Dec. 7, 2020

[Special Episode] The Mindstate Marketing Hour #11 with Will Leach - The ROI Online Podcast Ep. 65

[Special Episode] The Mindstate Marketing Hour #11 with Will Leach - The ROI Online Podcast Ep. 65

In this weekly episode* of the Mindstate Marketing Hour, host Steve Brown of ROI Online, interviews Will Leach, author of Marketing to Mindstates, founder of Triggerpoint, and CEO of the Mindstate Group on why focusing on customers emotions and mindstates is key to successful marketing.

*Originally produced as a livestream video

Mindstate Group free resources: https://www.mindstategroup.com/resources

Interested in getting more Marketing to Mindstates content?
Read Will's book: Marketing to Mindstates
Check out their website: https://www.mindstategroup.com/
Follow Will on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook


Need real resources that will help you grow your business? Grab your FREE business growth stack resources here!
https://thegoldentoilet.com/resources

Enroll in the QuickStart Academy today to learn how to develop and implement a proven growth strategy that grows your ROI, your business, and your confidence. Learn more HERE.

Thinking of starting your own podcast? Buzzsprout’s secure and reliable posting allows you to publish podcasts online. Buzzsprout also includes full iTunes support, HTML5 players, show statistics, and WordPress plugins. Get started using this link to receive a $20 Amazon gift card and to help support our show!

Support the show (https://cash.app/$stevemfbrown)

Transcript
Steve Brown:

Welcome to the ROI online podcast. And this is a special series of interviews with will Leach. He's the author of marketing to mind states the practical guide to applying behavior design to research and marketing. And I'm your host, Steve Brown, the author of the funniest book on marketing, the golden toilet, stop flushing your marketing budget into your website and build a system that grows your business. And then this series of conversations, we're going to explore everything about marketing, your messaging, and connecting with your clients, your customers, your employees. So come on, and join us. And let's have some fun. All right, and we're live at 1005 on what do we call this thing? The mind state marketing hour with will Leach?

Will Leach:

That's right. Hello, Steve. How are you? My friend? How's how's Mexico treating you?

Steve Brown:

It's doing excellent. So just so you know, I'm getting a message here from LinkedIn says we're having a hard time sending this live stream to LinkedIn. So what's the audience that we really wanted to have on here?

Will Leach:

Really want to have LinkedIn?

Steve Brown:

Yes. Hey, stream yard, I hope you're listening. Okay, so today, I'm really so first of all, I've been listening to our conversations. I'm down here in Mexico, I have a little time to walk along the beach. Exercise, but I've been listening to our conversations and and I'm really do enjoy them. And I learned stuff. And I forget about things that we talked about, like be the buttermilk.

Will Leach:

Yeah. That will go down in history somehow, after that, but yeah, I've had a couple of emails even asking me about buttermilk. And what am I going into the, you know, cuisine space? Like, no, yeah, listen to the episode, you gotta listen to the episode.

Steve Brown:

That's right. Don't be Batman, be the buttermilk, that antidote to poor, marketing, shameless marketing. The beautiful thing about will Leach is He's the author of one of my favorite books, marketing the mind states. There it is. And I'm going to shorten the subtitle. And it's basically a book on how to use science to connect better with your clients. And when I read that book, I really, really resonated to me because there's this thing going on in our head, it's called a brain. And whether most people will admit it or not, we all have brains, and especially the folks that we work with have brains, and they deserve to be treated as if they have brains, and that the whole reason we have that brain, it's number one imperative is safety first, keep us out of danger in spite of ourselves. And when we run into marketing, that brain is doing the same. Even when we're experiencing marketing, which is a great. Tell us just a little bit, just one or two sentences on why you felt you had to write your book marketing to mind states.

Will Leach:

Yeah, it was just as you know, the last 15 years has been kind of what I call this golden age of human understanding. And yet I was at PepsiCo and looking at marketing that didn't take in all of this behavioral science. So I decided to change up.

Steve Brown:

Yeah. And so you know, as a marketer, you think about if you're a marketing director, or even if you're a business owner, and you hire a marketing director, there's this thing in the back of your mind that's going do they really know what they're talking about? Do you have the authority to talk to someone in a legitimate meeting asking legitimate questions? how's this going to help grow our business? Yeah, and he's to be cued and needs to be attractive, but we usually lack authority to, to answer that question, with conviction. And that's what I really got from your book. So kudos for you. So today, we're going to work on something that is and I really love the way that you you teed this up. And in my book, I call it h two H. People go, Steve, so does the principles that you present in your book, does it apply to b2b? Or is it better in b2c? And my answer is always it's, it's legitimate in H to H, human, to human. And we get these, these words that come into the marketing vocabulary like consumer, this faceless, nameless thing that has a credit card, we want money from that consumer, but what we lose is that's real human and that's why I call it h two H and so Here you are. We want to move past UX, user experience, customer experience towards human experience. design will tell us

