The latest in my line of interview is a discussion with Bryan Eisenberg of Future Now. Bryan is very well known in the web analytics world, and is the chairman of the Web Analytics Association, and the co-author of Call to Action: Secret Formulas to Improve Online Results and Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?: Persuading Customers When They Ignore Marketing.
Bryan, and his brother Jeffrey, are the leading proponents of “Persuasion Architecture”. This is the notion that you need to model and understand your customers, what they want, and figure out how to persuade them to buy what you are selling. Sounds trivial, but it’s not. We are emerging from the era when marketing focused on branding and broadcasting simple messages to create desire for their products.
But now there are so many choices available to consumers, and they are in much more control. They don’t want to be slammed with marketing brouhaha, they want the answers to their critical questions, and, if it makes sense to them, to be able to buy the product.
It’s made more challenging by the fact that your prospective customers are not all at the same stage in the process. Some of them are ready to make an immediate decision, others are still doing research, and others may be at various in-between stages. In a Persuasion Architecture you strive to be successful in addressing the needs of all of these kinds of prospects.
It’s a thought provoking concept. Persuade the customer to buy, by serving them. Doing this truly well requires a lot of insight and ongoing optimization to get to optimal results. Yet the upside is tremendous.