← The Marketing Millennials
The Marketing Millennials
How to Utilize Psychological Biases in Marketing with Sarah Levinger
00:40:06
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- [00:00]
Daniel Murray
Welcome back to another episode, the Market Millennials. This episode was recorded last year, but the insights are timeless. I sat down with Sarah Levenger, one of the sharpest minds in marketing psychology, to talk about what really drives people to click, buy, and stay loyal. We unpack why impulse buys aren't really impulse. How pricing anchors shape perception and behavior, why your CTA copy might be silently killing conversions, and and how to weave emotion into your ads without feeling manipulative. If you're trying to make your ads hit harder, convert better, and feel more human in 2025, this episode is for you. I'm excited to dive in. Let's go. Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the no BS Marketing podcast. I'm Daniel Murray, and join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the off. What's up, everybody? Welcome back to another episode of the Market Millennials. Today I have Sarah on the podcast. She is one of the best in the biz when it comes to psychology and ads. How to integrate psychology and ads. How to integrate psychology into your creative. I'm excited to chat with her, but I'll let Sarah tell her tell you her story of how she got into marketing quickly and then we can get into the chat.
- [01:35]
Sarah Levenger
Thank you. Oh, my gosh. I'm super excited. It's gonna be a good chat today. So I have been in marketing for a long time. I actually first started in marketing when I was 20, maybe 21. I'm gonna be 35 this year. So, like a long time. 15 some years. The interesting part was, though, I didn't actually start in the psychology field. I was like a graphic designer and a brand identity person. And I was going to school for graphic design and I had a professor who was like, you know, if you're good at this, you don't really have to go to school to do it. You could literally just go start working. And I was like, cool, I don't want to pay for student loans. So I dropped out of college and just started a freelance business and then did that for the next 10 straight years. And the interesting part was I oftentimes kept getting clients in the door who were like, do you know how to do WordPress websites? Or do you do SEO? Do you do email marketing? I. And I would always say yes, even though I had no idea how to do any of it. So I had to, like, go learn how to do it as you do as an entrepreneur. So I would go to the library, of all places, because I don't like truncated information. I need like the whole picture. I just can't. Internet information is too short for me. I need like the whole thing. So I would go to the library and pick up all these marketing books. And next to the marketing section was all this like consumer psychology and economics and like all these really interesting behavioral books that are from the 80s. Cause that's all the library has. And so I just. For 10 years, I just picked up all these books and just like devoured them. I couldn't get enough of it. And I didn't tell anybody I had this knowledge or knew anything about psychology until I fell into paid advertising about four or five years ago. And that's how I ended up here, I guess.
- [03:15]
Daniel Murray
I think it's. First of all, that library is cool to putting psychology books next to marketing because they. They understand. They understand. But second of all, I want to dive into, first of all, what does it mean to integrate psychology and ads? And then we can talk about some specific strategies on how you think you could do it.
- [03:40]
Sarah Levenger
There's a lot that you could do with psychology and advertising. And I think people have like a general knowledge of it. And we were just talking about this. The most common things that I see is usually social proof or authority proof. Those are two what we call heuristics, right? So they're mental shortcuts that most people take to make a decision. So social proof, if you have that in an ad, people are going to say, oh, other people like this. So I probably will. It's just an easier way for the brain to make a decision. Now those are two mental heuristics. There's literally hundreds, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them that are basically global, right? So it's universal for every human. So I think it's time most marketers understand that, like the psychology is everything. The colors you choose, the models you put in there, the words in particular that you use for these ads, or lack thereof, all do something for the brain. Because what we're doing as marketers is trying to elicit a response from the brain of a human that's across the screens from us. So the whole thing is psychology. All of marketing is psychology. And having more knowledge about it is going to be the only way that these brands are going to win from now into the future.
- [04:52]
Daniel Murray
I think also I want to dive into a question that I know probably gets put up a lot on social and everything, but how do you, since you know that the brain works this way. And you, since you know that psychology works this way, how do you do it in a way that is helping the person on the other side of the screen or where wherever they are seeing an ad versus manipulating.
