9 Powerful Ways You Can Use Neuromarketing To Grow Your Business

image of a brain

Standing out in a crowded marketplace is becoming increasingly complex and challenging.

Wouldn’t it be great for small businesses and marketers to understand how people think and make purchasing decisions?

This is possible through the science of neuromarketing.

Neuromarketing combines neuroscience, social psychology, and market research to inform advertising, product design, pricing, design, and other decisions.

Neuromarketing is not a new concept. Large companies rely on neuromarketing for sales, go-to-market, and advertising strategies.

But this elusive science is no longer exclusive to a select few businesses. Marketers and small business owners can also use neuromarketing to improve their strategies and grow their businesses.

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Whether you’re starting a business, building a brand, or designing a product, you should have a basic understanding of how neuromarketing works.

Neuromarketing uses scientific methods to track body movement and brain activity to provide brands and marketers insights on how to communicate best, motivate, and influence their target audience. Among other tools, scientists use:

  • Electroencephalography (EEG). An EEG is a brain-imaging scan that measures brain activity via electrodes placed on the scalp. This technique shows what stimulus activates which specific regions of the brain.
  • Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). An fMRI is a brain imaging test that uses magnetic fields to track blood flow through the brain. An fMRI can reveal a customer’s neural reactions, recall, and degree of engagement with a product, design, or content.
  • Eye-tracking. This method helps marketers observe and measure the attention of a test subject through their eye movement. This method also records pupil dilation, which measures a customer’s arousal.
  • Facial expressions tracking. This method uses tools to identify and track microchanges in people’s facial expressions. This is useful in measuring a customer’s emotional response with quantitative data that measures abstract emotions such as joy, sadness, anger, disgust, or fear.
  • Heart rate monitoring. Through sensors attached to cardiovascular points, users can track and record the increase or decrease of a person’s heart rate. The changes are indicative of uncontrolled emotional responses such as arousal or excitement.

Here are nine examples of how you can improve marketing, product design, and branding with neuromarketing:

1. Use images strategically in ads

Images with people, especially babies, tend to attract longer and more focused attention.

But, when a person in the ad looks directly at you, people tend to focus more on the face and less on the content or ad. When the person is looking at the content, readers are naturally prompted to also look at the content. Studies looking at the effectiveness of baby photos in ads demonstrate this well.

Pick images that create a natural eye flow to the accompanying copy rather than away from the copy.

2. Pick appropriate colors

Colors influence purchasing decisions. So, don’t simply pick colors you like. Select colors that fit your products, messaging, and audience. Here’s a look at how 21 brands use different colors to influence customers>.

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Want to learn more about color psychology?

Color has a profound and often subconscious effect on behavior and is used by marketers to influence consumers. Learn more about color psychology.

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3. Use effective product packaging

It’s not always what’s inside that counts. People are drawn to attractive product packaging.

Neuroimaging has shown that consumers subconsciously respond to marketing stimuli, including packaging.

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Avoid these 5 packaging design mistakes

Packaging design is a vital bridge between your customers and your product. Customers will see and touch your packaging before interacting with your product. And, as excellent as your product might be, product packaging does the selling. Do not let poor packaging undermine your sales.

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4. Eliminate decision paralysis

Marketers and business owners used to believe that customers wanted choice. But it turns out that having too much choice creates decision paralysis.

Less can be more.

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Learn more about the paradox of choice principle

As the number of choices increases, the negatives escalate until we become overloaded and distressed. When we reach this point, choice no longer liberates but debilitates. This is the paradox of choice principle. Here is everything you need to know about the paradox of choice principle.

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5. Leverage loss aversion

People often worry more about what they might lose than gain. That’s why “limited stock” advertising strategies are highly effective.

How you present decisions to people (called “framing”) impact their decision-making. And importantly, if consumers feel that indecision will lead to a loss, they are more likely to buy something.

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Learn more about the loss aversion principle

Whether it’s losing a game, an argument, or an item we want to buy, we do not like it. People make buying decisions motivated by their desire to avoid a loss. Marketing can use loss aversion to manipulate the variables and win big. Here is everything you need to know about the principle of loss aversion.

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6. Take advantage of the anchoring effect

The first piece of info people hear is critically important because it is often the basis for subsequent decisions. This happens because people can rarely assess the intrinsic value of something and instead compare it to alternatives. You can leverage this by taking advantage of the “anchoring effect.”

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Learn more about the anchoring effect

People frequently act illogically, making their behavior difficult to predict. And they rarely take the time to learn the full facts before taking action. Here is what you need to know about the anchoring effect.

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7. Set the right price

We often see item prices end in .99 instead of an even number.

Contrary to popular belief, there’s a reason for this, but it doesn’t apply in all cases. The correct pricing depends on the accompanying messaging.

8. Include critical features in website design

Neuromarketing also informs how websites are designed. From streamlined navigation to strong photos and social proof, your eCommerce website must have numerous vital website design features to succeed.

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Interested in the latest web design trends?

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9. Supplement market research with science

Traditional market research, such as surveys and focus groups, is limited in scope and accuracy. Even in the most accurate surveys, brands and marketers still find discrepancies between what people consciously say they do versus what they do.

People may say one thing and do something else.

People often lie.

But the brain does not.

That’s because the subconscious mind is more influential than people think. More than 90% of our decisions are made subconsciously.

Neuromarketing mitigates the conscious and subconscious gap, allowing brands and marketers to understand decision-making triggers, motivations, and patterns.

Neuromarketing derives data methods and tools that track and measure people’s unconscious reactions. This data reveals more about customers’ preferences, desires, and attitudes than typical and controlled responses from questionnaires and supervised interviews.

So, continue to do market research, but supplement your research with data from studies that can help you improve your marketing and advertising.

Every business owner and marketer wants the ability to read the minds of their customers. Neuromarketing makes that possible.

Use the neuromarketing principles we shared to create better content, design better websites, inspire better product designs, and provide a better customer experience.

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