions of resistance this is the checklist which our subconscious mind is looking to tick off before it's willing to take a next step then we have won the inquiry from that customer.
Alex:Yeah, it's like you're saying. We need to speak to their subconscious immediately. When I am working on the hero section the first section of a landing page that has that big headline you mentioned, which has a message about how we can solve their biggest problem, overcome their biggest friction so I think when I am working on a landing page, I think about how to start overcoming the nine frictions, whichever one I think is most pressing, immediately, within, like as you said, the first 2.6 seconds. So people know right away I'm in the right place. These people are worth 10 seconds more of my attention and 10 seconds more. So that sort of leads us into the next topic which we've talked about the principles of consumer psychology. It's all well and good to understand the principles, but obviously we need to know how to apply them in practice. And that brings us to the nine frictions overcoming the nine frictions. So can you give us a brief overview of what the nine frictions are and why understanding them is important for CRO?
Josh:The nine frictions are the checklist which our head goes through subconsciously before it's willing to take the next step. And before I talk about that, I'm going to just quickly finish up on what we're talking about with header blocks. This is the first thing you see when you come onto the page. There's a company that we won an award for called Buddy Healthcare. It's buddyhealthcarecom, and if you go to that home page, you'll see what is near a perfect header block. It's not completely right, because what you will notice is that the headline reads transform your care pathways, and on the right hand side there's a little bit of movement. Now I want you to think to yourself. Just listen to those words again, and then I'm going to put on the screen and read to you an alternative headline. I want you to tell me which one you think would be more effective Transform your care pathways or reduce hospital admin time by 70%. I know I was asking the audience else, but which one of those is more likely to get your attention?
Alex:The second one would get my attention, because I think care pathways is a little bit vague. I'm not sure what that means. Hospital admin time is a lot more specific, and then, of course, you have a specific outcome reduced admin time by 70%.
Josh:Exactly right. What is transforming care pathways? There's no outcome there, whereas and this is a trick for anyone listening at home If you start a headline with a verb reduce reduce hospital admin time, that is an outcome based word, and so, instead of talking about yourself, never ever, ever write about yourself. We were the best in MedTech. New reduced hospital admin time by 70%, and by 70% is what makes it tangible. This is what makes a fantastic headline. So, with that out of the way and I really feel this is one of the most important lessons let's go back to our nine frictions. So let's assume we've won the first 2.6 seconds. What happens next? People then scroll out the page and their blind is looking for this subconscious checklist, these nine things, and when I walk through them with you, I don't think you're going to find it particularly difficult to understand what they are. I mean, this really is the very basics, but we never really think about. So the first one completeness of solution. I don't want your, your service, your product to actually do what I want. I want it to entirely do what I want. So, for example, if you were giving, if your business is giving, overseas tax advice allowing people to leave their current country and move somewhere else with a lower tax, right, so you're safe. Cash. That is great. That is part of the solution, right? But what questions appear in your head alongside that? Well, we'll actually like it there. What's the healthcare system like If I want to come back to my home country? Will I be able to do that? This is completeness of solution. I want to tick all of those off before I want to go down this path, even to chat to a salesperson. And so, completeness of solution if we can understand that, we can solve it. Expertise you want to buy from an expert? How do I know that this person is actually an expert? And the date is fascinating on this we are 86% more likely to purchase when an expert recommends something to us.
Josh:Product durability this one is totally misunderstood. All the time People think of physical goods. Oh, you know, will the barbecue last? Yeah, that's part of it. But what about if we sold sales training? Now, when you go into an organisation and you sell sales training me as a boss I think great, alex here might be a better salesperson. But what happens then? If he leaves, I've lost the long-term value of Alex. So what if that sales training actually taught us how to train or gave us some principles which the entire organisation could use. Now productivity really means long-term value of the money that I've spent. Now to bring Alex back into this conversation Alex, product pricing this is number four, or comparison. I know when you're talking to clients and writing, you get a lot of pushback on putting prices on the page. Tell me a little bit about your experience.