- [05:21]
Sarah Levenger
Yeah, I get this question a lot because people are always very concerned that like, well, Sarah's using psychology. Does that mean you're just manipulating people? Absolutely not. You're using psychology no matter what. So like even if you don't know you're doing it, you're still, anytime you build an ad, there's psychology built into it because you're talking to the brain. So in general, when it comes to kind of the ethics that surround using psychology and advertising, I try really hard to remember that most of the time these consumers have been dealing with the problems that they're dealing with for literal years before they are coming to the point where they're ready to purchase something. In general, impulse purchases don't exist. The subconscious need for that particular product is, exists for months sometimes before they ever get to purchasing. So in general, I try really hard to remember that like the psychology is going to be in there no matter what. It's my job as a psychology based marketer to not overstep the bounds into something that's going to make people feel negative about themselves or elicit some sort of an emotional response that's hurtful. Right. So I'm not going after emotions that are going to be too triggering for people and that's on purpose. My job is to be very careful with how I use the psychology so that people can get what they need out of life. That's the most important part.
- [06:44]
Daniel Murray
I think one thing that you just said that I want to dive into because I think people think it's impulse and it's not, is that most impulse buys have been seeded for a while or, or, or whether you, it's been seeded by marketing or seeded by just like pains you've experienced as a human being, you've, you've, you've needed that product or you've had a desire for that product somehow. So could you explain like how the mind works for impulse buys and how that.
- [07:25]
Sarah Levenger
Yeah.
- [07:26]
Daniel Murray
And how to elicit, not elicit, but get people to dig deeper into the need or want that they have.
- [07:34]
Sarah Levenger
In general, I would rather people not go after somebody who's an impulse buyer mostly because impulse purchases don't exist. Like I said, the brain is really interesting because it's, it's basically a three pound organ that consumes about 20% of the glucose in your body on the daily. So you're, I mean, almost like a third. Right. Of all of the sugar that you're taking into your body, almost a quarter basically of all the sugar that you're taking into your body every single day, goes straight up to your brain to just make yourself alive and keep yourself going. Right. Interestingly enough, brains in this particular culture and every culture on the planet interact with other brains on a daily basis. So everything you are interacting with, the smells, the sights, the sounds, the people you're like coming across, all get recorded inside the subconscious. And that over time, depending on the negative or positive experiences that you go through in life will generate the human that you are. So from this you usually have all these deep seated needs and hurts and fears and pains and also all of these great aspirations and goals and abilities and like really interesting things about your personality that are coming from decades of experiences on this planet. So when I hear a brand who's like, well, we really want to capitalize on more impulse purchases. We really want to get a lot more people who are just going to buy, buy, buy, I always tell them, please don't do that because the, the impulse buy that the algorithm is saying just purchased within the last like seven days technically isn't doing that. And so we're basically dumping money at people who might have a little bit less, what would you call it, less of a motive to stick with the brand. I don't really necessarily want somebody who's going to buy quick because it's possible that their pain is really high at that point in time. I would so much rather buy for someone who's like, I've been dealing with this problem for a, like decades, a really long time, and I'm ready to actually dedicate the time, energy and financial commitment to solving it long term. That's a higher LTV customer and that's also just a better customer in general than somebody who's just buying products left and right.
- [09:46]
Daniel Murray
Yeah, and I think also, I mean obviously you have to like, look, some products are one off buys and some products are LTV plays that you want someone to come back. So like if you have a, a vitamin or something like that, like obviously that's an LTV play. But if you have something that someone's going to use once and never use again, then it's, then that makes sense. But I also want to go into some tactics people could use today. So what are some, when you're building an ad, what are some say like psychology biases that people have or things you weave into ad creative to make the ad more successful.