Will Leach:

yeah, wet? Well, it's funny, you said I was gonna bring up even a story when you said, you know, h two H and I can remember my very first job out of college out of college. And I worked at a utility, public utility. And I remember we got there and I just came out, like refreshed with new ideas and, and excited about marketing research. And I remember that in the databases and in meetings, we didn't call our customers, even customers, they were meters, we point 2 million meters. And I remember thinking myself, and I'm in marketing, right? And I kept remembering, that's the most like kind of object kind of horrible way to talk about real people with lives. And so, you know, even back, you know, as long I don't want to say how many years it's been, but it's been a while. Even even then we weren't you talking about customers in humans. And I think we've lost that. And you know, you and I actually talked about this early, very early in discussions when we were talking about your book, right. And, and this idea, even recently, we've been talking about this idea that just being human can be a point of competitive advantage anymore. Because everybody, and I was a victim of this too. I'm working at Pepsi Co. I'm in marketing. And we're constantly being approached by new technology, or a way of getting more efficiency, better targeting, things like that. And the more we get involved with technology, the more we're better at targeting, the more we find efficiencies in the system to speed up our creative process. Even now, Steve, we have creative market, or I'm sorry, artificial intelligence that is being designed right now, to develop creative. That's how like move how far we're moving away from the human connection. And behavioral science is focused on nothing more than being human and teaching how to be human. And if you can become human like you, like we've said, I think it's actually becoming a point of competitive advantage, which is so foreign, because 20 years ago, that's what we all talked about. But then something happened with technology. And here we are today.

Steve Brown:

Yeah, it's because so now we can if we're having to actually up our game and represent in an area that's digital, that's virtual, that's remote. And so we're more focused on the technology, because oh, I don't know how to use zoom, or I don't know how to use a stream yard. I don't know how to use these tools. And so you get caught up in the utilization, and all the features and shiny things. But we forget that actually, this is just another human interface device. You know, what they call a keyboard?

Will Leach:

A human interface device?

Steve Brown:

How do you know? It is it's a way to interface with the computer. Yeah, so all this is is a human interface device. But what do we get caught up in? robot interface device and we keep designing to be a better robot into facer than a human interfacer. So So let's talk about if we're going to up our game in the H x, you say we need to design popsicle moments for your website visitors. What in the world? That's a popsicle moment.

Will Leach:

Okay, Steve. So that is my term, but I got the idea. Have you ever read this book by a let's say chip and Heath, Chip Heath and Dan Heath the power of moments? No. Okay. So Chip and Dan Heath are both their brothers. They are professors. I think one I know once at Harvard, the other one I think is a Stanford on the other coast anyways, and they write incredible books like they read, they're the authors who wrote may just stick they wrote, switch decisive. And so it's an amazing book, The Power of moments, and this idea on behind the power of moments. And I'm going to paraphrase and do this not anywhere near the Justice it deserves, is that in experiences, you can have an extraordinary impact. If you just think through and I call them popsicle moments, but they talk about these. These, I think they have a they have a they have a term around moments. I call it popsicle moments. And here's the big story. And I think about the story all the time now as it relates to designing of websites, but basically any interactive, or interaction. And so there is a hotel out in Los Angeles called on the mystery hotel.

Steve Brown:

What was it called?

Will Leach:

The Oh gosh, the mystery hotel. I'm trying to remember the name of it. I think it's called the mystery hotel. Have you ever heard of that mystery of the hotel?

Steve Brown:

Oh, you talking about

Will Leach:

the magic of the mystery that isn't the magic?

Steve Brown:

No, it's it's named after the gun heiresses and it's the mystery house. It's the Winchester Mystery house. Is that what you're talking? about where

Will Leach:

they're talking about

Steve Brown:

what that's there to. It's in California, and you walk up the stairs to know where?

Will Leach:

Yep, oh gosh, well, this one is, Oh, I can't believe I forgot it. The Magic Hotel in LA. Um, the Magic Castle. Sorry, I can't believe in the Magic Castle hotel. So the Magic Castle hotel, if you are actually, you know, ever on Yelp, the Yelp ratings are through the roof. Like it's the highest rated Hotel in all of Los Angeles. And it's bigger than the Beverly Hills Hilton. It's better than the four seasons. And if you look at that picture, Steve, it is nothing more than a motel It is a fact it's a kind of a rough looking motel. But it has these amazing ratings, people go nuts for this motel. And so what I guess Dan and chip did is they went they were trying to figure this out, highest rated Hotel in all of LA. And they have a lot of these moments. But one of these moments I call the popsicle moment. And here's the idea. out by the pool, outdoor pool, by the way, nothing magical about it, there's a phone, and if you pick up that phone, somebody on the other end of the phone says hello, what flavor popsicle Do you want. And you can have orange cherry or grape as many as you want. And if you have kids, they can order anytime, day or night any any flavor as many as they want. And they say I want to have a great popsicle. A then a couple minutes later, somebody comes out with white glove service on a silver platter, a popsicle. And imagine your kid if they ordered a popsicle on a hot day. And all of a sudden, this person comes out and greets you with this popsicle. Now this moment, what makes this moment incredible is just like you're doing you're smiling, because that is outside of the of the bounds of what would be expected from a motel. But there's this thing and it's a it's a perfectly executed example of a popsicle moment of surprise that came out of nowhere that creates this experience as human connection for your kids or even for you that otherwise we would find efficiencies to try to make that hotel chain as most profitable as possible, or this hotel to keep things like this out, you know, out of the system to keep hiccups out of system. But instead they found a moment. And this hotel motel sorry, has a couple of these little small things that have made it like this icon in motels or in hotel. So they talk about the power of moments. And I always think to myself, if you are going to do human to human design, one of the first things you should do is try to find popsicle moments, things that are totally non expected that you would never expect out of your website. It just so happens I came up with an idea for one that was like a new I in fact, I should we should consider doing this, Steve, because I think something is so unexpected. That could be a popsicle moment for you. You want to hear about?

