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Everyone Has A Story

Have you ever noticed that when you’re talking to somebody there’s always a story to be told? This is also true with businesses. So what is your story?  after all, everyone has a story.

The advantage to telling your story is the empathetic nature of The Human Condition. “Empathy is often defined as understanding another person’s experience by imagining oneself in that other person’s situation: One understands the other person’s experience as if it were being experienced by the self, but without the self actually experiencing it. A distinction is maintained between self and other. Sympathy, in contrast, involves the experience of being moved by, or responding in tune with, another person.” ~ Encyclopedia of Social Psychology 

Everyone has a history.

People from all over the world have various backgrounds, races, ethnicities, and histories. We all have a story to say, and more precisely, your business has a story; such as, why you started, what you sell, and why people should buy from you. 

That said, we are all not natural storytellers. If you are like most people, your life lacks inherent drama. This is when serious self-reflection, along with conversation with friends and family comes in handy. After you have read through a few of my blog posts, you will recognize Cortex Marketing’s philosophy, which I’ve talked about multiple times in all my blogs.

Everyone Has A StoryTelling Your Story

It’s important to remember the difference between the message that you want people to hear and the message that people are going to hear from their perspective. In fact, for most, it can be a challenge to develop the skill and a style that allows you to write from another’s perspective effectively; even though our egos will often tell you otherwise. This is where I can help.

Here is my offer, if you received any value from my words here or in another blog, fantastic, that is the goal from my end. If you are confused about where to start when looking to tell your story and need help, I encourage you to read through all my blogs. If you have read my other blogs and you are still not seeing the results you want in your personal or business marketing, call my office at 1-888-502-3523 and talk to me directly.

My Unparalleled Offer

Give me a call or set up a chat in my calendar and let’s have a conversation about your business. I’m willing to give you 20 to 30 minutes of my time at no cost to you and if you feel that you can get better results from what you create I’ll support you in doing that by answering calls from you whenever you need advice.

Now, this doesn’t mean that you get a bunch of free services forever, however, what it does mean is that you will have a direct connection to me and if I am not in a meeting or away from my desk, I will answer the phone and you can ask your question and pick my brain at no cost. Alternatively, come follow my page on Facebook. This is an attempt at providing a guarantee that I’m here to help and if that means personal help, that puts a “no wasted time” aspect on our connection. You win either way! 

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Business Communication: The Psychological Aspects

Business Communication

Why do people listen to your business advice? Or an even better question is, Why should they listen to your business advice?

The truth of the matter is that many in the marketing world still market in a way that they believe that psychology is the key to marketing. Unfortunately, they are only partially right, which is why they often only get partial engagement and partial results.

Influence is a multi-spoked wheel

Online Marketing - TOMAThe psychology of business communication

The psychology of business communication involves looking at the complex relationships between business and informal communications. Business communication is an object-oriented activity and is aimed at organizing and optimizing activity — presenting a business model, reaching an emotional agreement with a client, and targeted project planning.

A participant’s emotional attitude is key

To achieve the most effective emotional communication, the subject of communication and the participants’ emotional attitudes toward it are the main factors of the communication process. The ability to understand the targets’  needs and their positions (which includes personal attitude), is a necessary condition for the success of communication. The reason is that the main objective of business communication can be called productive cooperation, the desire to bring together goals and establish and improve emotional buy-in.

Not Telling Your Story With An Image is a clear WordPress MistakeThis  is a subject-target activity

Since this is a subject-target activity, the content of each communication form (talks, discussion, report, etc.), as well as each speech structure (conclusion, opinion, cue, critical remark, note) depends on the communicative intent and the expected result. Every specific goal in business communication requires the content of communication, which allows it to be implemented and to achieve the necessary results.

At the end of the day

The success of your communication depends on the adequacy of attitudes, the understanding of the subject and interpersonal position, the knowledge of the patterns of various forms of communication and rules of behaviour in various situations, the ability to form a tactical plan and implement it on the basis of existing social skills. This situation is especially important in those situations when there is an assumption about the possible insincerity of a business partner.

Learn more about getting your message heard.

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Five Web Page Design Hacks

Web Page Hacks in Website DesignHere are some web page design hacks.
When you’re running an online business with a website, the most important way to generate more customers for your business is to drive more traffic to it — and there are lots of ways to do this.

Content Marketing, Paid Advertising, and Social Media Marketing

However, not all the visitors that land on your site will buy from you. It’s the sad fact of digital marketing. According to WordStream, a typical website conversion rate is about 2.35% on average, however, the top 25% are converting higher.

Web Page Hacks - Landing Page ChecklistThis means that for every 100 visitors your site gets, only 2 to 3 of them will make a purchase. As such, you need to focus on creating a website that is fully optimized for conversions if you are to raise your conversions to a more profitable level.

In fact, I encourage you to download my Landing Page Checklist.

Impressing Potential Customers With Some Web Page Design Hacks

Since your website is your chance to impress potential customers, here are 5 simple web page design hacks from our partners at Rebel that will help convert more of your visitors into customers.

1) Increase your white (or negative) space.
Cramming as much content as you can onto every page increases the cognitive load on your visitor, to the point that they’ll leave. Try breaking up blocks of text with bullets and imagery for a better user experience.