- [10:32]
Sarah Levenger
Such a great question. Pricing psychology is one of the ones that I see people shy away from, especially in advertising and marketing. Mostly because people don't know what prices do to people. So they set their prices based upon what their competitors are doing or what they think they should be doing. They Almost always use a 9 or a 7 somewhere in all of their pricing. And I have to come back and very gently tell people there's a lot numbers do a lot to the brain. There's some serious brain activity that's happening when you're processing numbers. And so pricing psychology is probably one of them. Especially this basically anchoring prices to each other. So one of the best brands I've seen do this is a brand called Billy and they do it for razors. Right. So there's similar to like Dollar Shave Club where it's cheaper razors for women and they have a price that's almost always this kind of like $5 per box of razors or whatever it is real cheap. Right. DTC brand. Now in almost every ad I've seen from them, they always use a price anchor. So they have a ten dollar like symbol that's crossed out and next to it is their five dollar price. This is like one of the best ways to position your product in the market because most of the time people have general anchors in their head for how much things cost. Right. Based upon all of their interactions of all of the products that they usually purchase. But they don't necessarily have an anchored price in their head while they're watching the ad. So they have like a general knowledge. Razors are probably somewhere between like 5 and $10. But when they're watching an ad, their brain is basically double checking all of the information it has about razors to see whether that 10 and 5 is an actual good deal. So I wish brands would go further into pricing psychology because there's a lot you can do with it. It goes all over the place.
- [12:17]
Daniel Murray
I, I mean I remember I used to see, I think Dollar Shave Club had like their $1 and then they would like have half a snicker bar. Yeah. Like they would have like they would show like they were. Yeah. Anchoring against things that you would buy on a daily basis. Like oh, you could buy half a snicker bar or you could buy a razor for a dollar. What would you rather buy?
- [12:41]
Sarah Levenger
Like what would you rather buy? It's so smart too because you don't have to just anchor to prices. I love that you bring that up, you can anchor to literally anything. I have a brand right now that's actually running a test to see if they can basically take pricing off of the website and anchor to an icon. So this is similar to a test that IKEA is running right now. And IKEA is crushing with it because they're Ikea. But IKEA basically tested in some different markets, taking off prices off all of their price tags and only using a price anchor that was related to an item somebody already knew. So they basically took tags and put like coffee cups on it. So this like, table is like comparable to like three coffee cups or whatever it is. Because I can do the mental math in my head and say, okay, well, and I usually go to Starbucks, it's what, like eight to ten bucks? So this is like a thirty dollar table. I can do the math really easily without actually seeing the numbers. It is bonkers. Like, the brain is insane.
- [13:37]
Daniel Murray
Yeah, because I mean, it's, it's crazy because you could. Because people will easily buy small purchases that add up to what that large purse purchase would be, but they don't understand, like, once you put it in, in perspective to them and say, hey, I mean, you could, I mean, you don't have to sacrifice, but you could sacrifice having coffee for like three days and buy this table.
- [14:02]
Sarah Levenger
You could buy a stable that you need in your house or you want in your house. Absolutely. I mean, you can anchor to all kinds of things too. You can anchor to another brand, which is actually very smart. Hertz did this a while ago. Hertz and Avis. Avis. Thank you, Avis. Yes. So Avis was second to Hertz. Right. For a very long time. Hertz has been on the top for forever. So Avis was struggling to kind of compete in the market. So they basically took an anchored stance and generated a giant campaign that said, you know, we're the underdogs, which means we have to try harder. So they were trying to tell people we're second to Hertz on purpose. We told you this. And because of that, we actually have better customer service. We try harder with our customers. We're not as awful to work with. And it works. I mean, it grew their brand significantly during that time period that the campaign was running. And then they turned it off, which was very sad on their part. But in general, you can anchor to all kinds of things and see good success with it.
