The science and discipline of psychology is very much aligned with Marketing, and recently I read this great PsyBlog post about "Mind Pops". Mind Pops is the author's term for those images and/or ideas that to pop into your mind seemingly out of the blue and apropos of nothing.
Researchers learned that "mind pops" happen to everyone, on average, once per day. They have learned that these "pops" are not at all random.
People unconsciously process much more of the stimulus around than they are aware of. The images and ideas in "mind pops" can even be from triggers experienced weeks, or even months, in the past.
Think about that...images and ideas that you were exposed to, and may not even consciously "remember" are actively simmering in your brain. These ideas stay in the background of your brain, generating more synapse connections until one day, when the context is right, it "pops".
What does this have to do with marketing? Everything!
In a previous post, Attribution is Not Marketing, I talked about Google's Zero Moment of Truth and how there needs to be "something" that triggers a person to go and search and that the "something" is marketing.
This Mind Pops research supports my point about it being good marketing strategy: you need to be where your customers are, with compelling and relevant messaging, ads and content. While an action may not come out of each touch your content and messaging and brand is making an impression that may subsequently trigger a "mind pop" in them to take that desired action.
Recently I saw Megan Totka's article on Marketing to Small Businesses and just had to applaud her point that "business to business (B2B) marketing to a small business can be much like business to consumer (B2C) marketing".
Of course it is!!
Data shows that the majority of US firms are sole proprietors and less than 10 employees. The people running and working in these businesses are the very same people when they are working and when they are not. And while I don't have research stats handy as evidence of this, I expect that for these business owners, their line between work and not-work is very, very blurred. They think about work during their "non-work" hours and they think about non-work during their "work" hours.
So why would we think these people turn into new, strange, alien creatures just because it's a service for their business?
There isn't a "small business buyer" - there is just the person purchasing something s/he will use in his/her business. Most are comfortable using consumer technology at work, so let's start acknowledging that our marketing of business services needs to reflect consumer marketing sensibilities.
Marketing always begins with understanding the customer. The more that we can remember that it is people in these small businesses, the more successful every small business marketer will be in engaging and converting them into profitable customers.
