The Persuasion Slide: The best 4 steps framework for digital marketing you will see today
Reason and Emotion. You came across this duality more times that you can count. Mainly in a unconscious way. When you analyze them in a Marketing perspective, it all comes to the persuasion process and how much these two play a part in the decision-making process. Which is stronger? Which comes first? Which one is decisive?
Aristotle said in his book Rhetoric that all human actions have one or more of these seven causes:
- Chance
- Nature
- Compulsions
- Habit
- Reason
- Passion
- Desire
These are the drivers of human behavior there are known for thousands of years and are reinterpreted in many ways throughout our history.
There’s this short animation by Disney called Reason and Emotion, way before “Inside out” (2015), made in 1943 during wartime, that showed how imagination can run away with us. And what kind of damage we can do when we allow our emotion to overtake common sense. (Keep in mind this was a time of war. Different customs by then.)
In fact, there’s a no-longer top secret lab from Disney that among all sort of things, studied neuroscience, particularly the effects of content in advertising on the brains of subjects.
People do make rational decisions but there’s a lot more involved.
When we talk about behavior in marketing, one of the most recent topics surround it is the Neuromarketing field. Just like reason and emotion may sound as two opposite things, love and hate are the common dual reaction when neuromarketing is added in a conversation.
I’m bringing that up hoping that if you have any kind of feeling about neuromarketing, you can bare with me, put your emotions a little bit aside and bring the reason to the front seat. My goal here is to help the understanding in a further approach that is the main subject of this article: an overview of the Persuasion Slide.
When we talk about Neuromarketing, it has a range that can goes from behavior studies to neuroscience studies. So, when we talk about fMRI or EEG, we’re more in the neuroscience spectrum of the conversation. Don’t freak out yet! I’m going more to the other side, the behavior one, that is more general and have subjects like social proof, one of the principles of persuasion. Roger Dooley, author of the book Brainfluence, calls it Passive Neuromarketing. It’s a way of applying knowledge gained from behavior science and neuroscience to marketing. It includes decision science, influence and persuasion.
So, how can you apply this kind of knowledge in digital marketing?
When we analyze some of the main characteristics of Digital Marketing, three things pop-up: Big, Fast and Metrics. Many brands that use digital marketing or even more important, where born as digital companies, have a big scale. As a cause of this kind of growth, they can see result happening in a faster way than would do in a more traditional approach from late 20th century. And all this fast and big growth comes with lots of data, through KPIs and all sort of measurement of consumer’s journey phases, to understand the results of a strategy and how improvements can be made based on the learnings and adjustments to connect with the desired behavior a brand is trying to influence to happen in the consumer’s mind.
The first time I learned about the Persuasion Slide was in the digital course by CXL Institute, in a lesson given by the author himself, Roger Dooley.
As an introduction of the framework, he uses an example much known to people that works with marketing. You’re in a meeting with people from sale, people responsible by the product, sometimes a director or a high-level executive with the power of last word. With greatly conflicting views of what should the elements be consider (i.e. CTAs, visuals, messaging..) or which approach can be more effective (i.e. free shipping, discount, social proof…), it’s hard to have everyone getting to a peaceful agreement.
To help resolve this kind of discussions, the Persuasion Slide can be a good tool is a framework the has four simple components, inspired in an actual children’s playground slide,
The Persuasion Slide Framework
Roger Dooley’s Persuasion Slide consist in four element and each one of them has a conscious and a non-conscious component. They are: gravity, nudge, angle and friction.
Gravity
Gravity is what makes a slide work. So, the first step of the persuasion slide is to increase the inherent motivation the user has to engage with something, such as a conversion page, social media or buy a product in a store. The gravity represents the customer’s initial motivation, their needs, wants and goals.
Even in B2B marketing there are some emotional and non-conscious factors that influence. If at first sight the conscious part of a B2B gravity tends to components such as price, features, delivery, quality and service, the non-conscious elements that influence a person in a company that is responsible by the decision-making process an buying of a product or service can be related to job security, promotion, boss approval, relationship and risk aversion.
Keep in mind that these are the things that come from the customer, not the things a brand and it’s marketing team are trying to create. It’s entirely out of marketers control and decision. “Buy our product!” or any kind of “Do this for us.” variation is just like trying to defy real gravity. You can’t and if you try, chances are that you’re going to hurt yourself (and your brand).
Nudge
When you ask (or nudge) someone to do something, you’re trying to encourage them to complete a desire action or purchase. Like in a slide, a parent would gently push the child to go down the slide and let the gravity do the rest. In marketing, it’s about getting the customer’s attention. It can be a pop-up, a button to subscribe or any kind of artifact that can be seen by the customer and start the process. A nudge without motivation is a waste of opportunity.
For a more in depth view in this great subject, I recommend reading the book Nudge, by Richard H. Thaler.
Angle
A slide without an angle is meaningless, no fun. We can understand the angle as the conscious and non-conscious motivations that can be provided to help a certain desider behaviour to occur. Using a product benefits is considered a conscious motivation (i.e. discount, number of sells, guarantees). In retail, this is very often used in weekly sale flyers in which you see huge discounts. That’s the kind of trigger that seems old, but still works, even in digital marketing. Black friday and cyber monday are proof enough.
One important thing to keep in mind is to be cautious on the amount of impact it can make on your margin. A non-stop strategy of discounts and free shipping can make all possible profit reduce drastically.
The solution relies on the non-conscious motivators that can be used, to have a great impact without losing margin. They include changes to an ad, design of a website or testing different messaging. As I wrote in the beginning of this article, there are some principles such as social proof, scarcity, authority and reciprocity that can be used as non-conscious motivators.
Friction
Finally we have friction, that makes the difference between a smooth and a bump slide. It’s about how difficult is the process of doing something, like buying a product in a site. And the difficulty can be real and perceived. Real frictions are things like a form field, the steps in a checkout process or anything else in a conversion sequence. Perceived or imaginary friction are things like difficult words to say or a font that is harder to read.
Friction may be one of the most affordable things to get right. Minimizing them costs less than increasing motivation. Just think in a slide, what is requires less effort: pushing the kid from the top or cleaning the slide so the gravity with the smooth surface creates the best ride?
Conclusion
Marketers most common mistake is to forget to recognize that emotion overrides reason in the consumer’s mind. Logical arguments used in advantage of a product or service benefits won’t do a better job than the emotional gains or reliefs a consumer expect getting when purchasing it. A new car isn’t about how hi-tech or world-friendly it can get, but how the customers’ neighbors, family and friends will see them and how good they will feel about the perception they’re trying to achieve. It’s the same when we buy a new smartphone, shoes, clothes or even our food. A marketer does a good job when can identify the emotional drives of a purchase and them craft the message, including image, positioning and other things, that will resonate with the consumer needs and facilitate the path to purchase.
Using the Persuasion Slide Framework as a guide when creating a digital marketing strategy can be a good tool to help you increase conversions.
