Today’s #1 Challenge: Better Results with Less Money
When times are tough knowing in what direction to move is important. You have to know how to accomplish more, with less. Conventional wisdom says it’s all a numbers game. If it takes four calls to make a sale, make twice as many calls to double your sales.
If 10 clicks on an ad yield one sale, on average, then all it takes is to buy more clicks. Buy more ads. The problem with the “more resources applied = more success” model is that it gets expensive—very expensive. Worst of all, if the cost of getting a sale isn’t justified by the profit from that sale, the model breaks down completely. Applying more resources can result in bigger losses.
The Answer: Improve Conversion!
“Geeks on Steroids” is all about smarter marketing. Although there are certainly many ways to boost the effectiveness of your marketing and sales, we believe the best way is in understanding what your customers’ want from your website.
At Geeks on Steroids we do one thing and only one thing but we do it really well!
The idea of understanding how people think in marketing and sales is hardly a new idea. For decades we’ve seen terms like web design psychology, conversion optimization and psychology in web design thrown around in articles and books. With the development of modern neuroscience we are able to unlock the black box brain.
The idea is to build a website that is able to stimulate the unconscious mind into taking action.
Modern neuroscience has brought us tools that help us see inside our brains and open up psychology’s black box. Now, with the magic of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scans, we can see, for example, that our brain’s response to a price that’s too high is very much like getting pinched: it’s painful. Electroencephalogram (EEG) technology is bringing the cost of measuring some kinds of brain activity down and allowing larger sample sizes for statistically reliable optimization of ads and products.
How Rational Are We?
We all like to think there are good reasons for what we do and that our decisions result from a conscious, deliberative process. Although certainly there are rational components to many of our decisions and actions, researchers are constantly exposing new ways in which our subconscious drives our choices, often with minimal conscious involvement.
Since the early days of their science, psychologists have suggested that our conscious minds are not in charge of what we do. Freud, for example, developed elaborate theories involving repression and dreams. Many modern scientists attribute behaviors to our evolutionary past.
Even as we tweet from our iPhones, evolutionary psychologists say, our brains are operating with software from our hunter-gatherer days.
Not all the new insights come from complex neuroscientific studies. Around the world, behavioral researchers are conducting simple experiments with human subjects that reveal how our brains work and, in some cases, work much differently than we might predict.
Duke University professor Dan Ariely is one of these researchers, and if you doubt the existence of unconscious influences on our decisions, read his engaging book, Predictably Irrational.