Alex:Yeah, I think a lot of clients don't want to put their prices out there because they think maybe it'll scare away customers, which is kind of the opposite. A lot of customers might get scared away if you don't put a price out there and also, maybe the customers will be scared away. Will it be those who can't afford your product anyway? Or maybe it's just how they've always done it. No, we've never put price out there and no, that's been fine. So a lot of times it is an uphill battle trying to convince companies to put pricing info, but I do think that you don't have to put your exact price. You can put a range or an estimate or a comparison to similar products that has that price. So I think, once you explain, you don't have to put your exact price. You just have to give the customer an idea of the price and that if you don't, they might leave for a competitor that does give an idea of the price. I think they understand how important it is to provide pricing info.
Josh:It is, and the reason that my owners don't like doing it is they're scared of losing. They're scared of someone not signing up. I get it, that's how we are prewired, but it is very clearly wrong and I'll explain why. If we come back to our prehistoric brain again, it is geared so that it'll avoid pain and if there's doubt, doubt is pain. Now I can explain this with something that happened yesterday. My wife runs a golfing community and someone that was paying to sponsor to get a message out to the members is running a webinar. So it's a webinar for an awesome golf tour around Africa. It's like total amazing thing and she's having this webinar to explain what it is. We got hate mail and the hate mail had nothing to do with Africa, it was. This sounds awesome. I would really like to go. I am not willing to get on a webinar and give up my time if I don't have an idea roughly what this would cost. So the trip to Africa could be $3,000 or it could be $25,000. And I don't want to have to sit through an hour of presentation and already find that out. So when we talk about pricing, we are talking about giving people a ballpark or a comparison to someone else. Now I'm going to move quickly through the next one so we don't bore everyone at home Production capacity how can you demonstrate that you can give this level of output to the person who orders it?
Josh:So most people go oh, e-commerce Yep, sure, that's one place, but what about sales training? Again, if I want to train Alex, it's easy. What if I have 500 or 5,000 salespeople? Can you actually deliver on it? And timely delivery? Same question If I want you to do 5,000 people, can you deliver it all on the same time schedule or not? Or if I do order something from you, what will be the time schedule that it's presented to me on? I'm currently building a house and my architect has given me exact dates when she's going to come back with things so that I can plan every future step, and it makes it so much more comfortable.
Josh:Now we get into what is my favorite one on this whole list Similar clients, and I will tell a story. I had a software company come to me and they say well, you've got to be using our software. Mcdonald's is using it and it's really good. And we bought this software so we could sell it, so we could use it with them and it costs $20 million, and my argument to them was two things. One, $20 million doesn't make a software good. It just makes you a bad negotiator. And two, I'm not McDonald's and McDonald's is not my client. We don't deal with clients like McDonald's, and so I don't actually care about what it is you're trying to sell me. However, if they had said agencies like yours use this software and here's how it's helped them, now it has my complete interest.
Josh:So for the marketers that are still following me here, the question is if you're going to have logos and case studies on your page, make them about similar clients to the ones you're going after and the biggest ones you can think of, because it's actually scaring people away. The final two things are really simple and I'll fly over them. Customer service so, with someone there when I have a problem, it's reducing risk. This might be instant chat on your website, it might be a 24 hour hotline, it doesn't need to be anything. Finally, a sunsort of return policy or guarantee, or how can I have confidence that this is really going to work and you're not just selling me smoke and mirrors? Alex, I talked quite a lot about all of those just then and a big flow on. Do you think we've covered everything that makes up those nine frictions in a way that can be understood?
Alex:Yeah, I think so. I think it's kind of like what you were saying before you started talking in detail about the nine frictions, which is, I think marketers who have a basic idea of consumer psychology will recognize that they've come across potential customers who do have these sort of frictions. They just couldn't think about it in an organized and systemic way like we do at J-Marketing.
Josh:What I would recommend to anyone that's followed so far is it's hard to listen to a podcast and take all the stem, but what is really easy is to go to our website and fill in. There's a form there to download the nine friction booklet. It takes you through all of these frictions and explains each of them in detail. This is the framework that I would use to assess all of your marketing not just your website.