- [14:58]
Daniel Murray
Also, I think that ad had one other thing that is a great thing to do in marketing is that they basically admitted their flaws up front and Then they told them why they're better. So it's like, okay, hey, we know we're second. So they both trust with the audience. They're like, came out and said, we know we're second, but actually second's good for us because we will spend more time doing things for the customer, doing this, try harder. They anchored in the sense of that, but they also admitted flaws up front. And then they were just like, okay, that builds trust. It's kind of like when you go to a restaurant and they like, you say, do you suggest you get the chicken? And they're like, no, the chicken sucks. We get the steak.
- [15:43]
Sarah Levenger
My husband does this all the time. He always asks. Every time we go to a restaurant, he always asks the waiter or the waitress, like, which one's your favorite? Right. And the servers are always like, well, don't get this one or this one or this one. But this one is amazing. And it's always amazing. Every time they give us a suggestion, it's always amazing. Brands should do this too. Like, we need to come out and say, we're not very good at this, but because of that, we're trying really hard over here. Like, we can't fix everything because we're human, but, like, we can fix a lot for you. This transparency is really important because it makes the brand human. And humans buy from humans, not brands.
- [16:18]
Daniel Murray
Okay, so we, we do. We dove in a little bit of a price anchoring. So what are some other strategies you've, like, you've weaved into some ad creative or ads that are good people can use today that will. Can help their ads out?
- [16:34]
Sarah Levenger
Yeah, I tend to err on the side of being as emotional as I possibly can. I think a lot of people are very nervous about that because emotions are accepted in this particular culture. However, the more emotional you can get with somebody, the better. Now, this doesn't mean that we're trying to go in and, you know, be just crazy flowery with our language and just be fluffy feely all the time. I'm trying to identify specific emotions that are coming out of each customer subgroup. So I use something called an NLP report. It's natural language processing. Basically means that I'm doing linguistic analysis to try and identify which emotions are coming out of our customer base. And doing this, I usually categorize into nine different emotions. I can tell pretty quickly, depending on the language that they're using, which emotion they're currently feel or which emotion they solved by working with brand. Because I usually taking, I'm usually taking all this data off of reviews. So this is after purchase. The interesting part about doing that is you can say. You can take one message and say it in a thousand different ways. You will literally never run out of ideas for apps if you do it this way. Because you're taking an emotion and displaying it in millions of different ways instead of trying to take one angle like moms who run, dads who grill. Right. Like, that's a very specific use case and fatigues so quickly, especially in today's algorithm. So using those emotions, I think is probably the number one thing that I would suggest. First, identify those core emotions of your customer and then challenge your team or yourself to create an ad that is like, how many different ways can I say confidence? How many different ways can I say fear? How many different ways can I say comfort? Right. We can't just use one word. There's millions of different ways to say it.
- [18:21]
Daniel Murray
I think, I think that's great. I remember reading. You probably read this because you've read every. Probably read all the psychology books, but I remember reading Cashfritizing.
- [18:36]
Sarah Levenger
Yeah.
- [18:39]
Daniel Murray
I just remember that like there's, there's like that. The Life Force 8 where you have like a basic, like human instincts that everybody has, which, like survival, enjoyment of food and beverages, freedom of fear, of pain. And if you use like that and then you combined it with like common pain points that people have, like you could do a lot for in an ad if you take those two.
- [19:09]
Sarah Levenger
Yeah.
- [19:09]
Daniel Murray
Put them together.
- [19:10]
Sarah Levenger
It's very Maslow's hierarchy. Right. So like all these things have to be set and then we can get into existential needs, like, you know, growth and personal, like, you know, enjoyment, those type of things. But all of the, the basic stuff, security, housing, clothing, food, water, like that all has to be set before we can start like getting into these other kind of human emotions. The interesting part about that though is I work with a lot of brands who think that they have targeted towards an emotion and I have to draw them back a lot because they're like, well, we're going after fear. We've told people that, like, if you don't do this particular thing, you're gonna lose 20 of your bone mass every year. And it's not working. Like we're trying to push into fear and it's just not working. And I have to tell them this all comes down to behavior because how you behave teaches people what you're going to do next. Right. So if I'm working with somebody and this co worker is just constantly berating me, I can pretty much guess that tomorrow this person's also going to be kind of mean to me. Right. Just preemptive behavior. Now this happens in markets as well. So if we have a customer base that for instance, is looking for some sort of skin care. Right. We have to understand what's the behavior that's currently happening in the market. Are they putting a lot of lotion on their face or are they bar soap users? Because that's a very different market. Are they the type of person that uses a dermaroller religiously or are they the type of person that just like rinses their face with water at night and calls it good? Does she go to sleep with her makeup on or is she like, hell no, I got to take all that off before I go to sleep because I don't want to get like breakouts. What is she doing behaviorally? Because this will come into play when we start to draft ads that speak to the human experience. It's so much faster, way, way cheaper if we speak to the behavior and not necessarily just to an emotion. Even though I just said use emotion.