Steve Brown:

Well, I'm dying to hear about it. Tell me please.

Will Leach:

Here's the idea. Have you ever been to a to a website, I'm not gonna accuse you of anything. I've been to a website and I put my credit card in to buy a T shirt or something and the credit card gets rejected. That is a bit of a humbling experience. Sometimes the technology glitch, sometimes maybe somebody thinks I have my credit card stolen, I don't know. But the normal thing if you try to pay for something online, and your credit card gets rejected, you get this generic message that kind of pushes you out and says hey, try again. Try again. Eventually, you're probably having problems come back again, right? It's a terrible way of ending interaction on brand and knowing that somebody wants to buy your product. So I wrote here rather than that, rather than getting generic, you know, cancellation, what if your pop up came up and it said, we can clearly see that you really liked this. So we decided to chip in enjoy and you gave like a 5% discount. Well, even if you know it has, even if you never use that discount because maybe the card is cancelled. It's a data card whatever you would talk about that experience because Have you ever had a pop up that said hey, it wasn't just a discount was the saying hey side say 5% now it was it always made you believe the I wrote this we can see that you really like this imagine like it's like hey guys will turn a buyer buyer t shirts and he's running low on cash. let's get let's get the hat around. Everyone's like kind of in the back room. Getting the hat around me was like a popsicle moment. I thought if you could figure out just not coming up with the idea of of finding three or four times on your website experience or your total customer experience or your commerce experience where you could bring in something like that that made you feel human that would make all the difference in today's crazy cluttered world.

Steve Brown:

See what you're thinking about is how to use the technology that's available to us now to recognize that that something's going on there. That person is backing out. And so that's when if you were to They're in person, you would have said, Hey, before you go is there, there's something that we're missing here? What can I do to help? Right? And so thinking about how to continue that Ajax human experience, to use that technology, instead of thinking about, hey, where you going?

Will Leach:

Yeah, yeah, I was gonna say, and it just, it just dawned on me, I've worked in, you know, the field of, you know, behavioral science based marketing and helping clients find ways to find, you know, you know, to better interact with people. And it just dawned on me, we, I've had clients who said, basically, how can we convert people away from calling our Customer Care Center, which is a huge cost constraint for a lot of companies and move them online, without ever going through the process of if we make this conversion? if everybody's interacting with us on our on our on our online, on our website, how are we going to make make that as human as possible, and it's more than just using fancy words, it just is it's it's these, it's these small things that we can really make somebody feel like I'm having a one to one friendship relationship. Even though this this technology is keeping us afar, you and I right now are having a great relationship on this technology, you know, thousands of miles away, totally.

Steve Brown:

So how can one conduct an H x audit on their website to find popsicle moments?

Will Leach:

That's right. So this is going to be a little bit of innovation, a little bit of creativity. But what I did is I started thinking about if I was going to really create a human experience, knowing that I have to do it on my website, I can't have a one to one phone call with every person who wants to, you know, work work with me in some way or learn about, you know, behavioral design and things like that, I do an audit. So what you do is you lay out literally from the very first email that maybe somebody gets, and just lay out the process and just do it in hate your own handwriting, and do it yourself. So it's really important as I tried to at first, remember all the touch points and think, oh, maybe there's some times where I can really throw surprise. And instead, I forgot probably 30% of all the touch points I really had. And this is not a huge company, right seemed like we were all. So go through the actual steps that somebody goes through on your, you know, to interact with you, on your website, go through every step, every single click every kind of every kind of you know, tab, you're gonna open up and just get a feel for the entire experience. And then there's this thing that I thought of is, as you're doing that, find moments where you believe a surprise to happen to me, it makes natural sense of services, like if you have a Services tab, and you're going to start talking about some of your services, that seems like a natural place where you can kind of surprised somebody with either it's and it's not an offer, I don't think you have to discount your services or show a discount. But I think a surprise that pops up and you know, maybe it's a video and says, hey, yeah, you could read all this stuff. But let me give you the two minute download of what we really can do for you here. And that's it as opposed to having somebody read and then getting into the details. But something as simple as that. Or one thing that we've started to think about is a lot of people come to my site, Steve and on the resources page, because they want to learn, and they want to go deeper. And one thing which we never really talk about is how we do back behind, you know, the website, how we do our work, we don't do that very often, we just kind of deliver for our clients. But there are some out there that want to know like what you and I are talking about, like, Well, how do you do it, that is a perfect time to put in something that shows you behind the scenes stuff. And if somebody's going to be on the resource tab, that's probably an area we want to pop up a video and just say, if you want to know the real scoop behind how we do it, watch this, it just shows us all working behind the scenes. So finding moments of inspiration, we call these things trigger points in my book, and the idea of a trigger point or these moments where people pause. And then and then what they really want to engage. And if you can identify these trigger points. And these are usually like I said, a services page, a checkout page, maybe a Resources tab where people are trying to dig into a particular topic that you know, maybe you wrote about those are natural trigger points. If people are interacting with your site, find those moments to surprise and that's the first thing you should do to try to bring him in back into your website.

