Neuromarketing: How to Get the Innate Responses You Want

19 Aug Neuromarketing: How to Get the Innate Responses You Want

As a physician, you are used to evaluating all of the nuances of various test results as a way to understand what is happening in your patient’s body. When it comes to marketing, some companies are doing the same thing, with the end goal being to understand what is happening in the target audience’s minds. Marketing research companies are even using some of the same equipment you are, including EEGs, MRIs and biometric sensors. People’s innate reactions to various stimuli (as it relates to advertising and marketing strategies) are measured, and decisions are made from that data.

Does this sound like something out of a science fiction movie? Welcome to the future, because it’s going on right now!

So, what types of marketing are likely to elicit the responses that you are looking for from your website’s readers (i.e. your potential patients)? Let’s take a look at a few of them.

Touch on Cultural References as a Neuromarketing Technique

Your culture includes comfort foods, certain animals, the way your home looks, memories from your childhood, music, movies and much more. When you see an ad featuring spaghetti and meatballs or a bowl of chicken soup, this might give you a warm, comforting feeling. An ad with an image of a fluffy kitten might make you feel differently than one featuring a snake or a spider. If someone were to sing the first few words of a song popular in the years when you were in college, it’s very likely that your brain would perk up and fill in the rest of the line.

When people see your blog entries, your website or your social media pages, they react to what you’ve written as it pertains to their memories and their culture. If your target audience is in their 60s, it’s unlikely that you will be as successful posting the words to a Justin Timberlake song as you would be using the lyrics to something by the Beatles or the Rolling Stones. Think about who is reading your material, and look for ways to touch upon their culture.

Tell the Whole Story to Engage Your Reader

If you specialize in a particular branch of medicine, you spend your days telling your patients how you can help. Have this surgery and you will stop having so many headaches. Take that medication and you’ll be able to eat without worrying about pain later. And so on.

When you are marketing to patients, however, you need to fill in more of the before and after details. How are the headaches impacting your patients’ lives. Are they missing out on gathering with friends due to pain? Are they having trouble reading? Maybe they are calling in sick to work and suffering from unpaid bills. How will their lives change? Better friendships, more time spent on enjoyable hobbies and more money at the end of the month are all possible benefits to having their treatment.

Taking your patients through the cycle of imagining exactly how their lives can change by filling in the gaps and really telling the whole story can have a meaningful impact on your neuromarketing results.

Become a Hard Habit to Break

When your patients wake up in the morning, they automatically check their email, read their favorite news site and maybe log in to their Facebook page to see what’s been happening since they went to bed eight hours ago. Wouldn’t it be great if your site was one of the few that they chose to look at while drinking their morning java?

Give your readers something worth reading on a regular basis. Update your social media accounts. Post on your blog. Mix it up; don’t be too predictable. Basically, you want your readers to come back and check your website or Facebook page regularly because they expect to see something new and interesting.

If you would like to know more about neuromarketing and the power of advertising, please call HealthCare Marketing Group at 800-258-0702.