- [21:02]
Daniel Murray
Also, the point you just made is very interesting because I, I, when you tell people like, for example, in the future you could get 80% like less bo like humans can't think that far out. Especially like younger, like if you, if you, you're the position to how it can help them right now or today. And if they keep doing this activity, it will prove for the later you can add that into. But I think I, I was talking to Rory Sutherland about, he did a campaign.
- [21:37]
Sarah Levenger
I love him. Oh my gosh. Rory's my idol.
- [21:40]
Daniel Murray
He's amazing. Yeah. But he was telling me how like in UK they were trying to get more people to do pensions. And it was hard because like, especially younger people can perceive what it's like to retire like in their head. So like they, I, I forgot how. But he just changed the messaging that instead of that it's like investing, like it's only taking 5% of your, your salary today or something like that.
- [22:13]
Sarah Levenger
You got to put it in context. Rory is the master at this too, of basically behavioral marketing is what we're talking about, like behavioral science based marketing where we're talking about what does this person currently value? Because again, if you're selling something like insurance, which is very similar to selling supplements, I will say the, the cognitive struggle with that. Insurance and supplements are very similar. So if you're struggling as a supplement company to try and get people to stick with your product. It almost always comes down to the fact that people cannot think almost farther than about three months ahead of time, even six months out. That time frame is too difficult for the brain to understand. Even though it knows what six months feels like, it has no idea what it's going to be doing in six months. So it doesn't prioritize future very much over current needs and current pleasures that it's trying to, like, figure out. So if you're selling something like supplements, insurance, those type of things, it's best if you can bring it back to what are you currently losing this year you're going to lose 2% of all of the collagen in your body, which doesn't sound like a lot, but that could be the difference between a handful of hair this year. Right. Like, you got to put it in the context of what these people are currently experiencing and then, like, connect it. You know, you're going to be taking this supplement so that next year's you could keep her hair.
- [23:34]
Daniel Murray
Yeah, I mean, that's the way to do it. Like, even, like for men with, like, hair loss. Like, most men start the process when they're losing hair, but when they should really start, when they aren't losing hair, but, like, it's. Marketers could position it as, hey, like, keep your hair that you have today for the. For 10 years down the road. That's different than saying, hey, you're going to lose your hair in 10 years. And you could be like, oh, maybe I have the genes that don't lose my hair, so I don't get to buy this today.
- [24:09]
Sarah Levenger
Yeah, they'll roll that dice if they're not currently experiencing it. Yeah, you would do, you would do better to talk about the fact that, like, if your father lost his hair, he lost it at your age, not when you're 10 years down the road. You may not be seeing the hair loss yet, but the wheels are already turning. Like this year you're going to lose hair. Right. So you're trying to come, come back to again all comes back to that human experience behavior that's happening currently. Very important for brands.
- [24:37]
Daniel Murray
So we've done two. So pricing you've done like using emotions. I know we talked about two before the podcast, but I think, I think they are important to note that you can use these two, but one is using social proof, ugc, whatever people will use, and then that second is using like an authoritary figure, whether you're selling toothpaste and it's a dentist. Like, how, how do you how, how have you seen people do this? Well, because I think some people would use social proof in a bad way and some people do it well. So how do you see people do so?
