2 Minute CMO Guide to Neuromarketing YouTube
What is this?
Ideally, you can consume this post in 2-5 minutes. The post’s goal: once you finish reading, you’ll have a foundational understanding of how neuromarketing can significantly improve your YouTube marketing campaigns. To make this piece consumable, the definitions are high level, the examples & details are simple and kept to a minimum.
The hope is that you get the basics and become interested enough to read more.
What is neuromarketing?
Neuromarketing uses neuro & cognitive science research techniques and insights to improve marketing and product design by discovering deeper & more complete reasons for a customer’s behavior. (For more details, check out this post)
How does neuromarketing work?
Neuromarketing works by measuring one or more body processes that we, as humans, can’t easily control. For example, you can’t easily change how your brainwaves respond to what you see or think. Since you can’t easily change these responses, the results tend to better represent a subject’s true beliefs and intent.
By itself, this data is useless. The “art” of neuromarketing is developing creative research projects that leverage biometric data to uncover valuable insights.
What can neuromarketing do for my videos?
Increase viewership
Increase watch-time
Increase post-watch brand affinity
Increase post-watch conversion behavior
Increase shares
How can it increase viewership?
YouTube viewers, even channel subscribers, click to watch your videos based on the title and thumbnail. Neuromarketing can evaluate if your thumbnail or headline can capture the attention and elicits the appropriate emotions to generate a click.
If you don’t have a thumbnail yet, neuromarketing research can highlight topics, content, or scenes that generate high levels of arousal.
How can it increase watch-time?
The percentage watched for a YouTube video is primarily related to the feelings a video generates:
Stimulation (What will I learn next?)
Pleasure (I want to continue to experience this feeling.)
Curiosity (what will happen next?)
Neuromarketing can help generate ideas to elicit those emotions. And for videos already created, neuromarketing can validate that those emotions will be present in your viewers.
How can it increase post-watch brand affinity?
Increases in brand affinity are derived from an increased desire to identify with your brand. Typically this comes from your brand authentically representing values that increase a person’s social value: e.g., power, mastery, belonging. Neuromarketing can help evaluate if your video can elicit these feelings. If your video does not generate brand affinity, neuro research can highlight narrative elements that will and connect authentically to your brand.
How can it increase post-watch conversion behavior?
Some videos have a direct call-to-action (i.e., “buy now”). Some videos, created for longer-term goals, seek to improve the viewer’s impression of the company, its products, and move customers closer to the top of the funnel. Neuromarketing, in combination with other marketing research techniques, can validate a video’s purchase intent. Additionally, neuromarketing can evaluate if that video increases a customer’s likelihood to purchase.
How can it increase video shares?
Your customers share videos for several reasons. One of the most important is because they communicate something pro-social about themselves: I’m funny, I’m in-the-know, I’m “on your side.” Neuromarketing can evaluate a video’s ability to motivate share behavior. Additionally, it can highlight opportunities for your creative team to enhance the video to elicit sharing.
Where can neuromarketing fit into my team’s video development process?
Validation Phases
For an existing product or piece of ad creative, neuromarketing can increase the accuracy of your team’s go/no-go decisions.
Additionally, you can use neuromarketing techniques to validate storyboards, pre-visualizations, rough cuts, or edit versions.
Ideation Phases
At the ideation, writing, or re-shooting stages, neuromarketing can provide direction on enhanced content, topics, themes, and narrative structure.
What organization is this right for?
Most.
While neuromarketing has become more accessible, it still requires expertise, the purchase of new technology, and time. Therefore, this approach only makes sense for organizations creating high-stakes videos or commercially focused films.
What situations is this right for?
Yes…
for TV commercials, video ads, or movie trailers. Why? The cost of failure is high, and the value of even a small improvement is substantial.
No…
for one-off or low-cost YouTube videos. Why? Even if the video fails, the cost of deleting that video and uploading another is negligible.
HOWEVER…
Neuromarketing may help you discover key insights that improve your overall YouTube program.
What does it give me that I can’t get in other ways?
Increased accuracy
Neuromarketing can tap into a subject’s primary drives better than other marketing research. This insight means improved accuracy over traditional methodologies and increased validity that gives you confidence that the results you get from your research will apply to your entire population.
“Why-validity”
Neuromarketing, far better than other research methodologies, can help you understand why your target market is behaving in a certain way (e.g., buying or not buying)
Ideas
Neuromarketing can uncover the deeper and often hidden reasons your market behaves the way it does. With these insights, your creative team has the potential to generate more impactful ideas.
How long will it take to implement?
Days to Months
If you build a neuromarketing lab from scratch, it will take several months to get it up and running. If you hire someone in-house, they will take less time to generate insights, but it will take at least a month to see results. If you bring on a neuromarketing agency, depending on the clarity of your team’s request, you can see results within a few days to weeks, depending on your research goals.
Will neuromarketing affect my delivery times?
Possibly, but if so, not significantly.
Neuromarketing requires recruiting subjects and having them engage in some activity. That sequence takes anywhere from a day to two weeks if you are engaging in a longitudinal study. This additional time can push back video completion. However, it might be possible to complete your research in parallel with other tasks.
How will this affect my content production team?
In the beginning, there will be growing pains. Your team will need to adapt to a new workflow and learn to integrate a new type of data/intelligence. However, a good team will adapt quickly and welcome the insight, especially when they see jumps in performance data.
How will it give me an unfair advantage?
Insight leading to relationships
Videos are an excellent medium to build one-to-many relationships. Done well, the audience comes to like and connect with the people in the videos. Done exceptionally well, the audience projects themselves onto individuals in the video. Neuromarketing can highlight key attributes your audience is looking for in your videos. When present, these attributes speed the building of relationships. Further, these relationships become barriers for your competition, while reducing barriers to your sales.
Should this replace my existing marketing research?
Probably not.
Neuromarketing research programs often integrate traditional market research techniques and big data to develop substantial customer intelligence increases. As a result, neuromarketing should be able to supplement any research or analytics you are currently using.
How can my team get started?
If you are open to exploring neuromarketing more, there are several things you can do.
Read - Subscribe to our newsletter. We will continue to put out short guides like this and more detailed posts.
Read More - Consumer Neuroscience (The MIT Press) by Moran Cerf & Manuel Garcia-Garcia
Demos - iMotions (https://imotions.com/) and NeuroLynQ (NeuroLynQ.com) can give you quick demos that will give you a better understanding of what’s possible.
Consultancy - The power of neuromarketing requires significant tech but even more substantial experience. Almost anyone can claim to do neuromarketing, but only neuro and cognitive scientists can do it effectively. Of course, scientists don’t have marketing & product experience, so a good consultancy will have marketing strategists who understand your needs and your business’s priorities.
For these reasons, before you engage an agency, it is essential to evaluate them rigorously. We will cover selecting a neuromarketing agency in another post.