How Your Promotional Messages Can Overcome Consumer Inertia and Spur Action

By Eric Keiles, Instructor of the ProThink Learning online course The Cyclonic Buyer’s Journey: Marketing Tactics and Tools

Consider Average Joe — a fifty-six-year-old man ready to retire in a decade but has just $17,000 in total savings. Now Average Joe is not someone who has faced significant, unique hardships or financial misfortune. In fact, his savings correspond exactly with the median savings of people between fifty-six and sixty-one years of age.

Now, how can Average Joe be relaxing, watching football, and drinking a beer when he plans to retire in ten years with money that won’t even buy him a new Buick?

The Curse of Complacency

Average Joe is an example of a person in the Awareness stage of the customer journey, someone aware that they have a problem but thinking “gee, you know, I should probably do something about that sometime. Just maybe not today.”

It’s worse when we move into the business realm, where executives may be at greater fault than Average Joe here. Business leaders are paid precisely to see ahead and plan for the future. Yet in industry after industry, we watch as leaders not only fail to see opportunities for innovation but fail to react to disruption even after the new course of an industry has been inevitably set.

In fairness, it’s far more difficult to fundamentally change the culture and workings of a staid institution than it is for Average Joe to get serious about retirement planning. But at both the consumer level and the business level, you find people aware of a problem and doing next to nothing about it.

Maybe One Day . . .

Why do people put off doing something about a problem they know they have? On a pragmatic level, we find that the following are the main reasons that we need be concerned with in business:

· Feeling overwhelmed: It’s easier to ignore something than it is to sit down for even a few minutes to learn how to solve it.

· Lack of immediacy: Intellectually, people may know that they need to change course to avoid the inevitable reality of their problem, but emotionally they’re complacent. Bad things may be coming, but it doesn’t feel like there is impending doom; it just feels like another Tuesday.

· Fear of responsibility: Especially in the workplace, many people fear putting time toward a problem because they’re afraid they’ll get saddled with the full responsibility of it, even if they just wanted to help get the ball rolling . . . which also means they’ll get saddled with the blame if it falls through. It’s easier to not rock the boat.

· Not invented here or not my problem: Just because someone recognizes a problem doesn’t mean that they recognize it as a problem for themselves.

· Underestimation and misconception: Sometimes people remain inactive because they believe that whatever problem they have is smaller or easier than it really is. Many business owners are shocked to learn that an effective web marketing campaign, for instance, can easily take six months to assemble.

· Comparatively low priority: Something gets pushed to the proverbial back burner because there are too many other needs that take precedence.

· Fear of change: This is the most common reason people never move out of the Awareness stage. Sometimes doing nothing feels safer than doing something. Humans are genetically designed to fear change and stay away from it.

Faced with this inertia, how do you influence your buyer to take action?

Moving Past Consumer Inertia

To spur your consumers into action, focus on these three elements in your consumer interactions:

Highlight the Consumer’s Pain

No purchase is ever made unless it makes pain less acute. Think about your own purchasing behavior. Do you ever buy something if you don’t need or want it? Of course not.

In the Awareness stage, your prospects might not have acute pain yet; otherwise, they would be actively searching for a solution. So your content, advice, and guidance have to be designed to poke at pain and to help them understand the potential challenges facing them down the road if they don’t take action.

Make Interactions Frictionless

Armed only with Awareness, consumers are not very dedicated to finding a solution for their pain, so the slightest need for effort, thought, or time will have them giving up and walking out on you. They’re willing to invest very little in your relationship, so don’t make them work for it.

To simplify the consumer’s experience, make sure your websites are easy to navigate. All your messages should provide a quick and easy way for consumers to learn more about you or the problem, so rather than just leading them to your website’s homepage, direct consumers directly to a product or a specific landing page. Don’t require visitors to fill out reams of contact information; they won’t be ready to give it up and have no desire to talk to anyone yet.

Trigger Their Fear

The fear of missing out, known by its slang acronym “FOMO,” is one of our most primal fears and, as it turns out, a great way to inspire action. To really motivate your audience, tell or, better yet, show them what they’re missing by not opting into your product.

This is exactly what Bose did with their Wave music system. Initially, the company’s marketing focused on its revolutionary innovation, its patented technology, and the wonderful listening experience people reported. But the system cost much more than what people were used to paying and experienced limited sales. That is, until Bose began incorporating the phrase “Hear what you’ve been missing.”

While Bose should certainly advertise its innovative tech, using it as a differentiator in the marketplace, that alone failed to encourage action. Once Bose framed its system as the answer to something you were missing out on though, the company became the undisputed leader in luxury audio technology.

Crafting the Right Interactions

Although consumers in the Awareness stage might not be ready to invest time and money to find a solution, the good news is that, because they are now aware a challenge exists, they will be more attuned to solutions and more open to marketing messages and content offers. Your job, then, is to make sure you are creating interactions that help buyers focus, filter out the noise, and hear your story. And ultimately convince them that the time to act is now.