- [25:18]
Sarah Levenger
Oh my gosh. Social proof and authority proof. Oh, these are two that I get so frustrated about because people think social proof is a testimonial and that's not at all what it is. Social proof can come in the form of a testimonial, but that's not what it is. Authority proof is also one that's just, it's a beast in itself. But I'll do a social proof first. So when it comes to social proof, social proof can literally start entire mass movements within a culture. It's literally herd mentality. It's people following people is all it is. So the, the heuristic of social proof comes down to if other people like it, I probably will. Or if other people like it, it must mean that it's not damaging, it's not bad for me, it must mean that somebody tested it, which means I'm safe. It's a safety, kind of a mechanism in the brain. And this starts from babies. Like babies are very keen on watching what their parents eat and how their parents eat it. So you'll notice that at a really young. I have two kids, a five and three year old, so I just went through this. But at a very young age, these kids will start picking up pieces of food and just practicing, right? But they'll also watch you eat food. So if the baby's sitting on your lap, they'll just watch you put things in your mouth. It's very creepy how they just sit there and watch you. But this is this big, this mechanism that they have for watching, teaches them how to eat right and what not to eat. Basically this happens at a young age and we carry it all the way up into adulthood. So we follow people constantly just to double check and make sure we're not going to poison ourselves, we're not going to walk off a bridge, we're not going to do something that will damage the body. So when it comes to social proof, I would so much rather you as a brand help your customers do the talking for you instead of like you trying to say we are a well loved brand. Now that doesn't mean that you should take all this, you know, five stars off of things. I want you to continue using this like 20,000 customers love us because it does work. But what I would rather you do is help your customers tell other people for you. Because that word of Mouth marketing is a hundred percent. How social proof works is people telling people. Best example I have of this is actually Apple did this very easily when they came into the market with their ipods. Very early on, almost Everybody had an MP3 pair that was black, right? So the player was black, the headphones were black, the case was black. Everything came in this like weird gunmetal gray shade, right. Apple came in and turned everything white. All of their products were white. Their headphones were white, the cases were white, the product packaging was white, everything was white. So now people started to see as they were walking along the roads and like with their friends and out in the stores that everybody was wearing these white headphones and had these white products so they stood out. That is social proof, not necessarily. Testimonial people walking around with the product was enough social proof to boost the numbers exponentially.
- [28:07]
Daniel Murray
I love that because I think, yeah, testimonials is one out of a thousand ways. And also, like, even though you're writing a testimonial, it could be targeting if it's to say the testimonial was from this person. That doesn't match who I am in a person. Yeah, I'm not gonna buy. So it's better. It is actually better off to show like, hey, we have, we're 4.7 stars and we have 21.7 thousand whatever. Because the more people people see, they follow the those people. But I like the Apple examples. Apple does also how Apple did. Like they purposely made like the Apple logo on Max, like face, like outwards. Not like when you close them, it looks bad. But they didn't care about like what you look, they want.
- [29:03]
Sarah Levenger
Other people saw. Apple's brilliant. I could study Apple all day long because they made very strategic decisions about what other people thought about your product, not what you thought about it. Because they knew, they knew that humans are so, so sensitive to what other people think about us. That's very deep, very deep seated. So on the opposite side for anybody that's going to authority proof, this one is hard. Authority proof is very hard to get right. Because you can't just say 9 out of 10 dentists recommend this, right? You can't just say that anymore. Mostly because it's only going to work for a small subgroup of people. And here's the reason why. Depending on the market you're in, authority proof may not be trusted. And I've had to work with quite a few brands on like helping them understand this concept. If you're in any sort of medical field that has anything to do with a generalized doctor or anybody that's anybody that you see on a consistent basis. Right. So family doctors, you're probably going to struggle a little bit with customers trusting this doctor recommended thing. Because in this country, at least in the US the medical field is very politically charged concept. However, on the opposite side, for like a physical therapist. Physical therapists are not usually, they don't have a lot of stigma around them. Right. People trust their physical therapist usually. So it depends on the industry you're in. You have to be very careful about how you frame things. Now, one of the best ads I've ever seen, and I'm just like, this is so freaking psychologically brilliant, was a company that makes toothbrushes for kids. And on there they literally just said, 9 out of 10 doctors recommend your child use a toothbrush and brush twice a day, but the tenth doctor recommends us. That was a really interesting psychological shift of like, holy crap, nine out of ten doctors are telling me this, why does that particular dentist recommend this brand? Right. So it gets you thinking a little bit about, do I trust my dentist? So that brand was very smart and trying really hard to narrow down into this. Like, do you trust what your dentist tells you? Because it's possible that your toothbrush is the reason why your kid has cavities.
