With marketing experience, you inevitably experience some promotions succeeding beyond your expectations while others klunk without much response at all.

How to understand the difference? The book Hot Button Marketing by Barry Feig provides a useful framework for guessing possible reasons for such variations in response. Then you can tweak intelligently and try again.

Feig profiles 16 emotional drives that motivate people today to buy, including familiar ones like the desire to belong and the urge to be superior to others along with newer wants like re-evaluating priorities and reinventing oneself.

In examining the web copy that quickly filled my first “Launch Your Information Empire” action group, I see that I repeatedly referred to a dream becoming reality, which corresponds to Feig’s hot button #16, wish fulfillment.

Those who signed up resonated with that theme. Note that I did not muck up the presentation with appeals to status seeking (Feig’s hot button #2) or instant gratification (#12). Tossing disparate hot buttons together doesn’t work.

When at first you don’t succeed, try a different hot button.

Multiple Hot Buttons

What if customers have markedly different reasons for buying?

When some buy an exercise machine to feel better about themselves, while others wish to reach their fitness goals and still others want to avoid fighting crowds to and at the gym, use sequential marketing.

Through a series of direct mail pieces or multiple ads within a short period of time to the same audience, focus each message on just one hot button. Today they receive the “feel younger” pitch, next week the “get fit faster” pitch and the week after, the “no more traffic jams” pitch.

At a web site, which people may visit just once, headline it with the strongest or most common hot button. Feature the other hot buttons in quotes, case studies and lists, set off from the main presentation.

To identify the strongest hot buttons, test headlines against each other or ask buyers what got them to take the leap. Often themes emerge in their replies.

Hot Button Discovery Exercises

* To warm up to the idea of emotional hot buttons, go to your closet at home and pull out four items of clothing you haven’t worn in a year. Then ask yourself: Why did I buy this? Why have I kept it? Listen for wishes, hopes and fears in your answers.

* Find a marketing pitch of yours that didn’t work well and identify the emotional needs it appealed to. Then look at one that did persuade buyers and identify which needs it targeted. Jot down any insights that emerge.

* Get a bunch of friends together and open up the Yellow Pages to a random page. Imagine that you had to compete with those vendors with an offering that cost twice as much as theirs. How would you persuade customers to prefer doing business with you? Repeat on another page. What did you learn about emotional reasons for buying?

* Create a free report related to what you sell. Sign up for a Google Adwords account, if you don’t already have one. Create at least three little text ads for your report that appeal to different emotional needs. Test these against each other to find out which hot button reigns supreme in your market.

* Once you’ve identified your strongest text ad, create another version of it for the same report that’s somewhat more rational and straight-laced, and yet another version with more emotional hot sauce. Then test these against each other to determine what level of enthusiasm clicks most with your crowd.

Author Bio: Marcia Yudkin is the author of more than a dozen books, including 6 Steps to Free Publicity and Persuading People to Buy, from which this article is adapted. Learn about her Marketing Insight Guides series on turning strangers into long-time customers: http://www.yudkin.com/guides/index.htm .

Category: Marketing
Keywords: marketing psychology,persuasion,principles,hot buttons,motivators,needs,wants,buying triggers