I had an interesting conversation with my running buddies this morning. I explained to them that everyone is trying to get your attention, most of every day. Email for example. We all get dozens, if not hundreds of emails a day, each one trying to get a piece of you. Naturally, we need to filter most of them out. So, I asked my friends, what draws you in? What really works? And the answer came down to 4 words: wants, easy, fear, trust. Read more…
Want - to really get my attention, I need to believe I’m going to get something I want. They say sex sells. Well the reason sex sells is because people want sex. Alternatively, for me, anytime I see a picture of a dog or a boat, I am immediately drawn in. Because I want boating and I want dogs. These are things that I want more of in my life. Only when I actually see that I can get something I want, will I be willing to give anything, including my attention.
Easy - because there’s so much coming at us 24-7, it needs to be easy for me to get what I want. Not to say that people are afraid of working at something, but generally speaking, when marketers are fighting for your attention, it better be easy for me to see that I can get what I want. This is where the word “frictionless” comes into play for me. The less friction, the more likely it’s easy, and the more likely you’ll get someone engaged.
Fear - or perhaps safety. But I’m going to focus more on fear. Even FOMO counts here. Fear of missing out, fear of dying, fear of your membership expiring and you losing access to the things you want.
Trust - there needs to be a minimal level of trust for someone to play this game of give-and-take. A prince from Uganda that needs my help might offer me USD$1m. I want $1m and it looks easy enough, but if I don’t trust the source, I’m out.
One final thought to wrap it all up. I think it’s important is to understand the people you’re trying to engage so that you know what each of them wants or fears. How do we understand them better? Data. Yes, that’s important. But asking questions gives us the context we need at the individual level to drive engagement from the bottom up rather from the top down. With data from your AMS your making guesses as to what the population wants and fears. So you take that off the top and disperse it down to the membership. If you ask at the individual level about wants and fears, like you do with PropFuel, then you can treat that particular exchange in a way that maximizes engagement.
I hope sharing this morning run conversation might help us construct more engaging campaigns.
Dave Will
While working for SAP, a multi-billion dollar software company, nearly 20 years ago, Dave Will was advised to "Walk faster and smile less, because perception is reality." Dave took this feedback to heart and started a business based on the antithesis of this advice. Fourteen years later, Dave successfully sold Peach New Media, a Learning Management System for associations, which is now part of Community Brands.
Since then, Dave and his leadership team from Peach built an engagement platform called PropFuel, the first Conversational Engagement platform designed specifically for member based organizations to improve member engagement using the Ask, Capture, Act methodology.
Dave lives on the South Shore of Massachusetts with his 3 boys, 3 boy dogs and his formidable wife, Nicole. He's an endurance runner and pretends to work from his boat in Buzzards Bay, MA as much as possible all summer long.