Steve Brown:

While you were talking, I was thinking about that I did this in a past life. I worked in restaurants a bunch. And it was kind of cool, as you would see table encountering some frustrating moment. And if you could, like show up with like a round of drinks that they didn't order, and they didn't complain, but you knew they were feeling that and when you show up and you deliver a popsicle moment like you're saying, Yeah, they just go Hey, I noticed you guys were having to wait a while. So here this is on us. And you remember that when that happened to you and how you really felt understood and appreciated. And that's what you're talking about.

Will Leach:

That's right. There's a there's a real famous behavioral science paper that was written that said When the server at the end of the meal has mints, if they double the amount of mints, so rather than one piece of peppermint candy, two piece of peppermint candy, and that when they give those mints away, nothing really happens, the extra mints, nothing happens with the tip, unless the server says, Hey, I pulled a couple extra mints for you. That's all they have to say. And also tips raised about 15%, on average, because it's an unexpected surprise before it's just like to PR, they say, Hey, I gave you some extra, it's an unexpected surprise, something as small as that makes you feel like you were thought of right, you were thought of kind of seen. So

Steve Brown:

that's it. So that's comes from a book called persuasion by Robert Cialdini. And that's, that's what one of the six principles, that's the reciprocity rule. And so that's beautiful that you're tying that in, because you can create reciprocity, even in your human experience on your website. And these are things that our brains love, because it makes us feel understood and appreciated. And therefore it makes us want to go, Hey, I want to, I want to bring some appreciation back to you. And that's just how we're wired. And that's how we feel great in certain situations, whereas other situations, we don't, Yep, that's right. popsicle moments. Number three. So let's say you want to go back through your website, or your brochures or materials to eliminate friction to their flow.

Will Leach:

Yeah, and this is just a standard thing that we should be doing anyways. But I'll give you an example on my own site that I heard about yesterday. And so you'll appreciate this D. But in any kind of experience, realize that any moment of friction, any extra behavior, any extra words can cause friction, and what any piece of friction can get people to just disengage, it's just so hard to capture people's attention. And so a good best practice is to go through your website and really go through your entire experience, you know, your client journey, or the customer journey on your website, and look for moments of friction. Here's an example of one I just picked up yesterday. So on my website, you can download a free PDF. And I was talking about creating a new landing page after somebody has already given me an email address or whatever, and they've asked for this PDF, Well, then let's go create a landing page so that there's some words, and then we can put that PDF on there. And it's great for branding, right? It's great. I think it's perfect for branding. And somebody had mentioned, well, they already gave you their website, why not? When they click it, I mean, I'm sorry, their email address, why not just click it, and also the PDF is right there. And they can download like, like, why sending them to a landing page, so that they can read more about this, and I see all the brand benefits behind that. But I thought that's, that's, that's not unreasonable to expect that to like, try to even take out efficiency of words and just have the PDF pop up. And so we have so many times in our, in our, in our websites, and I'm a horrible person who doesn't I keep wanting to add more, add more, add more, because I have so many things I want to talk about. And by adding more, you can actually create moments of friction, it's not that it's bad, but every moment of friction can cost you a sale.

Steve Brown:

So we're gonna design these moments into our h x. What are some examples of how to use like achievement or competence or empowerment motivations in these examples?

Will Leach:

That's right. So you know, these are, let's say, for instance, if you and before you go there, we'll

Steve Brown:

just for those who maybe haven't read your book, or can you give us a quick little backstory on those?

