Nick Mason, Turtl
There are various methods marketing teams can use when it comes to content creation — but a somewhat underused tactic is understanding the psychology of buyers. Targets don’t interact with random content for fun; they engage with content that speaks to them and they identify with.
To dive deeper into content psychology and understand how marketers can use it to their advantage, we sat down with Nick Mason, CEO, Founder and Chief Storytelling Officer at Turtl, to understand what goes into creating compelling content that resonates with buyers.
Demand Gen Report: You’ve written a lot about content psychology and how to get into prospects’ heads — can you provide some insight into that for our readers?
Nick Mason: The way content is produced today focuses almost entirely on the business and includes very little time and thought into the audience and customer experience. If you start to think about the psychology of the customer in question, you can get some dramatic results. There are all kinds of psychology out there, but the two people are most familiar with are Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and Self-Determination Theory. With those in mind, you can start to build up an idea of what makes someone engage when it comes down to things such as the autonomy of choosing what to read.
We built a reading format based on all that good psychology, and to prove it works, we partnered with Nielsen to conduct a study and saw a 1,006% increase in engagement. That was over 10X more engagement with the same content presented in our psychology-driven format versus a traditional PDF format. We also saw 5X more positive brand perception, which shows that you really need to put the psychological needs of people into the equation when you think about the context of content.
There’s also a higher-level thinking here, which is the business-centric to customer-centric approach. In psychology and communications, there’s this idea of active versus passive listening, and I think a lot of businesses engage in passive listening. With passive listening, you’re not really listening; you’re basically just waiting for an opportunity to respond.
Active listening is taking the time to communicate with someone with more relevant messages and trying to understand how to respond based on how they respond to that message.
DGR: Can you provide some examples of passive versus active listening?
Mason: When you think about the way a lot of companies create content, it’s typically a classic lead capture form. Because a sales rep wants you to fill in the form to access the content; then maybe a day or two later, you’ll get a call from them. They don’t consider any kind of understanding of you or what you’ve read; they just want another opportunity to talk to you. That’s passive listening.
Active listening is taking the time to communicate with someone with more relevant messages and trying to understand how to respond based on how they respond to that message. That’s where this becomes a psychology thing. With passive listening, you can’t build trust or relationships; everything’s very transactional. But with active listening, you’re demonstrating to someone that they’re understood, and that breeds trust, confidence and all the other things you need to build a relationship.
DGR: I would imagine that automation and AI play a key role in active listening. How do they help collect and inform content creation?
Mason: AI is a little bit too young in content personalization and it needs to develop more, but automation is necessary to personalizing content at scale and spotting patterns. Specifically for active listening, there are two things that you need: The first is the ability to listen to a person and understand and gather behavioral data, and the second is the ability to articulate a different messaging depending on those stimuli.
For example, if a prospect reads five different topics and skips over another five, you need the ability to only speak to the areas they found interesting and evolve the relationship in that direction — you can’t do that without automating the personalization step.
DGR: What are some common myths you see about content personalization?
Mason: Some people say content personalization at scale is impossible, but then you look over at how successfully Spotify is scaling personalization. There’s another perspective that believes personalization can’t be done without a human being. Those are the two biggest myths I’m seeing.
The other one is that personalization is creepy and invasive, but that just comes down to how each company does it. If you’re sending someone a document that says, ‘I know where you live, your company and your name,’ that’s creepy and weird. But if you’re doing it in a way where you’re delivering relevant content and saying something like, ‘Hey, we thought you might be interested in this,’ you’re always going to get thanked for that. You want to provide a service or something with real value.
