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Six Techniques To Improve Your Digital Persuasion

August 3, 2010 by Duncan Shand

Last night I was speaking about Digital Marketing at the IceHouse. Part of the presentation was on persuasion and the different techniques that can be used when you’re designing websites, email or social media campaigns. For this I drew from the work of Robert Cialdini who wrote “Yes – 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to be Persuasive”. This is a great book for anyone interested in marketing, psychology, negotiation and changing how people think and behave (ethically of course!).

In the book he refers to six key principles persuasion. These are;

• Reciprocity – give something away. When you give something away you create a natural imbalance and most people feel compeled to even things out. One campaign where we did this recently was the SPCA Petfood facebook campaign where we gave fans samples of the product to try.
• Likeness – reflect the target market. This goes beyond just defining your target market to actually try to reflect how they look and how they act. People buy from people that they connect with and like.
• Social Proof – show that others like you. The new social media widgets that you can embed in your website pages are a good example of this. Have a look at another client – Endemic World – here you can see how many of your friends like each product!
• Authority – show reviews/testimonials. Use reviews and testimonials to demonstrate how good you are and get other people to talk about  you. You can read what other people are saying about Young & Shand
• Commitment – ask people to be consistent. People generally do what they say they will do, so the more times you can ask people to confirm their intentions the better. Have a look at the All Good Pledge we did for All Good Bananas as an example of this.
• Scarcity – develop a sense of urgency. This is one of the oldest tricks in the book. There are lots of different ways to create scarcity; you can limit time, quantities, invitations etc.

If you see any other great examples let us know!

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