Will Leach:

That's right, so behavioral psychology tells us that there are nine core human motivations that drive people to engage with our brands in any way. Things like success, which would be designed around people's desire for achievement, or to belong to a group that's somebody's desire to be a part of a tribe somebody bigger than themselves. So that's called belonging. So there are nine of these motivations. And if you know these motivations, you can take a surprise moment to the next level. So for example, if for whatever reason you're selling consulting services, or maybe coaching services, you may find that your customers your clients are driven to become a success. They're driven by achievement. So if you know this, which that makes, that's reasonable if you're doing coaching in some way, um, business coaching or any kind of personal coaching, it's reasonable. So how if we know that this person is driven by success, how can you make your actual your site help them be successful? And so things like how can you on your website level up how would you level somebody up? How would you give them a badge or a reward because if you're driving by success and achievement, little badges as you're going through an experience little rewards, it'll, hey, you just made level three level four, makes you feel like a success. But imagine if somebody else came to your website which they come to mind sometimes for competence they desire greater skill will now my website, I can design my website to make you greater skilled in the area of marketing domain state. So I would give you exclusive content, like we said nuggets of knowledge behind the scenes information of what we do things that are only exclusive to you. Because that makes you feel more confident you're getting behind the behind the scenes skills that otherwise you wouldn't have. So if you know which of these nine motivations are driving your customers, integrate those into your into your surprise moments, so that you can now elevate something that was just a surprise into it's a surprise that's motivating to me, it's helping me feel the desired, you know, feeling that I want, I

Steve Brown:

want to pause here just for a moment and talk to you about a program that we have just released called ROI quickstart Academy for authors. Every day, I talk to business owners just like you who struggle with quickly getting their fundamentals in place, we want to create a great foundation and we want to grow our business. But the things that are in our way, our lack of knowledge about the specifics, we should put in place, what kind of technology what kind of messaging and what kind of campaigns and that problem exists for authors as well. And we just chill so good with authors because, well, I'm an author, and I understand everything that you struggle with, you have a great idea you have a great book, but what do you want to do, you want to get your book in front of more people, you want to make it easy for them to find you learn how they can schedule a time to talk with you hire you for a conference, or maybe sign up for the services that your book promotes. So what is the Quickstart Academy for authors? Imagine working with a small group of like minded authors, and the experts from the ROI quickstart team, it's a great way to get your messaging clear to be confident with the technology in your marketing automation, and how to run a strategic campaign to get you more of what you want from the investment of your book. To learn more about the Quickstart Academy for authors, you can visit ROI online.com or click in the link in the show notes below. And now, back to this episode. Now you think about the folks that read your book, really, were inspired by him wanted to apply it but immediately you know that you can't just read a book and start to be excellent at it you have you're going to have to make several attempts at it. And you're going to need to read some more do some research to be able to listen to you. Every week on this would be like super inspirational because you're going to walk away with now popsicle moments. Yeah, that that's so cool. Last week, it was buttermilk being the buttermilk this week, it's popsicles, the one before was being human as a competitive advantage. So there you go. That's our popsicle moment. Example. Alright, so then we want to do, we're injecting those triggers. Yep. To move people from interest to action, talk to us some more about that. blindness with some science.

Will Leach:

That's right. So remember, in the book, we we use, there's a whole chapter in the book about something called cognitive heuristics. But for us out there, and these are just things called triggers. And what these are, are these are little tips, little triggers little words you can inject interject into your into your website to move people from kind of inspired excited on your website, you're actually doing a transaction, whether that's just giving an email address, buying something, or downloading a brochure or a PDF document. So these triggers are things that we all use, by the way, regardless of what society you're from background, we use these triggers. Now in my book, I have 21 of these triggers. But I pulled out of the 21 six that I feel are useful right now that you can put on your website right now today. And we know from academics and kind of just pure business experience that these triggers work.

Steve Brown:

So what are like six, you wanted to cover? Hang on, I got to come up right here, watch this. A trigger, here comes a trigger, six ways to create a trigger to action on your website, a cater to your customers. So number one, I was running out of Spanner space here. So that's number one is provide social validation to testimonials.

Will Leach:

That's right. That's a concept called social proof. Guys, the reason why testimonials work and they work for almost anything is that people feel safer when they know that other people like them have taken and use your product. That's kind of what you said we look for safety in that kind of in the back of our minds. So Social validation testimonials, anything that says that hundreds of people have used this service hundreds of people have bought my product will be very useful in moving somebody from interested in your product to actually buying your product.

Steve Brown:

And again, in that book we just mentioned with Robert County, one of the six principles of persuasion is social proof. And the reason that it works so effectively is because we have so much information coming at us, we cannot possibly stop. And I forget how many decisions we make in a day. But let's say, let's just say we make 100 decisions a day, it's impossible for us to sit him give 100% Focus, focus, focus, focus, focus on that decision, it 100 times. And so we look for social proof things like if if wills done it and Wills in my area, then I can trust the evaluation that he put into that to help shortcut me needing to spend the time to evaluate it.

Will Leach:

Yep, happens all the time, guys. That's why when you go to Amazon, and you see the five star ratings, and you look to see how many people have reviewed it, you feel much better when you have 10s, hundreds, thousands of people reviewing an item. That's why you feel better than just having one person because it's been validated by others.

Steve Brown:

All right, surprise. we've,

Will Leach:

we've already talked about this, right? It's this idea that you can create these unexpected popsicle moments, what the real, the real idea behind that is you create what's called a hot state, that's a scientific term, you create emotional arousal. And when you have higher emotional arousal, surprisement, when you get happy, you get excited, you see something that's unexpected, that creates interest in that idea. And that interest will oftentimes that emotion will translate into, I got to take an action. So find moments of popsicle moments and surprise people. And that is a nice way to jumpstart somebody from just being casually interested in your website to actually buying on your website.

Steve Brown:

There, I read this book called hitmakers, and it talks about a hit has to satisfy a couple of things with our brains. First of all, we need to be you need to kind of already know what's going on here. We need to be in an area that feels safe. So it's like it feels familiar. But if it doesn't have a surprise in it, give me it. And so it's titled Give me something I'm I'm Give me something I already know. But surprise me. Give me the same, but surprise me. And that's in play in this surprise moment in this popsicle.

Will Leach:

Yeah, I don't know how true this is. But I heard that there is a ratio in innovation. So if you're gonna launch a new product, I heard that ratio is 80%. Familiar 20% surprise, because ultimately, we desire that safety. But so if you go too drastically, maybe that's Google Glass, right? That could be an example of Google Glass where it was just so different, even though these are glasses, that we just weren't ready for it. So I think there's this ratio I've heard about is a 20%. Surprise. 80%. familiar. And that's the right ratio where people feel inspired to act but not fearful that they're going to take an action that could hurt them.

Steve Brown:

So I was telling someone this, this testimony the other day, and it was about you will, actually so I hope you don't mind me sharing this and into the world right now. But But the first time that you and I were talking and I suggested maybe we you know, you were totally open to being a guest on a podcast, but producing a podcast, I remember the look on your face when I brought it up, because I could see and then in your brain, it was going I don't have time to do all the things that go with that. And so when when I reframe the conversation is will I want to do a weekly interview with you? Then it was like easy, and it made sense. And so basically, I changed the name of what we were doing. But yet, but yet, we're delivering on all this beautiful stuff that I'm super proud of. And it's beautiful. But I had to discern that don't call it podcast, call it a weekly interview.

Will Leach:

Yep. It's a great point.

Steve Brown:

And you, you adopted it. And it made sense because you didn't have to do all the work because you're busy doing all this other stuff. Alright, here's a number, another principle, scarcity,

Will Leach:

scarcity effect. This is a we use this a lot in corporate America and in just business America. scarcity is this idea that if you want to create value for something, tell others that it's scarce in nature. Right. So if you put limited time only for this special offer, or we only produce 10 of these kits, whatever those things are, when things are scarce in nature, there's this feeling that well, they're scarce because other people are buying them up and many times that's the case, right? If you go to, you want to you want to go on a flight and they say hey, there's only two or three more seats left at this price. A lot of times there's only two or three price of seats that are left. So help find places where you can Make something scarce in nature. And that oftentimes gets that you know, that emotional arousal that we're talking about to get them to go, you know what I may lose out on this, I don't like the idea of loss, I'm going to go ahead and buy.

Steve Brown:

Yeah, that's coming in again at that brain member. Remember back when we only were low in class, and we didn't have shoes, and we didn't have an iPhone, we didn't read, but we'd run into a resource that maybe wasn't we didn't see all the time, berries, or whatever. So we would stop and get them because they were scarce. Yeah, because we knew that we may be a while before we run into them again. Yeah. All right, build commitment.

Will Leach:

That's right. This is that classic, you know, the salesman get the foot in the door. But there's this, there's this, there's this kind of phenomenon that when you ask somebody to take a small step towards a goal, that many people take a small step. And then when you get somebody to take a small step, you can ask them for something slightly larger, and then slightly larger. And then ultimately, you get to kind of the overall goal that you're asking for this desire called come in. And when you get somebody to commit to taking a small step, and then consistently taking another step, another step, that's a much easier way to get somebody to purchase from you than asking for the purchase alone. So you actually even talked about it, you know, in this in this when you initially approached them with that, so I remember even writing a sheet of paper, do not I had it on my list of things open, do not do podcasts, really. But like, think about what else you do so well, okay, we're not gonna do that. But let's just do a meet we called the mind state minute, and it's a an email that goes out to video email that I record, but three minutes of time, it's an hour, three minutes of time. That was a very small ask. And I said, I could probably do that three minutes, I could probably do that. And I got comfortable with that. And then all sudden, they say, Okay, well, now let's do another email that we're going to, we're going to have your record, that's going to talk about a topic that you wrote about in the past. So I did have to come up with a new idea I wrote about in the past, but you're just going to tee up that, then those two videos a week. And now we got three things a week, because it was a small step, you got the foot in the door to get me to and it's fine, I'm comfortable with it. But I just needed to have the small step first. And that's the easiest way to get a buy is something that's free, and then a very low cost price item. And then you kind of graduate into higher higher priced items. And it feels more natural for people.

Steve Brown:

When you're producing. You know, the biggest challenge for an agency like ours is to pull out of the heads of these brilliant, progressive leaders that we work with to get that stuff out of their head and get it into some form of digestible content that people love. And just sitting here and talking, and you're not, you don't need to prepare, because you've done preparation for years, even wrote a book. And so it comes out of you naturally. So I love that. And that's just, that's so cool. And now you're producing all this awesome content every week. And your peers are going well. What are you doing? You're going crazy over there?

Will Leach:

No, but they are, if only they knew it's being pushed, it's like this is just conversational. It's pretty easy, actually. So show customers

Steve Brown:

what they can lose if they don't buy

Will Leach:

concept called loss aversion. Everybody, we desire to never lose. It's just it's our it's our human nature. We are adverse to anything that's that could be perceived as losing. So what you can do is on your website, talk about here's what could happen if you don't buy. And we've used this before in in things like you're already a member, let's say if you went to my you went to my website for the first time, and or you went to any website, and if you're being told that you're already a member, but you will lose out on this offer, you'll lose out on this membership. The reason why they're doing that they may not know it that they're doing this is that they're saying you're a member of this group, you're a member you have you have this kind of certification of membership. And if you don't buy you're willing to lose it just by saying that it makes you feel like you are you have something to lose this membership that you know, you're a member of that is called loss aversion. And by doing that, you can get somebody who really is interested in again signing up for something, rather than saying they will become a member, you would say this membership is yours to lose. And that slight tweak on the words that you use can increase the excitement of somebody wanting to really become a part and actually interact with you.

Steve Brown:

That's a great point. Total how many times that's been used on me, just my gym membership. Like my fat tax membership. Yeah, that's

Will Leach:

right. That's right.

Steve Brown:

All right, and tell customers stories to build a human connection. Yeah,

Will Leach:

and you know, ultimately, guys, um, we've been talking about human design, and it's all about stories. Stories are the way that everybody understands the world around them in any environment. It's through stories that they've been told. It's their stories that are in our culture. Culture, storytelling allows people who are in unfamiliar areas in life to navigate people. Some people use the Bible to explain how do I navigate the situation. Other people use other philosophies, stoicism, whatever. But stories are the basis of how we understand life. And if you are not using stories in your, in your website of some kind, whether that's a testimonial story, or or it's your kind of story about how you started the business, stories make people relatable, they make your business relatable, because people see themselves in stories. So use stories, wherever it makes sense.

Steve Brown:

Yeah, and use the stories to communicate, you understand them, you understand the challenge that they're encountering. And this is what really drew me to wills book was that that story could be dialed in to specifically communicate, I understand the mind state that you're in at this moment. Because folks that come to my website, there have this persona, that when they're in this state of mind, they're in an achievement, mind state, they're, they're going, this is what they're thinking. They're thinking like, Alright, I have to attempt this, I'm going to make it regardless, that's just who I am. But I'd like to avoid stepping in a ditch and wasting money and time, I'm hoping you guys are the ones that have helped me achieve that.

Will Leach:

It's a classic story. It's the Warrior story that we've grown up as kids hearing again, and again. And so we identify if you're in that warrior frame of mind, we call it you know, achievement mind state. But that's it's all story based things that we learned through TV stories that our parents told us, the Bible or anything like this. And so it's in our DNA to read to to become a part of stories.

Steve Brown:

So this, we've recovered design popsicle moments, we can do that a popsicle moment is this nice little thing, it's happened to us many times, we just didn't realize it. But we'll use the example of the hotel in California, the magic hotel.

Will Leach:

That's right, the magic hotel, like I get it, the Magic Castle hotel,

Steve Brown:

Magic Castle hotel where you can dial in while you're by the pool and say, I would like a great popsicle, and they bring it out there on a silver tray, white gloves? How special does that make you feel? So anytime you can weave that in to your human experience, then that makes a big impact, then we're changing the word UX to Ajax becoming human experience. And you just want to feel like how can I help you eliminate friction, inject triggers? And you do that by conducting these audits and figuring out where you can put these popsicle moments in? That's right. So can you just tell us off the cuff, any little one, one account where you stumbled into this, and this kind of came clear to you and you it, you implemented it? And it was a big win?

Will Leach:

Yeah, um, I can't tell you the account name. But it was a major financial services company that, um, that was trying to create a sense of security on their website. And imagine if you're a credit card company, that you have every transaction of all of your customers so you know, the things that people buy, right, and that's a scary proposition for people. And so the fear is that if if the credit card company was ever hacked, how would my information get out there the things that I bought, you know, they could use my credit card to buy things that I don't want them to buy, things like that. So a very simple thing that we started doing on their on their website was incorporating little small cues to make them feel like the website was more secure. And the way we did that was literally putting small pictures of padlocks in certain areas, especially areas where you're going to look at your account information. And that small Miss small prime of showing a lock actually conveyed to them that this was a secure site. It's a very simple thing to do, because these sites are very, very secure. But we actually saw increases of feelings of security and more transactions of looking up looking for my credit card information, looking for my transactions, downloading bills, just by doing something as simple as that.

Steve Brown:

Yeah, you think that's just universal everywhere we go. Any country that we drive in, we see these common icons that communicate without text, what it means, and so that Locke was doing the same thing. Our brains don't need text all the time we can get you know in marketing, we can get all wordy and different think that we have to have all this text but when an icon or an image could be so powerful,

Will Leach:

yeah, even more powerful than reading all those words, right.

