Beyond Logic

On many occasions, I’ve talked about how you, as a marketer, can use the biases inherent in each of us to enhance the effectiveness of your marketing.  But today I want to turn that lens around and examine how one of our biases can keep us from marketing most effectively.

While there are several biases which can impact your effectiveness in marketing – today I am going to start with one of most common ones we fall prey to.

Confirmation Bias: Challenging Your Comfort Zone

Meet Confirmation Bias: It’s like an agreeable friend who always nods along to your ideas. It’s comfortable but can lead to a narrow view on many levels. The solution is to challenge yourself! Seek opinions and evidence that contradicts your assumptions to ensure you are on the best trajectory.

Real world example:  I recently got a new client who offers three different but related services.  Each service utilizes different products and allows him to target different market segments.  It seemed like the marketing was disjointed because of all the different segments that were being targeted.  During discussions with the owner, I tried to determine the most profitable, or preferred market segments so we could minimize the marketing campaigns.

I started reworking the website, but the lack of an elegant way to simplify the marketing kept gnawing at me.

I finally sat down with my favorite AI and fed it the information about the business.  I took each service one by one and had it give me an exhaustive list of potential market segments.  I then cross referenced these lists to find those segments that were represented in all three lists.

I went back to the client with both, the exhaustive lists and the short list of 7 different segments that might be interested in all three services. He was shocked – there were segments on these lists that he had never considered.  We further reduced this list to three highly potential and profitable market segments.

Now I can focus on these three segments, and offer bundles of all three services together, as well as each individually.

The marketing is simplified, and ROI can be maximized.

Blind spot gone.