Josh:When you sit down I suspect, alex, this is our next topic but when you sit down and you think about, okay, how are we going to achieve our goals through marketing, sit down and think about your customer. If you do that and you think about the frictions they might be facing, you can really just run down the nine friction lists and work out. If I was in their shoes, where would I feel anxiety? Well, I'm not certain it's going to work, okay. Well, which of the frictions are we not delivering on and therefore, what should our messaging be? Once you have that, then it's really easy for you to think about the where. Well, we could use good ads for this, we could use some pop up banners, we could put it in emails, we could refine our sales pitch. Most marketers think about channel first and then they try to work out what to say on those channels. And that is us about face. You're making it so hard for yourself, whereas if you follow the nine frictions process, it makes marketing easy.
Alex:Yeah, exactly, and that sort of leads into. We just talked about these strategies for using these insights into user behavior. But even when you're applying the nine frictions especially if maybe you don't have as much experience as we do at Jmark and you're not going to get everything right the first time, so you need to do continuous testing and adaptation. So can you talk a little bit about I'm not just doing a B testing, but how you can get insights related to overcoming the nine frictions from AB testing?
Josh:Yeah, this is one of my favorite things in the world. And again, you'll almost never see an agency do this Ask your audience questions. It seems simple, right, but marketers always seem to feel like, oh, we should just know. So I stick that finger in the air and then they're supposed to have the answer. This is absolutely ludicrous and anyone doing it definitely needs to take a look in the mirror, because we all know the way to solve a problem is to know that there is one. And so how do you do that? You test Now. You don't need to use your company account. You can use some dummy account or your personal account.
Josh:But the very simplest AB question is to put up ads to your target audience it doesn't matter whether it's through Google, facebook, linkedin or TikTok or anything and try to get to put up these frictions in the forms of questions. Don't change any of the design. Keep it all standard. Just think about a black box with a question on it. You could even do this through just a social media post, and if I were to say in a question experts recommend that brushing your teeth with this toothbrush is better. Find out which one, and I was to put up a different post which said this toothbrush, find out which toothbrush not only cleans tea but removes X, y and Z as well.
Josh:Now, these aren't particularly good examples, but you can see how I'm testing two frictions against each other to see which one of them has a bigger pool for people. Now they really aren't good examples, because I wouldn't do just one of these. Of course. The answer is all. I would look at different ways of wording it, but I was using that as an example. To say A, you can use AB testing to understand from the market what they think is most important.
Alex:Exactly so. We talked about the nine frictions and some strategies for overcoming them and, of course, provided information about another resource, the ebook we have on our website. But it can be hard to sort of take a step back and objectively evaluate your own marketing operations, especially if you're trying to take a totally different viewpoint, trying to figure out how you can overcome the nine frictions. So to that end, at J Marketing we offer a full $995 digital marketing audit. Can you tell us a little bit more about that, josh?
Josh:Yeah, you really summarized it well. It's very hard to challenge what you've already done because you've got biases made up in your own mind. So what we offer and it's a loss leader for us is to come in, analyze everything you're doing your current landing pages, your website. We look at your analytics, your Google ads, emails, everything that you're doing and we'll give you some feedback around psychologically. Is this hitting the marks you want? And we go even deeper and say are you actually wasting money through using these things badly? When people then use that roadmap to realign their marketing and focus themselves, we have a hundred percent success rate of them instantly finding growth. The truth is, it is not that hard to influence customer decision making if you've got the roadmap in the first place.
Alex:Exactly, and that should be the next step for anyone who's gotten value from this podcast and wants to know how they can use the information that they've learned and work with experts to skyrocket their conversions. Well, I think that about wraps it up. Thanks for coming on the podcast today, Josh. Look forward to having you on again soon. I'll speak to you soon.
Josh:I love talking about these topics and if anyone wants to reach out to me to talk about them, my contact details at Josh at jmarketingagency will be levelized at Davachat. Thanks for having me, Alex. Thank you.