Marketers are always cooking up schemes to get people to take some action: watch a video, read a blog post, join a mailing list, buy a product...<\/p>\n
You've seen their limited-time offers, special introductory prices, social proof, iron-clad guarantees, stacks of bonuses, and a billion other tricks they use to try to motivate you to act.<\/p>\n
How often do you take the bait?<\/p>\n
Not very often, right?<\/p>\n
More importantly (for you), how often do the people you're<\/i> trying to spur into action take the bait?<\/p>\n
Not nearly often enough!<\/p>\n
You've applied every trick exactly the way you were taught, but nobody's buying. What's the problem?<\/p>\n
Motivation.<\/p>\n
\"But,\" you say, \"isn't that what all those techniques are supposed to do -- motivate people to act?\"<\/p>\n
Well, yeah. Sort of. But if people aren't acting, obviously, something's missing.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Again, it's motivation.<\/p>\n
I've written a few times recently about how to beat procrastination<\/a> and how to keep motivated as a blogger<\/a>. In both cases, my solutions centered on simplification -- make the task easier to understand and easier to do, and you'll get further with less motivation.<\/p>\n But you've still got to have some<\/i> motivation.<\/p>\n It doesn't matter how scarce your product is, how soon you're taking it off the market, how much other people love it, how long your guarantee lasts, or how many thousands of dollars of \"real world value\" your bonuses have if the customer simply doesn't want it.\n Similarly, the incentives you use to try to motivate yourself, affiliates and JV partners may fall flat. In fact, today, Yaro Starak wrote about how incentives and rewards can hurt<\/i> your business<\/a>:<\/p>\n So, how can getting financial rewards or material incentives for working harder, smarter, faster and better possibly be detrimental<\/b> to our business? Dan Pink says there are seven fatal flaws<\/b> in this way of working. Material rewards and incentives can:<\/p>\n ...<\/p>\n The reason we are the ghosts in the machine is that our three greatest motivators are autonomy<\/b>, mastery<\/b> and purpose<\/b>. These are motivational forces from within, and they don't go away.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Let me tell you a story that speaks to a few of the flaws Yaro listed.<\/p>\n I've got a storage room in my basement that has swallowed up quite a few of my kids' toys. One way that they can get toys out of storage is to try new foods.<\/p>\n Anybody who has finicky kids won't be surprised to hear that it's next to impossible to get ours to try anything new (even to get a toy).<\/p>\n But what proves Yaro's point is that sometimes, they'll resist eating something they know they'll like because we won't give them a toy for it!<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Ultimately, all motivation is intrinsic (internal). External motivators like rewards and punishments can never have any more power than whatever internal<\/i> motivations they're tied to. And the further they're abstracted from a person's internal motivations, the less of that power they'll borrow.<\/p>\n You may think the title of this post is wrong -- that sometimes (even if only 1-2% of the time), people do<\/i><\/b> do what you want. But it's just not true.<\/p>\n I'm not saying that your wants and people's actions never match up, and I'm not saying that you can't do anything to increase the odds of that happening. What I'm saying is that people do what they<\/i> want.<\/p>\n No amount of tricks and techniques will ever put your will in control of someone else's actions. That's why you've got to know your target market inside and out.<\/p>\n Knowing them \"out\" -- their demographics, where they hang out, etc. -- will help you find them, talk to them in their language, etc.<\/p>\n But you've got to know their inner motivations to know what to offer them, and how to talk to them about it to alert their inner control center that you're offering what they want.<\/p>\n I mentioned earlier that external motivations have more power when they're less \"abstract\", or more concretely connected with internal motivations. Your product may fulfill someone's innermost desires perfectly. But if they have to understand a convoluted chain of causes and effects to see how, your motivating power is going to be diluted.<\/p>\n One way to cut through the problem with abstraction is to use stories that illustrate the connection between external motivators and internal motivations.<\/p>\n First of all, it's easier to get someone to listen to a story than to sit through a dissertation on cause and effect.<\/p>\n And second, it's easier to understand a story than a complicated explanation. If you can show<\/i> cause and effect, you may not even have to explain how<\/i> the cause causes the effect. If the magic black box works (and if you can convince people that the black box is what caused the magic), it doesn't matter so much why.<\/p>\n All those marketing techniques have their place. Some of them aren't motivators in and of themselves. Instead, they simply remove barriers that might prevent someone from acting on their motivations. And others are connected to intrinsic motivations in some way.<\/p>\n But ultimately, the more directly you can speak to your prospects (or your own) internal motivations, the more success you'll see. And the less negative side effects your efforts to motivate will have.<\/p>\n Ultimately, it all comes down to two questions:<\/p>\n Think about that.<\/p>\n And keep thinking about it till you find the answer.<\/p>\n Then think about it some more to be sure<\/i> that you've really got the<\/i><\/b> answer.<\/p>\n When you do, people will motivate themselves to do what you want.\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Marketers are always cooking up schemes to get people to take some action: watch a video, read a blog post, join a mailing list, buy a product... You've seen their limited-time offers, special introductory prices, social proof, iron-clad guarantees, stacks of bonuses, and a billion other tricks they use to try to motivate you to...\n
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