How to Identify and Overcome Your Marketing Blind Spot

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Everyone has a physiological blind spot — an area without vision — because there’s a tiny part of the retina that doesn’t respond to light. Likewise, every marketer has a blind spot — their own lack of vision — which prevents them from seeing their marketing through the eyes of their customer.

During his recent featured speaker presentation at MarketingSherpa Summit 2016 in Las Vegas, Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director and CEO, MECLABS Institute, revealed critical steps to overcome your marketing blind spot so you can drive more revenue and opportunity. Watch his presentation here: The Marketer’s Blind Spot: 3 ways to overcome the marketer’s greatest obstacle to effective messaging.

 

1.      Understand the source of your disconnect.

Overcome your self-interest, and instead look at your copywriting from the customer’s perspective.

Consider these headlines and think about which one won drove the highest amount of clickthrough: 

 

Then look at the results of the entire experiment:

 

The headlines that consistently performed well put the interests of the customer first. They immediately focused on what’s in it for the customer if she opens the email. Notice the top four headlines say or imply “get.” The worst-performing headlines put the marketer’s self-interest first — they don’t mention what the customer gets until the end.

 

2.      Consistently embrace a method for seeing through your disconnect.

Fortunately, you don’t need genius or talent to see beyond self-interest. You just need a different lens – one that helps you look beyond design, beyond words, and instead analyze, step by step, how well your message captures the interest of the customer. This lens is called the conversion heuristic.

Here it is:

 

Here’s how is an example of how the conversion heuristic is put to work in the sales process:

 

Above is an illustration of a sales funnel for a travel agency. You will note about half of the people drop off when the price is revealed. That is to be expected. However, note the number of people dropping out of the funnel at the checkout. This indicates that there are inordinately high amounts of anxiety (concern) and friction (anything that slows the sales process). So the conversion heuristic was applied to the checkout page below.

 

Here’s how the Control was changed to leverage the conversion heuristic:

• The clarity of the value proposition (3v) was increased by adding a cart summary with an image of the vacation. It reminded the customers of the value they will be receiving once they complete the checkout process. Always remind customers of your value throughout the sales funnel.


• The incentive to take action was increased, and friction was reduced (i-f) with a linear page layout and by identifying the amount of steps in the checkout process. The customer knew how far she had to go until she could be done.


• Anxiety (a) was decreased by adding a security seal and a lowest-rate guarantee, and offering further one-on-one support.

 

The result of looking at the billing-and-shipping page through the lens of the conversion heuristic was a 36.10% increase in product purchases.

 

This is just one example of hundreds that illustrates how the conversion heuristic has helped marketers better understand what customers are thinking at each stage of the sales process, adapt marketing to better match their thought sequence and produce remarkable results. Just check out our Research Directory. And if you want to learn more about applying it to your marketing, check out our training and, of course, be on the lookout for more replays from MarketingSherpa Summit 2016 here at MarketingExperiments, and also at our sister site MarketingSherpa.

 

You can follow Andrea Johnson, Copywriter, MECLABS on Twitter @IdeastoWords.

 

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See the Research in Action: Dr. McGlaughlin personally optimizes your landing pages [Video]

MarketingExperiments Methodology [More on the Conversion Sequence Heuristic]

B2B Marketing: Value proposition discussion with Dr. Flint McGlaughlin [More from the blogs]

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