- [31:14]
Daniel Murray
Also, I think, like, even an authority, authority could be a, a creator or influencer that it doesn't even have to be a dentist. Like, okay, I, I use this toothbrush with, for my kids every single day. Like, that's not even a dentist, but like, this influence, like for you, for example, your two kids, like, if you told, I bet you told your friends, like, hey, this toothbrush that I'm using, my kids, my kids are using it every day. They're brushing their teeth. It's amazing.
- [31:49]
Sarah Levenger
Yep.
- [31:49]
Daniel Murray
That would probably go a longer way than saying, like, four to five dentists that do that. Because you're coming also from a place, sometimes a place of authority because you like, okay, I, I have kids. I, they understand that. I, yeah, I, I, I'm a mom. I get it. That's also authority figure. Because you're just like, moms take care of kids. It doesn't have to be like someone who's necessarily like, specialized in, like, kids or like, hey, I went to my dentist, love the dentist. They the favorite in the community and someone else is talking about the dentist and you're, you're recommending a product that the dentist told you. Um, so cool. I mean, is there any other, like, takeaways that you. You've seen that you want to tell the audience that, like, hey, or anything that you want to say to the audience like, that they should do today in their advertising that could. Can change a game, even if it's like a small little tweak.
- [32:49]
Sarah Levenger
This is something interesting that doesn't have to do with advertising, but it's something that I constantly tell people to check, double check what your buttons say on your landing pages. In particular, I have a brand that I just worked with that had the message of like, get a quote right? Or like, find out if you. What did they say? Find out if you qualify. Was the. The button that they had on their website because some of their brand was running through insurance, Right. And so I challenged them on it and I was like, I think this button is scaring people. It sounds weird, but I think people are freaked out when they see that button. So they changed it to literally just like, get started drastically increased the performance of those pages. So second guess, everything you think is standard in the industry because sometimes what you think is going to be beneficial for performance might actually be changing the behavior of the people that are coming on the page. It's little things that people get attuned to. And this stems down into, again, some neuroscience and psychology. Everything that you interact with gets interpreted by the brain within milliseconds. You don't even know what's happening. Most of the time, 95% of our processing power comes through that subconscious mind. It's the mind we can't control. So most of the time you are running on autopilot. The rest of the time you're making very logical, like, very calculated decisions. But that doesn't come into play unless you're forced into a situation that isn't common. So in general, I say double check things. Like, you gotta. You gotta be very careful with how you're presenting the information.
- [34:20]
Daniel Murray
Isn't there also, like a bias? I don't know the exact bias, but isn't that a bias that humans like, finishing what they started? So like, even like, get started is like a different. Because, like, learn if you qualify means I have to start something, but then I don't know if I'm gonna get a result. But get started. It's like, oh, if I get started, I have to finish this.
- [34:41]
Sarah Levenger
Exactly, yeah. People don't. People really hate, oh, sorry, my phone was doing something weird. People really hate it when they get into like a little bit of a loop, right? And they don't get to finish it. This happens a lot with copy, it's called an open loop. So if you say, oh my gosh, you'll never guess what I just heard, your brain goes, what? Like, what? What did you hear? I need to hear what it is. It might be the dumbest thing ever. Like, they have donuts 50% off today, right? It doesn't matter what the information on the tail end is. Open loops are very intense for the brain. It wants to know. So this happens everywhere. And paid advertising on landing pages all over the place. Humans hate unfinished things. So if you can get that process of, like, get started, what do they call this? It's basically some cost fallacy, right? Well, I've already put time into it, so I might as well finish it.
- [35:29]
Daniel Murray
Exactly. That's. You got the exact one I was looking for. The last question I have for you is, what is a marketing hill you would die on?
- [35:37]
Sarah Levenger
Oh, gosh. Okay. Hello, Diane. I have a lot, so I have to like, narrow it down. In general. In general, it doesn't matter what type of ad you run. Branded ads, ugly ads, cost caps, asc. It literally doesn't matter what type of structure you try and put around that ad. The only thing that's making people purchase is the emotion inside it. That's it.
- [36:07]
Daniel Murray
I love it. I love when people. I remember a quote that stuck with me. I forgot who said, but like, the advertisement is the targeting. So even if you target, I mean, and people have got back to this with like iOS 14.5 that they just running broad ads and playing the creative. But if you, if you have a good ad that targets the has emotion, has the great copy, great creative, it's going to perform 10x better than you trying to tweak the system. Maybe 10 years ago it was a good. You could target perfectly and get purchases, but not anymore.
- [36:52]
Sarah Levenger
It used to be very technical. All of the metrics that were in account used to tell you what your targeting was doing. The actual in platform, who were you targeting? Did you turn off any of your, like, previous customers? What were your, like, lookalikes doing? It used to tell you technical things. Now it only tells you what the creative is doing. And if you don't know how to interpret that, it's time to learn because it's only going to get worse. I mean, Google's eventually, they keep swearing they're going to do it and they haven't done it yet. Google eventually is going to take out cookies and then that's going to drastically affect how our pages perform. Right. We're also coming up against iOS 17 coming up here which is going to change a whole bunch of other different privacy policies that we're running into. So there's like it's just going to get worse. We're going to get more and more and more restricted. So you might as well take the time to learn how to emotionally market and how to be more behavioral based because that's, that's the only lever we have left.
- [37:46]
Daniel Murray
And even just to add on to that point, I think that's why like older marketing books are so great because they didn't have like the technology we had today. They didn't have. But they, they still got customers through the door. They still got people to walk in the snow to turn in a mail check. So if you, if, if you can use psychology and great creative like laziness is like you can't. It's out the door now. You have to start stepping up your creative game, your psychology game and all that good stuff.
- [38:19]
Sarah Levenger
100 yep.
- [38:21]
Daniel Murray
Lastly, where could people find you?
- [38:23]
Sarah Levenger
I am usually on Twitter literally all day long. So you can go follow the at Sarah levenger. I'm on LinkedIn at Sarah Levenger and I also have like a YouTube that's got one video on it. So you can go watch my one video on YouTube. I'm hoping to have more time to like build that up. I also have a newsletter though if you guys want to. As far as I know, this is the only creative strategy newsletter in the industry right now and I'm doing all tactics so none of it is theory. It's 100% use cases every single week. It takes me three hours to write it. So please subscribe because that one takes a while. But yeah, I'm giving away free ads over there. So if you want a free ad, go subscribe.
- [39:02]
Daniel Murray
Well that sounds like a good deal right there. I like tactical newsletters where you can get in specific. So I think if you need to dive in go. Sarah is is known as the one of the best in the industries of this. Thank you. Just from what I've social proof on Twitter where. Yeah but thank you so much for joining. I appreciate it and so fun.
- [39:28]
Sarah Levenger
Thank you.
- [39:29]
Daniel Murray
Thank you so much. Thanks so much for listening. Keep tuning in please to hear more great insights from the coolest marketers from around the world. If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe and follow the Marketing Millennials podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcast. And if you like what you hear, I would greatly appreciate you giving us a five star rating. It helps bring more marketers into our community.