The Missing Part of the Online Marketing Puzzle : NLPComments Off
Matt Hopkins posted in NLP, Search Engine Marketing, Web Analytics on April 18th, 2007
One of my hobbies for many years now has been the study of NLP or Neuro Linguistic Programming. This is the study of how people communicate, there are better explanations and facets of NLP but communication is what I’m interested in.
NLP has a number of presuppositions, which are things that may not be true but might be nice to pre-suppose. These include ‘everyone looks at the world using their own map of the world created by their own experiences.’ and ‘everyone tries to pick the best option in any given situation.’.
So what does this have to do with online marketing?
Well, let’s take the situation that you have a website and you track your visitors to the site using a web analytics tool. Your site receives traffic as a result of your SEO and SEM activities. So, you can drive traffic to your site and you can analyse the traffic to learn insights from traffic patterns etc.
Now up until this point you will have been looking at various metrics and KPIs but have you lost sight of the fact that these numbers actually represent real people. It is often very easy to fall into the trap of forgetting that your not trying to attract more numbers but in fact you’re trying to reach out to more ‘people’. This is where NLP falls into place in online marketing as it emphasises the ‘people’ aspect and makes you think about how it is best to communicate with your website visitors.
This all ties up nicely with visitor segmentation, this is taking your website visitors and splitting them up into groups based on commonalities. These common aspects may be geographical location, age, gender, job title etc. or they may actually be based up the communication style of your visitors.
A neat way of looking at this is to create personas of your target market segments. Personas are example people within your target segments and are a good way of ensuring that your marketing activities are aimed at the right sort of people. So, you might have a persona called Sam who is a marketing bod in a small company in England who is given a small marketing budget to work with. Sam enjoys playing basketball and socialises regularly with his colleagues from work. With the added NLP edge we might add that Sam is a very visual type of person who learns and understands best when concepts are explained using pictures. This aspect may be common within that one particular market segment and will allow you to communicate better and ultimately sell more to that group of people.
You can test to see which type of communication method works best with a market segment using standard A/B testing, maybe with an email containing images and one that only has text. But remember that communication methods are not always about visual, auditory and kinaesthetic ways of looking at the world, preferred tone of voice and style of writing can be different between market segments.
In conclusion, I just wanted to open up your minds a little bit to another aspect of online marketing rather than pure metrics and numbers. Remember that you are selling your products and services to people and where ever people are involved you have a psychology aspect which can prove to be extremely useful in increasing conversion rates! 
If you want to hear more about how psychology fits in with web analytics and online marketing then leave a comment below and I will come up with some more examples of where I’ve used NLP to improve websites.