Warming your customer up to your value proposition

Which would you rather listen to when you’re at the gym - smooth, slow jazz or up beat house music? You may enjoy both equally but may be less inclined to push yourself harder on the treadmill to the dulcet sounds of the saxophone. 

The effect from the fast paced music that gets gym bunnies into the head space to workout is one way to prime your customers. Priming happens all the time, sometimes less ethically than others. However, when done well and subtly it is a great tool to add to your marketing tool kit. 

Start planting the seed of how your service can support your customer well before offering your service!

It’s important to note that priming and nudging are not the same things. Priming is creating the psychological conditions

that put people into a particular mindset where nudging is moving people towards a particular action. For example, leading up to a product or service launch you may be mentioning the problems that that new product or service is going to resolve without actually talking about the product. This lead up prepares your customer for the launch.

There are many ways to prime your customer. The three types of priming I’ll talk about in this blog are about triggering emotion, a behaviour or a thought that lends itself to your business activities. 

Colour is an easy one to think about for your brand. It’s no surprise that products that position themselves as natural or healthy are mostly green or health services are often blue. The feeling that culturally we assign to colour prepares us for what comes next. It can be particularly jarring if the branding colour and its businesses are misattuned. Could you imagine a funeral home with the brightest neon colours available? That would put you off pretty immediately! It’s worth having other eyes on your branding colours to give feedback on the feeling it gives them. If first impressions are off base it will be difficult to bring your customers back to where you need them.

Your business tagline, slogans and pithy phrases are areas you can implement behavioural priming. This is an opportunity to subtly suggest the behaviour you want to see. The tagline I chose on my website is “Build the business you love”, it implies action and cooperation. A fitness store may have the tagline “get moving” to entice customers to purchase their active wear. Consider your tagline and what behaviour it is moving your customer towards. 

The words you use matter, particularly in those high cost marketing tools such as ad words or META ads. Your copy can trigger people to recall other experiences that lend themselves to using your product to recreate those fond memories.. This definitely should be used responsibly! You created your business to help customers resolve their problems, not scare them! There is a big difference between acknowledging a challenge a customer has (a fraught relationship that can be healed) and scaring them into purchasing (your relationship is over and you are awful - unless you buy my service!). Using copy that activates related memories is what you are going for. For a jewelry business, the business owner may want to use words that bring up memories of gifting, of family, of feeling good. These are all things that can be done without any sales pitch such as relating a story of the business owner gifting jewelry to a loved one. 

Start with thinking about how your social media, website, or other marketing materials feel at a gut level - better yet as a real honest pal. Do your marketing communications inspire the feelings you want to generate in your customers? If not, have a play and test with your network. This is such a great thing to do when you’re small. Mess up, try again, re-word! You’ll find the flow and design that primes your customer to think of you next time they have a problem they need solving.