2) Simplify your navigation.
Only include the most important pages you’d like your visitors to click on, in the header of your website. Simplifying your nav will lead to increased conversions.

3) Use an animated call to action.
Calls to action on every page are important, but how you present them maybe even more important! One study found that using button CTAs instead of text-only CTAs increased clicks by 45%. Better yet? Incorporate subtle movement into your CTAs for an even higher conversion rate.

4) Use high-quality stock photography.
Lack of branding photos? No problem! Incorporate high-quality stock photography throughout your site for a professional and captivating user experience. When you’re done, add graphics too!

5) Add social proof.
Whether it’s product or service reviews, incorporating social proof into your site garners trust and a higher conversion rate. In fact, impactful testimonials mean that people are 58% more likely to purchase from you.

Web Page Design Hacks from Rebel
A strong digital presence is a must-have for today’s businesses. That’s because customers expect to find you online. Whether it’s a website, an e-commerce platform, a social media page or a combination of all three, getting your company online comes with major benefits.
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Decision Making And How We Actually Make Decisions

Multiple Choice Decision MakingDecision-making —  how do we actually do it? Most perceive it as an exercise in analyzing and logically approaching problems, and in some respects, that is true. However, the fact is, there is a lot of science behind the process we go through.

For many in business, it has been thought that marketing your product was a psychological game, and as such, for many years people marketed their products based upon the selling of an idea. Just give ’em more information and they will eventually buy, right?

What we have found out, however, is that people do not make their decisions based upon what they know. In fact, if you give them too much information, they won’t be able to make a decision and your sale will fail because the buyer will go into “choice paralysis” and not be confident about their decision. 

What is choice paralysis?

Have you ever been shopping in a store only to approach a sample table and on that table is a sample of jellies? There’s a very definite scientific methodology about the way that they display these jellies. Notice they never give you a choice of more than three or four if they want you to actually choose your favourite. This is because, over the number of three, the typical human will have “Choice Paralysis”

Choice paralysis in Decision MakingAlso known as over choice, choice paralysis, or the paradox of choice describes how people get overwhelmed when they are presented with a large number of options to choose from. While we tend to assume that more choice is a good thing, in many cases, research has shown that we have a harder time choosing from a larger array of options.

So decision making works how, again?

It’s important to understand that all decisions involve emotions. In fact, every decision that you make is about your emotions. You can use certain words to make people feel confident within their decisions, however, it will always boil down to emotions.  In this way, it’s a bad idea to provide more than four options to choose from with anything that you do.

Emotions In Decision MakingDecisions are not made from an informational or rational point of view.

We’d like to think that we are rational and logical animals and that when we make a decision we carefully weigh all the options. However, research has shown that the truth behind it all is actually counterintuitive. There are literally hundreds of decisions that we make every day, and while the information that we possess does influence those decisions, 100% of those decisions are based upon the feeling that we get from the knowledge that we understand and how that understanding makes us feel a certain way.

Most of our decision-making is unconscious.

Neurological research shows that activity while making a decision, researchers were able to predict what choice people make 7 to 10 seconds before they themselves are even aware of having made a decision. STUDY SOURCE: Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain. Nature neuroscience.

“Do you write your messaging and content to appeal to logical thinking? If so, it’s possible and even probable that your logical, persuasive arguments to your target audience about why they should go with the premium service or why they should purchase a particular product may be in vain.” ~ Susan Weinschenk, Ph. D.

Is there ever a time that our decision-making is making “rational decisions”?

The short answer is no. If you can’t feel emotions, then you can’t make decisions. This is largely thanks to our Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex… we’ll just call it the “VPC” for now, but science calls it the vmPFC.

Essentially, in the front of your brain lies the prefrontal cortex and within that is the VPC. It’s important in regulating fear, while other parts of your brain — specifically the amygdala — tells you when you should be afraid and what you should be afraid of. So if you’ve ever heard the term “fight or flight” that is a direct reference to the functions of your amygdala. 

This is all within the limbic system, a collection of regions of the brain that specifically regulate emotions. And people decide when they feel varying emotions. They buy when they feel confident and do not buy when they don’t.

The science behind decision making.

According to researchers, there is a neuron that fires in the brain that triggers people to take action. Then the brain decides whether it is a confident action or not. This subjectivity is not based on the amount of information you have, it is based on a feeling you have… in this case, “confidence” or “no confidence”.

So, in business sales, if you want people to take positive action and buy what you are selling, you must be able to make them feel confident.

What Decision Making Looks Like

So is the information you know weighing heavier in the influence of a decision?

The answer is yes. In business sales, there’s an old adage that says only give more information to people if they’re making a goal-based decision. And while all decisions are made from our emotions, there are surely different levels that this takes place. 

As an example, some decisions are made in the Orbital Frontal Cortex or OFC, so during the times that you are looking for solving a goal-based decision or value-based decisions, your heavy emotional decision making has mostly been done; all you were deciding upon now some of the more habitual details e.g. you like white better than black, or foods with less salt, etc. 

So in closing…

People liked having more choices to choose from but they were more satisfied with their choice when there was less to choose from. Silly humans, let’s have a chat.

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