An Introduction to Cognitive Marketing
As a marketer, understanding your target customers' decision-making process is a key advantage to scaling your business. As the economy continues to grow, the choice of solutions in the market also increases, making it critical to know why consumers decide to move forward with solution A over solution B.
Classical economic theories explain that humans are rational and will go for the product that offers the highest utility at the lowest price. However, that does not always apply in sales nor is it applicable in every industry. Psychologists also know consumers are irrational, impulsive, and unreasonable. Read on to learn more about the marketing tools and sales behaviors needed at each stage of your prospect's decision-making journey (CDJ).
What is Cognitive Marketing?
Cognitive marketing is the transtheoretical model of behavior change applied to the complex sales process our clients must navigate. It's the underlying foundation that enables us to help our clients 1) identify and 2) remove the barriers that prevent their highest-value prospects from becoming life-long customers.
This powerful framework forms a natural connection with your prospects because you are aligning your efforts around the specific tools and behaviors they need to progress into the next stage of their decision-making journey.
Technology has also paved a way to achieving this goal with more efficiency without compromising the personalization expected from today's buyer. With advances in AI, you have the power at your fingertips to analyze the data you collect to speak to the issues that resonate with your target audience. And if your technology is fully integrated into an aligned marketing and salesforce, you can cover various channels simultaneously, forge better connections, and improve campaign visibility.
Principles for Success in Cognitive Marketing
Through cognitive marketing, you can develop effective marketing strategies to help you optimize your brand's resonance among your target audience. Here are some underlying principles to building an emotional brand attachment.
- Establish safety and trust: The initial and most crucial step in establishing a connection with your prospects is to provide safety, which ultimately builds trustworthiness and reliability as they progress through the CDJ.
- Show empathy: Make sure your brand shows that it understands your clients' problems and comes up with individually tailored solutions.
- Offer extra value: When a client feels emotionally enriched, it helps to improve their customer experience. For instance, if a consumer feels inspired by your brand, there are higher chances they will be loyal customers.
- Bring out a sense of belonging: Once your customer has complete trust with your company, feels proud to buy your products / use your services, and has a natural drive to spread the word about the problems you solve, it's proof that they've become an advocate of your brand.
Why You Should Use Cognitive Marketing
Today, cognitive marketing has become an effective tool, and it's also easier to make the most out of it. As a marketer, you need to include it in the campaign strategies focused on specific audiences. Here are reasons why this is the case:
Simplifies Personalization
Personalizing your marketing campaigns is one of the most effective ways to reach each client within your target group. Cognitive technologies emphasize this area, since you can use online behavior to segment your audience, allowing you to customize your message to each group. This strategy is far more effective since it's usually based on actual behavior and not implied data. Through cognitive technology, you can also redesign a message based on a person's behavior, helping to create a better connection, which will lead to better results.
The customer will not only receive the right message, but they will also get it at the right time. Therefore, it becomes easier for them to process what they see since it's relevant to them. Consequently, the process is much more effective than generalizing your clients into groups based on gender, location, and age. As a result, your advertising will hit its mark.
Puts Full Focus on Your Customers
By using cognitive marketing, you put more focus on your customers in every campaign. This method ensures more emphasis on your customers and has maximum effectiveness. Additionally, it helps to eliminate influences that could negatively affect the brand-to-customer connection.
Cognitive marketing also minimizes the tedious day-to-day tasks and puts more focus on delighting the customer. When you have more emphasis on your customers and their datain each stage of a campaign, you will create better connections and generate more benefits for your brand.
Create More Effective campaigns
Generally, consumers look to brands and advertising to assist them in fulfilling their emotional needs. As a marketer, you should focus on what consumers want instead of what you think they would like.
If your campaigns aren't customer-focused on the problems of your target group experiences, it will lead to a lack of conversions. Prospects are far less likely to purchase when they don't resonate with the benefits of your offering. In the long run, it leads to negative feelings towards your brand, which damages advocacy and customer retention.
Using Cognitive Marketing
There are six stages in the decision-making process and at each stage, your prospects need specific information to move forward toward a decision. Missing information, the wrong information or the right information presented at the wrong time creates barriers that prevent people from moving forward. To learn more about each of these stages and processes needed to move forward, check out our other blog posts:
