Hello and thank you for joining this webinar in which we are going to look at how behavioural science can help you grab attention and build engagement with your marketing communications and get your clients really excited about what you've got to communicate. My name is Becky Meyer. I'm managing director of Inside Minds Consulting.

I'm a vet with small animal clinical experience, and I'm a marketer, having spent the last 18 or so years in a range of commercial roles in in the veterinary industry. I'm also a behavioural scientist, so I've got a consumer psychology degree and in, it's that, that sort of three things, the clinical, the commercial, and the psychological that I bring together to help practises and veterinary businesses make really small changes which have really big psychological impacts on the people who are receiving the messages. So the idea being that by making these small changes we can really change what our clients think, feel and do, and as a result, we can make the biggest difference to animal health.

So over the next 50 minutes or so, we're going to take a look at how we think and in particular we'll focus on the role that the subconscious plays in driving our thoughts and our behaviour. We'll also talk about why memory is really important when it comes to our marketing communications and what we can do to make sure that our communications are memorable. And then I'll take you through my 5 top tips for grabbing your client's attention and making sure that they engage with the communications that you put out.

So before we get into the detail, I'm very conscious that some of you may not have come across behavioural science, or if you have, you may not be that familiar with it. So just a word 1st, 1st up to let you know what behavioural science is. So behavioural science is basically the study of how we think, how we make decisions and how we behave.

And I mentioned that I'm a consumer psychologist. So consumer psychology is one part of behavioural science, and it really looks at how our thoughts and how our beliefs and our perceptions affect how we buy and how we engage with products and services. So let's start having a look at how we think.

If we want to capture people's attention and we want to really engage them in our communications, it's really important that we understand what's going through their minds and how are they engaging with, with, incoming, sort of data and information. As they navigate through the world, we live in this really busy world with constant barrage of marketing communications, and we need to understand how people engage with that so that we can make sure that we grab their attention and that they engage with what we've got to say. So if you've watched my other webinar, through the webinar vet around how to guide clients' decisions, you will have seen some of this, this slide already.

But it's worth talking through it again because it's a super important part of, understanding how we can engage with our clients more effectively. So Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking Fast and Slow coined this idea of system one and System 2 thinking. And it's, it's of course an oversimplification, but it's a really useful framework to help us understand the role that the subconscious plays in the way that we think and how we behave.

So system one is our our gut feeling really, it's fast, it's automatic. It happens without any conscious thought whatsoever and and outside of our awareness as well. So it's our instinct.

And system one is driven by things like emotions, by our biases, by heuristics, which are mental shortcuts that we all have, by, habits. Soy one is really our subconscious minds taking control over the things that we do. And of course, It's super useful from an evolutionary perspective.

If you think about the number of incoming data points that we come across every day, if we spend time and energy examining each and every one of those, we'll be paralysed, we won't be able to do anything. And certainly in a, in a kind of fight or flight scenario, we need to be able to react before we've even had time to have conscious thoughts. So System one plays a really important role in our survival and in helping us make sense of this complex world.

So an example of system one behaviour would be something like tying your shoelaces as an adult. It's something that you've done so many times, you just do it without thinking. You don't have to concentrate on where your fingers are going or where which way the laces are lying across each other.

You just automatically do it. Similarly, a, a drive that you do really frequently, maybe your commute to work, where you can get from A to B and realise when you get to be that you haven't really remembered any of that journey, you're doing it on autopilot. So those would be classic examples of System one activity.

System two, on the other hand, is is our conscious mind. So this is, where we can, we can feel the cogs whirring. We're really consciously thinking about something and analysing data points.

It's very slow, it's very deliberate, it takes a huge amount of effort, and because of that, our brains don't like doing it. So we tend to default towards system one wherever we can and avoid engaging our conscious brain. So an example of a System 2 activity might be learning a new musical instrument or reverse parking a car into a really narrow space.

So something where you're really having to shut out other data incoming and really concentrate and focus on what you're doing. Now whether or not we use System one or System 2 varies a little bit depending on the situation that we're facing and the context. So for example, if we're in a really good mood, we tend to switch off our system two and focus more on our instinct and our and our gut instinct.

If we're making really complex decisions like what house am I gonna buy, what job am I going to take, then we're more likely to engage system two. But the really, really important take home here is that even for those really big decisions, there will still be a very big role being played by System One. So even when we think that we are being very rational, we are, you know, really digging into the detail and consciously engaging our system two to make a decision.

Our emotions, our habits, our heuristics, our biases, all of those things will still be a very strong driver for the decision that we make. And that brings me on to this quote from Rory Sutherland, which is that the conscious mind thinks it's the Oval Office, when in reality it's the press office hastily constructing explanations for decisions taken elsewhere. And I use this quote all the time.

I absolutely love it, because I think it's, it's a really lovely way of putting into words the role that our system one plays in our decision making. As human beings, we tend to think that we are more rational and, more conscious in the things that we're doing than we actually are. And really what's happening a lot of the time is that we're operating through our system one and system two is post rationalising it for us and making, you know, giving us a rational reason to hang our behaviour around.

And that's really important when we come on to look at how we can engage clients and how we can grab their attention. We need to understand that their system one is going to be in charge a lot of the time. So just to get a feel for the power of System one, I would just encourage you to read out loud now the colours of the words.

So I don't want you to read the words. I want you to say out loud the colours that the font is written in. And I'm gonna have a try of this as well.

So if we look at the left hand list, that's relatively simple because the colour of the font is congruent with the with the meaning of the word. So I can read that quite easily. Green, yellow, red, black, red, green.

So what's happening there is that my brain is not really having to dig in and think about it. I'm not really having to engage my system two. System one can just.

Sort of glance at the word. Look at the overall shape of it, and the colour matches it, so very quickly it's just offering up to me what those words, what the words say and what the colour is. Now if I try and do it with the list that's on the right where the colour and the meaning are incongruent, I'm gonna have a lot more trouble.

I'm gonna try, but forgive me if I get some of these wrong. Green, yellow, red, black, red, green. So you can see that I can do it, but my brain needs to slow down because I'm, what you see is the shift between system one thinking and system two.

I'm having to really consciously concentrate on what the colour of those fonts are, and it makes me much slower. It feels much harder. I'd encourage you to have a go at this yourself so that you can feel the difference.

It is much harder and much less pleasant to to try and read it in that way with System 2 engaged. So what does this mean for grabbing clients' attention and engaging them? Well, it means that when we are communicating with them, when they're taking in our communications, the vast majority of the time they're going to be viewing it through that System one lens.

They're going to be glancing, vaguely looking at it. The System one will be offering up some gut instinct judgments based on what they're seeing. So we need to design our communications in such a way that we enable the system one to very easily decipher what it is we're trying to communicate, what it is they need to do, and also to make them feel that this is a good idea from their gut instinct.

So I would just like to touch on here the importance of memory. We've spoken a little bit about how we think and how the system 1 and System 2 drive our behaviour. The importance of memory is really key when we're thinking about how we can grab attention and get our clients to engage with our communications.

So you've probably experienced a journey at some point where you've driven from A to B and you've got to be and you can't remember the journey at all. And what's happened there is that you've been operating on your system one, you've been driving automatically and therefore you've not been paying attention to any of the data inputs that are coming into you at that time. Because you've not been paying attention, you've not laid them down in your memory.

So, the, the first important point is that we need to grab attention and we'll talk a little bit more when we come to the five top tips as to how we can grab attention so that clients are able to lay that information down in their memory. But if we don't lay things down in our memory, then they can't influence our behaviour. So memory is a really important driver of behaviour further down the line.

So if you want your clients to do anything off the back of your communications, then you need to enable them to lay your communications down in memory. So memory plays a really important role in in the formation of our preferences, in what we decide we like and what we don't like. And that's really key because if we can't get those, those communications laid down in memory, then our clients can't decide they like what we've got to say, that they believe what we've got to say, and that they're gonna act on what we've got to say.

So when we pay attention to new information, our brain lays it down and connects it via mental associations in our brain. And the stronger those mental associations, those sort of webs of mental association that it creates, the easier we find it to retrieve from our brain. Now this is important because those those strong webs of association enable easy retrieval and easy retrieval is something that feels good to us.

So our brains are very good at at deciding, oh, I can, I can pull that out of memory very easily and remember this is all happening subconsciously, this isn't conscious thought we're talking about here. And the easier we find it to retrieve information from our brains, the nicer it feels. And then, and then our brains tend to misattribute that sense of niceness, this sort of pleasant feeling of easiness.

And instead of thinking, oh, I, I, you know, I simply remember that well, which would be the rational thing to think. Our brain decides, oh I like that more, it's more believable, it's more credible, I think it's more correct. I'm going to act on it.

So simply by having strong webs of association, our brains are much more likely to believe and act on the information that we lay down. So it's really, really important, not just because we want our clients to remember what we have to say and act on it later, but because if we don't lay really strong webs of association down in memory, then they won't necessarily like, believe, see it as credible. So this is really key.

So how can we do that? Well, One of the really strong ways of enhancing memory is to use images. And there's a whole heap of truth in that adage that a picture paints 1000 words.

Images are so much more memorable than words. They talk directly to our system one. We're able to see a picture and it sets off a cascade of associated thoughts and feelings at a subconscious level.

We're very much more likely to take in an image than we are to read a paragraph of text, and a paragraph of text is very unlikely to set off at such a strong cascade of associated thoughts and feelings. So around 90% of the information that our brains process is visual. And we can process images around 60,000 times faster than we can process text.

Most people, when you show them a piece of marketing literature, will only read around about 1/3 of the words that are on the page, and that's probably the very best you can hope for. Very often it will be much less than that. But we can see and we can process an image in around 13 milliseconds.

So you can see there the power of images when it comes to talking to our system one. We can convey things in, in a visual way. Much more easily to the system one than we can do through words which are more likely to make them engage System 2.

So what does this mean for your marketing communications? Well, make them as visual as you possibly can, make them really rich in images, as light in text as possible. And if you're producing content for a channel where video is is an option, then I would always use that over and above, any other format if you can.

So I'm gonna move on into our 5 top tips now, and the first one is to be really clear on your intention. And this might sound super obvious, but being really clear on exactly what it is that you're intending to achieve is absolutely critical to create something that's attention grabbing and that's going to engage and drive a behaviour. So how do we do this?

Well, the first thing that I would think about is what is the behaviour that you're intending to drive? And again, this might sound really obvious, but you'd be surprised how many items of marketing communication are produced without clarity on these things, and it really does make a huge difference to the success of your piece. So you might be wanting to encourage people to sign up to your mailing list.

You might be wanting to drive clients to join your health plan or write a review for you on your Facebook page. You might want them to book an appointment or to encourage new clients to join your practise and to and to register. Whatever it is, be really clear for every single piece of communication that you produce, what behaviour is it that you're trying to drive?

The next thing it's really important to understand is in whom are you wanting to drive that behaviour. So are you wanting to engage with new clients who aren't necessarily currently within your network? Are you wanting to talk to existing clients?

And if so, is it all of them, or part of them? Is it clients that own a particular breed of animal or a particular type of patient, patient with a particular disease? Being really clear on that again can really help you understand.

How to then reach them, how are you going to engage with them and how best to, to drive that behaviour that you're looking to do? And the third part is to think about when, and some of this may be driven by your answers to the first two questions as to, you know, which behaviour you're trying to, to drive and in whom. But based on that, when's the best time to access them?

Do you need them to be maybe at home in the evening when they're on their mobile phone or their laptop? Or if they are new clients that you're wanting to draw in, do you need to be capturing attention whilst they're out and about in the local vicinity, you know, outdoors going about their, their, their sort of daily lives. Have a think about when is the best time to access those people and, and, and how are you going to start to think about driving that behaviour.

And answering those three questions will give you a clarity, which will enable you to produce communications that are super focused, and they will be so much more clear to the end user, to your clients when they're reading those communications or engaging with them. They will understand much more clearly what it is that you need them to do and why it's important. Without that clarity, you can end up with, with, with very poorly focused communication, so it's really important.

The other thing it will enable you to do is if you know exactly what it is you're trying to drive in terms of behaviour, in whom and when, it gives you the ability to then test and measure because we all know in marketing that there is no one size fits all approach. We always need to test and learn, and knowing exactly what it is that you're wanting to, to drive enables you to be really clear about what you need to measure so that you can test your approach, learn from it and understand whether or not you need to change it. So tip #2 is around being different.

And, you know, again, this might not sound like rocket science if you're a marketer and you're already producing marketing communications, but at a psychological level, it's really, really important and it's something that is very easily overlooked when we're producing our communications. It can be very easy to go with, with the default of, of how we've always done things or how others are doing things. But the really important thing is that we're programmed to notice what stands out.

You probably notice on this page that it's very much easier to focus on the orange balloon or the pink umbrella or the sharp pencil than it is to focus in detail on any of the others that are on the screen. And that's because of something called saliency bias. We're drawn to, to notice what stands out.

And it makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, you know, often the thing that stands out is, is dangerous or it's food, or, you know, it's something that is important to us from a survival basis. So it makes total sense that we should be programmed in this way. But it does mean that if your communications don't stand out, then they're very much less likely to grab attention and to engage people's minds.

Similarly, if we look at this image here, this is just another example of saliency bias. You probably find it very easy, I certainly do, to focus in on the black sheep and to see his facial expressions in the detail. If I want to focus on one of the white sheep, I really need to focus.

I need to concentrate on moving my attention elsewhere. So if your communications fit in with everybody else's, like the white sheet, people are gonna have to concentrate very hard to engage with it and to understand what it is that you need to say. So, you know, I guess the, the take home here is when the world zigs, you need to zag so that you capture attention.

And saliency bias is really closely related to the von Restdorf effect, which is also known as the isolation effect. And it's named after a German psychiatrist, Hedwig von Restovf. And in the 30s, von Rostovf ran a number of studies to try and understand the impact of how things that stand out affect our memory.

And she used very similar things to that that you see on the screen and asked people to identify which were the most memorable, what did they remember after that had been taken away. So if I take this list away from you and I was to ask you now, what is it that you can remember from the previous page. The likelihood is that you would tell me you can remember the number 153.

And that's because it stands out, it's different, so you've been able to lay it down in your memory. So being different can dramatically affect how easy your clients will find it to lay your communications down in memory, and we've already spoken about the importance of memory and the importance of easy retrieval, because they will like your communications more, they will be more convinced by them, and they'll be more likely to act on them. And you know, in the world of marketing, standing out can sound can sound risky.

It's, it's often very much more comfortable to go with the status quo. But I think what I'm trying to communicate here is actually not standing out is far more risky for your marketing communications, and it's far more likely that you will be wasting your time and your money if you don't stand out and your clients aren't able to see that you are something different standing away from the crowd. And if we look at at some of the creative that companies use, you can see that you can create some really lovely images that enable great standout.

If you were to see this in a magazine and to be flicking through, it's very likely that your eyes would be drawn to it even for a few seconds, possibly even longer depending on what else it was wrapped up within. But it's quite a, it's quite a captivating image because it's different, it's unusual and it, and it forces us to pay attention. So it uses that von Restdorf effect to to draw us in.

And similarly, if you look at these adverts, these are for adverts for a small bookshop in Lithuania. They're really clever, they're really unusual. There's something quite different, and they're communicating something to us about the importance of reading books, so it's very relevant to their brand.

But in, in a visual captivating style. And of course it's not just creative execution, I understand that it may not always be within our gift to be able to go and spend money and time creating new visual creative executions. But what we can do is think about how we can use the von Rastdorf effect when we are laying our communications out as well.

So we can play with, we can play with our layout, we can play with colours and shapes and so on to make sure that the important bits of our communication stand out. So here on the left you can see that I've put a purple box around some of the text, and that will draw the eye in, it will make it stand out and look different from the text that surrounds it. So you can use things like that, you can use highlighting different font colours and so on.

You can see on the right, there's just a couple of examples of how using colour and shape and size can can draw our eyes in and use that von Restdorf effect or the salience effect. To make us pay attention to particular bits of information. So when you're creating your communications, have a think about what are the really key take homes.

There might be a key message that you really want to make stand out. There might be a call to action, like, you know, sign up here or call us now. There might be something like that that you really want your clients to notice and act upon.

In which case, think about how you can use layout, colours, size and so on to really draw the client's attention into that one particular part. So our third tip is around using emotion. And As a professional service which is grounded in science, er, it can be really tempting to root our communications back into that science, back into the evidence and back into a very rational explanations as to why clients should follow our recommendations.

And of course, our recommendations need to be evidence based. But the thing that it's really important to remember is that although your clients will want evidence-based recommendations and their patients should, your, your patients should absolutely get that. Your clients will be viewing your recommendations through their System one, which is largely driven by emotions as we've already said.

So if we communicate to them only at a rational level, we only explain the rational why, then we, we're not gonna be as persuasive as possible and inadvertently we're going to be pushing them away from making the decision that's in their pet's best interest. So we really need to be engaging with the emotional why so that their system one can hear what we have to say, read what we have to say in our communications, engage with it and decide it's a good idea. So one way we can do that is through communicating emotional benefits.

So emotional benefits describe how something will make our clients feel. So that could be peace of mind, it could be that it will make them feel happy. It could be that they'll feel reassured.

Whatever it is, by communicating it, we help the System one identify that whatever it is that we're recommending is a really good idea. It stops them having to engage system two, where they would take the, the rational explanation as to why they should do something, and then they would then have to layer on themselves which means that it will make me feel. People will tend not to do that themselves because it's hard work.

So we offer it up to them so that their system one can very quickly make that judgement call without any effort having to be having to be used. So as an example. Rather than just saying after this procedure, we would expect an 80% chance of return to normal use, we could add to that, which means that your dog will be able to enjoy family life and exercise with you as fully as they always have done.

So We're sort of layering on that emotional, that emotional hook, really, to help them understand why returning to normal use is useful to them. So it's not just that their dog is going to be not lame anymore as an example, but their dog is gonna feel better and they're going to be able to engage in family life again. And that's going to make the owner feel something.

So by explicitly calling that out, we help the client engage their system one and understand that's a really good idea. I need to follow this recommendation. The other thing we can use to communicate emotion or to engender a sense of emotion in our communications is to use images.

And we've already spoken a little bit about the power of images in terms of memory. Images are also very much more powerful in terms of evoking emotion. And we're in the perfect profession to be able to do this, in every communication because nothing really evokes more emotion than cute animals and children.

So we can use cute animals in our communications to evoke that sense of emotion and nice affect that we want people to feel. And it's not so much that people will look at your at your communications and suddenly feel a very conscious flooding of emotion, that won't happen, but what will happen is that at a subconscious level, they will be feeling a lot of emotion that will then likely be misattributed by them as a, as a liking of your message, a liking of you of your practise, and therefore they're going to be more convinced by what you have to say. So it's this sort of subconscious generation of a of a positive effect that we want to achieve, which will then encourage the client to to decide that they like the communication and therefore be more convinced by it.

It's not rational, that that sort of route that we go through with from, you know, I, I feel something positive. Therefore, I like it. Therefore, I'm convinced by it.

That's not a rational flow, but it is the way that our brains work and it's really important that we understand that. Now this one I find super interesting. And this is tip number 4, target attention by using eye gaze.

There's a whole heap of data available now from eye tracking glasses and eye tracking software where we can understand exactly where people's eyes look when they engage with with our communications. And what's interesting is that in a very sort of deep evolutionary basis we are programmed to recognise faces, and we're also programmed to try and have empathy with the faces that we see. So we will tend to try and understand what we think they're thinking and feeling, and we'll also follow their gaze if we see them looking at something.

And this can be extrapolated to some extent to animals as well. So if we look at this dog holding up his paw and looking down, you can see that I've put some font on the page there to show you where our focus is typically drawn. So we will be, we will be drawn to look at what we think he is looking at to try and understand what he's thinking and feeling.

Similarly, if you look at this image, you can see that we're, we're most likely to be drawn to the top right of the page, we're gonna be looking up to where this dog is looking. And we can use this in our communications because again, as we've mentioned already, there are likely to be individual parts of your communication that you want to draw people's attention to in particular. So using eye gaze within your images to help encourage people to look perhaps towards your call to action button or towards a key message that you really want people to engage with, it will just help draw their eye to the part of the page that you want them to look at.

So this is tip number 5, the last of our 5, and this is the easy equals engagement. And this is super, super, super important because you know, it's, it stands to good reason that if we make things mega complex, that people are gonna feel confused and they're probably not going to engage with our content particularly deeply. But at a psychological level, it affects us much more deeply than that.

So if something's really confusing and really difficult for us to consume, then we confuse that feeling of difficulty with a negative feeling about the content and the messages that are being delivered and actually the messenger. So in this case, if you're doing marketing communications for a vet practise about your practise. And what we will decide is that because we found it difficult to consume that information, we don't like it.

We don't see it as credible, we don't see it as correct, we're less likely to believe it, and we're less likely to act on it. Again, it's not a rational train of thought, but it is the way that we're programmed. So if something's complex, we won't like it and we will be less inclined to be convinced by it.

The flip is true. If we make it really easy for people to consume our communications, they're more likely to like it, they're more likely to believe it, to see it as credible and true, and therefore they're more likely to act upon it. So keeping things easy for people to consume is about much more than just making it easy for them to understand what we're saying.

It's actually about making it much more likely that they will like and act on the recommendations that you're making. So we need to always remember, if we don't make it easy, people won't like it, won't act on it. So how can we do that?

Well, there are a number of different ways. The first one may sound really obvious, but use plain language. It can be so easy in our world where we've got a lot of scientific and complicated language and a lot of it we're using every day with our colleagues and our peers.

It's very easy to forget that that language may not be common use for our clients. So making sure that we go back to lay language that's really easy to understand and also that we don't get caught up in our view of the message that we're trying to communicate and forget to sit back and take a helicopter view and think, could this have a double meaning? Could anything that I've said here come, you know, by somebody coming in with fresh eyes, could they take something else from it other than what I'm intending to communicate?

So I find it really useful to ask somebody outside of the profession, outside of the practise, to review communications so that they can just give me that sense check of am I communicating what I think I am? Is the language easily understood? The second point is around using fonts that are really easily readable.

And this is incredibly important because when we read words, we don't typically look very clearly at every individual syllable. And sort of, you know, read it consciously. Instead, what happens is our system one takes over, it glance glances vaguely at the word shape, might look at maybe the first and the last letter, and then guesses what it is that the word says.

So anything that we do that changes the word shape is gonna make it harder for our clients to read and therefore they're going to like it less. So things like italic fonts, all capitals, so don't put your headings in all capitals, underlining, all of those things will change the outline of the word and make it harder for them to read. So wherever you can avoid doing that.

Contrast is another important thing to use if you want things to be easily readable, and typically we find it easier to read dark fonts on light backgrounds. So wherever possible, have a look at your communications and make sure that the colour contrast is there to make it really easily readable for your clients. And then finally, it's really important that we keep it brief.

The more brief it is, the easier it is to lay down in our memory, and we've already spoken about the importance of memory. And the nicer it feels to take on board. You know, nobody really likes to look at a big long, a big long set of paragraphs of text, knowing that we've got to decipher our way through it.

So make things stand out, make them short, brief, easily consumable. And help your clients get straight to the core of what it is that you're trying to tell them. The other thing that's important is to make our communications easy on the eye, because this can also affect how we feel about the communications at a subconscious level.

We generally feel things feel nicer when they look nicer. And, you know, I've got a an image here which is, is very easy on the eye with cute puppies, but images aren't the only way that we can make our communications easy on the eye. We can look at layout.

Making sure that we've got nice clean layout with lots of empty space, helps people feel like it's it's a sort of pleasant experience to consume the content and you can look at how you're using colours and contrast to make sure that things look nice and look appealing. Honestly, these things have a very real effect on how clients perceive the recommendations you're making. So this isn't just superficial stuff we're talking about here.

It actually genuinely affects the likelihood that they'll act on what it is that you're asking them to do. The other way we can make it easy is to make sure that our communication is really easy to understand. And the way that we do that is that we communicate the needs that we think the client has very clearly.

So, for example, with a health plan, we might be communicating that they have a need to spread the cost of their pets preventative healthcare, or to be reassured that all of their pets healthcare needs are taken care of. Whatever that need may be, make sure you communicate it very clearly and then provide some very brief but very clear information about how it is that you address that need in whatever it is you're communicating about. And then don't forget a specific call to action.

Be really clear, tell your clients what it is you want them to do. Do you want them to click here to sign up? Do you want them to call the practise to make an appointment?

Whatever it is, be really clear and, and call it out very explicitly and make sure that you draw attention to that part as well, visually in the way that you lay it out. So when we come to making it easy, it all comes back to a psychological phenomenon phenomenon, you try saying that called perceptual fluency. And we can make things more perceptually fluent by making them easy to consume, so using things like our fonts, our our easy language, contrast, and so on, by making them easy on the eye, so lots of clear space, make them nice and pretty.

And making it easy to understand, making sure the information we put on the page is really clear that we've told them what their need is, how we overcome it, and also what we need them to do, make that super clear. But of course this doesn't mean that we should dumb down our communications so that they should be so simple that that they're oversimplified, because our clients need us to provide reliable information, and they need us to engage with them. And one way that we can do that is through your communications, ask questions.

So the use of rhetorical questions will naturally send people off into a space where they start to think about answering the question. It's something we can't help doing. If we read a rhetorical question, we're we're automatically answering it in our minds.

So that's a good way of getting them to really engage with your content without necessarily putting a huge amount more information on the page, so you can keep it simple but make it engaging, ask them questions. You can also ask them to some extent to do a little bit of work. So we don't want to make this super difficult and make them have to really engage their system too, but by asking those rhetorical questions or leaving something unsaid that might just ask them to elaborate on it a little bit in their minds, we can encourage them to actively participate and really engage with the content, and that will help them lay it down in their memory and and make sure those webs of association are very much more rich.

And also, again, this probably sounds super obvious, but it's worth saying because it makes such a big difference to how they will feel, we should give our audience credit for being, you know, intelligent, educated, sensible people and talk to them as, as though they are those intelligent, educated people. It will make them feel very much more positive about the communications that we're putting out there. So I said that I've got 5 tips for you and I'm just gonna throw in this 1 bonus tip as an extra.

And I share it because it's something that I often hear marketers feeling nervous about because they feel that maybe they've been putting their communications out repetitively over a long period of time and they feel worried that clients are going to be bored with them or they're going to not look at them because they'll just feel as though they've seen it all before. But we need to remember that as marketers, we're seeing those things very much more often than our clients are, and we tend to overestimate how often our clients will have consciously noticed those, those communications. And at a psychological level, repetition plays an incredibly important role, because of something called the mere exposure effect.