Steve Brown:

So the other day I looked as an Adobe that's coming up with this artificial intelligence that you can pick an image of a human, for example, that you want to use as a stock photo on your website. But the artificial intelligence now can dial in their eyes, and you can change where the eye looks to change the emotion on their face, when you can make it really dial in and be more specific to convey. And I was thinking about your book. And when I was reading your book, I was going, it's so hard to find stock images that accomplish what you coach.

Will Leach:

That's going to be a game changer. Because I get that comment all the time. How do I convey you know, cuz we go down in the book talking about you have to show confidence in the person's face? Well, scientific tell, they tells us the muscles that need to be kind of contracted for to show a point of competence. Paul Ekman did a lot of this work. But you can't find those images on stock photography. So they're always like, Well, what do you do, if you can do that that's a game changer in behavioral design and using these ideas, because the face has so much emotion, but finding that exact emotion is so difficult to do. So if you can create that on stock imagery, it's a game changer. So I don't know what to say. That's huge. That's huge. It is huge. And

Steve Brown:

it communicates the understanding of it. You know, that's the problem with the folks that are listening to this. You're competing against hyper weaponized, corporations, companies that are well funded, that have this great technology, these armies of data scientists, these armies, and marketers that are dialing in and taking advantage of all these little competitive applications. But the truth is, it's in you already, but you have to be human, to start to pull it out of you. And and so that's why you preach, being human is a competitive advantage that gets you past these armies that think about the conversations they had in the boardrooms. Well, if we spend these millions of dollars, we can actually adjust the the look of the person's is you mad, is he happy? Yeah. But they had to be convinced to invest millions of dollars for that. And it came from the science that convinced that convicted them that it's going to help them connect better with clients. Yeah. So Well, you've got some workshops going on, you've got you've got things going on, tell us a little bit about the marketing the mind state marketing workshop.

Will Leach:

That's right. In early November, we're doing our next mind state marketing workshop. It's a two day workshop where on day one, we teach you more of the sciences behind behind all the principles of marketing of mind states. But on day two, we actually walk you through a case study with real data, we work together using this real data so that we can teach you how to identify your customers mind state, and then how to apply behavioral psychology principles that the ideas that are in the book into your marketing. So you walk out of there with not just knowledge, but actual direct application to your business. So you should check it out at mindset group, comm

Steve Brown:

mine steak group.com. You know, will I get to talk to you one hour a week, I'm like, I'm probably the smartest guy on the mind steak stuff that you preach now,

Will Leach:

an hour a day with me that God's got to give some kind of pay off

Steve Brown:

an hour, a week, an hour, an hour plus, plus, I listened to the episode later to see see, you know what we talked about what resonated and how we should upgrade our next one. But there's all sorts of popsicle moments in these. There's all sorts of testimonials. There's a lot of things going on in these conversations,

Will Leach:

we need to keep track of these things, right, we need to have like a running list. And one day that running list will be like really impactful powerful, like send it out for Christmas or something I don't know, we got to start thinking about

Steve Brown:

something like that. Just package all these videos. I'll stop wearing my ball cap so that my head matches yours matches that going on there. And I don't know we'll just call it the two eggs Christmas package or something.

Will Leach:

We'll get some creative people on that. But I know where you're going. I'll tell you.

Steve Brown:

All right, well, well, this has been awesome. I really value this. You're great guest and this is excellent stuff. What do you want to tease for the next episode? Oh,

Will Leach:

I don't know. I think I'm gonna go with some Halloween themes. And I'm starting to get excited about alternate egos or alter egos. And so I may I may toss in this idea about how to you you personally use that These sciences to kind of be your best self. It's a little bit outside of marketing, but I'm starting to toy around this idea. So we may see that next week, maybe not. But we may see that next week.

Steve Brown:

All right, and just tell us again, the holdup 10 book that you showed us while ago.

Will Leach:

That's one of the front here marketing mindsets, or this one.

Steve Brown:

That one? Yes. The power of moments with chip.

Will Leach:

And Dan Heath.

Steve Brown:

Yeah. Excellent. And then we also mentioned persuasion by Dr. Robert Cialdini. Yeah, I totally recommend that for you guys that want a little homework in between episodes. All right, team. That's it. So the marketing the mind state marketing hour, it's been another success, how to use science to connect with your clients. Get the book marketing the mind states by will Leach and we'll see you next week. We'll have a great week.

Will Leach:

You too. See you. Thank you.

Steve Brown:

Thanks for listening to another fun episode of the ROI online podcast. For more, be sure to check out the show notes of this episode. And feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn where we can chat, and I can help direct you to the resources you're searching for. To learn more about how you can grow your business better. Be sure to pick up your copy of my book, The Golden toilet at surprise, that golden toilet.com I'm Steve Brown, and we'll see you next week on another fun episode of the ROI online podcast.