How Important is Persuasion?

This article is written by Nardine B. M’barek, a Contributor Author at Startup Turkey.

Ross Kingsland is the Founder & CEO at Inception Business Solutions. They are a group of strategic advisory consultancies. As a team, they offer people a plug-n-play solution- offering them instant access to a marketing team and services to fulfill several marketing roles. They focus on making young entrepreneurs save time, as well as costs through the services that they provide. Mr. Kingsland was a guest of ours during Startup Turkey 2016 and delivered a speech in which he gave tips and secrets behind growth hacking.

  There is a difference between traditional marketing and Growth Hacking. As Mr. Ross Kingsland explained to us, Growth Hacking depends not only on attracting the right market towards your company and product but also on retaining that market that you attracted, while continuously raising your revenues. Many of you would actually think that this is a difficult task to do. However, with some good thinking and ways, you could easily achieve it. 

First of all, you need to play on the psychology of your users. People are easily driven by their emotions. In order to do that, you are going to need to introduce some sciences to your plan.Conducting a Science Growth Hacking experiment could really help you determine the needs of the market that you have targeted. Since not all the users are alike, and the majority of them are very different from the others, the results of this scientific experiment - that you started with a simple hypothesis - could guide you towards finding the best way to attract this market. 

The main issue in this scientific experiment, is how to attack that starting hypothesis, and how to specify that first idea you are going to base everything on. According to Freud, there are only two forces that drive human beings’ decisions. The essence of it is that people will always do everything to avoid ‘pain’ and move towards ‘pleasure’. It sounds ridiculously idealistic and oversimplified, but if you think of every decision that you have made until now, you will probably find a link to one of these forces, if not both of them. 

Persuasion is the key to everything. Indeed, if you can not persuade someone to come and sign up with you, and start using your product, then you probably can not do anything. According to Dr. Robert B. Cialdini, there are six primary core principles to ‘influence’. The first principle is ‘Social Proof’; people are always influenced by the decisions that other people do. No one really will be able to be the first to go out of their comfort zone and start doing something that they have not been doing before, but would rather do things that people did before in order to see its results.

Social proof is actually proven to be a very good method when it comes to influencing people and their decisions. When using Social Proof, you need to think about how is that going to take you to the next step you want to achieve. The second core principle is ‘authority’, followed by ‘scarcity’ since the more scarce something is, the more people desire it and want to have it. You really have to step out of your comfort zone in order to do what you want to do, therefore the fourth principle is ‘commitment & consistency’. The two final core principles are ‘liking’, and ‘reciprocity’.

You will need to attract people who will bring you profit. At first, that is definitely not an easy thing to do, but once you know the basics, then you are ready to go. 

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