So you have probably watched Netflix series, and as you're getting, you know, halfway through or towards the end of the series, you notice that you're starting to really like those characters a lot more than you did at the beginning. And typically we'll tell ourselves it's because we've got to know them, we understand their character better. But what's happening there is it's the mere exposure effect.

So we tend to like things that we're familiar with much more than things that are new to us. It's just how our brains are programmed. And when we like things, as I've already mentioned several times during this talk, when we like things, we tend to then assign other quite irrational judgments that go along with that.

So because I like it, I trust it, I believe it, I think it's correct. I see it as credible. I'm persuaded by it, I'm gonna act on it.

So that's typically the sort of subconscious thought process that will be going on. So we need to make sure that we engender that sense of mere exposure, that we encourage our clients to engage with our content sufficiently often that we feel really familiar to them. And the more we repeat things, obviously, the more likely we are to achieve that.

So also think about repetition within your communication. So if you've got a key message that you really want clients to remember after they've consumed your content, then make sure that you communicate that maybe in different ways, multiple times through your piece, so that by the time they get to the end of it, that message has been repeated and repeated and repeated. We know that repetition enhances memory, and you know you will have all experienced when you're studying for exams, the importance of repetition in order to get things to lay down in our memory.

So when there's something you want your clients to remember, make sure you repeat it in the piece. But also when you're putting out and planning your your content plan, don't be worried about repetition. It's a good thing and it will encourage your clients to engage more with your content, feel more familiar with it and to like it, and to act on it more.

So that brings us nearly to a close of this webinar, so in the spirit of repetition, repetition, repetition, I will just quickly run through the content that we've covered this morning. So we started off looking at how we think and we talked a little bit about the difference between System one and System 2. Soy one being our instinctive system that takes over most of the time, and System 2 being the more rational system.

So we just need to remember when we're designing our communications to talk to System one, because that's the one that's really driving our client's behaviour the vast majority of the time. We spoke a bit about memory, about how that drives our preferences. So if we don't lay something down in memory, we're very unlikely to be persuaded by it.

And the stronger those webs of association, we can lay down, the better, because it will make it easier for us to retrieve those that or for your clients to retrieve that information from their memory. And the easier it is for them to retrieve it, the more likely they are to like it, be persuaded by it, and so on. And then we went through our 5 top tips with a little bonus at the end.

So be clear on your intention. Think about what's the behaviour I'm trying to drive in whom and when, and that will give you the clarity that you need to be able to create really great content. Secondly, make sure you stand out, be different, whether that be through your creative, whether that be, you know, trying to stand out from the crowd, amongst your competition or other, people who are advertising in the same space, or whether it's within your communication, making sure that you make particular parts of your communication stand out and look different so that your client's attention is drawn to them.

So remember that Vonn Rastdorf effect, we're drawn to the things that are different. Thirdly, use emotion, it's so much more memorable and it's something that we can engage with in milliseconds. So, you know, the use of images, the use of emotional benefits, it really helps our system one understand why, why something is a good idea, why your clients should take your recommendation.

So don't just communicate the rational, make sure we explain the emotional benefit as well. And also we can use images to create that sense of emotion. So remember to use images of animals, particularly with those making eye contact with the reader to help people have that subconscious sense of a good feeling as they're reading.

Don't forget that you can also use your images to target attention with the eye gaze and remember to make everything easy. So easy to consume, easy on the eye, and easy to understand. And repetition, repetition, repetition.

So if I've piqued your interest in behavioural science, then we also provide workshops and training, other marketing services and bespoke audits as well. So if you're interested, head across to find out more at Inside-dashins.com.

I hope you found that webinar useful and all it remains for me to say is thank you very much for joining me.