How to use psychology to hack viewers brains (& make more money)

the best way to grow any business is better content it's a cheat code and the only thing holding you back from making better content is understanding the psychology of how viewers act online so I'm going to break down that psychology show you a bunch of different examples and then show you the Tactical changes that you should make to your content to drive better outcomes now I've used this framework to grow my personal channels from zero to half a million followers in 18 months I've also helped many Brands behind the scenes dramatically level up their content

thinking with this same method and it works because it's not some secret formula it's just understanding basic human behavior in the context of social media all marketing boils down to one simple principle can you get the viewer or listener or reader to feel an emotion that will most compel them to take an action so emotion to action that's what we want now not all emotions Trigger action love for example is an extremely strong emotion but it doesn't always trigger an action if you love someone and you see something that makes you of them you may

message them but love alone is not closely tied to purchase and purchase is the action we're looking for because if someone would be willing to purchase they're for sure going to sign up for your newsletter or share your thing so we're looking for emotions that drive purchase now there's one emotion above all others that best triggers purchase fear and I'm not talking about chainsaw in the woods type fear I'm talking about foma it's fom's cousin fear of missing anything anytime you watched content and it compelled you to buy subconcious iously you were afraid of missing

out or losing something or dying early or not being healthy enough or not being enough or not being cool Etc no matter how long the thread if you pull long enough the subconscious motivation behind almost every purchase is fear let's say you see a piece of content about chocolates and flowers that are on sale for Valentine's Day you have a wife or husband or boyfriend or girlfriend that you buy these for and you may say it wasn't fear I wasn't afraid of them I bought them cuz I love them and yeah that's true you're not

afraid of them but deep down you bought them because you were afraid that they wouldn't know how much you cared about them it's the fear of them not knowing that pushed the purchase not the love or even worse for some people in that scenario they'll buy them because they fear their partner will be upset if they don't so to quell that subconscious fear they buy buying the chocolates and flowers is a sign of love but the fear of them not knowing or the fear of them being upset is the reason you purchase let's take another

example let's say you see a video about a gut supplement that improves your digestive system so you buy it now why did you buy it it's not because you like taking supplements or even because you want to be healthy it's really because you fear the consequences of being unhealthy and in extreme cases dying so the fear of something is the most potent emotion that you can make a customer feel that will compel them to purchase and this happens on big stages too why do McKenzie Bane and BCG have billion dooll businesses basically telling Executives what

they already know because those Executives fear the wrath of their board or their shareholders or their bosses for not having done the research to back that decision it's fear cya now the big question is how do we adjust our content to drive more fear so that purchases go up because the obvious answer is not going to work if you start every piece of content with you're going to die soon or you're going to get fired people will think you're a whack job and they will lose trust and the only thing that can counteract the pull

from Fear to buy is the push to not buy from lack of trust so we can't afford to sacrifice trust the art of content and marketing and persuasion and copyrighting is to make someone feel that fear without explicitly saying it so how do we do this the best way is to show an example of someone or something that they relate to experiencing that fear in the same way and making them make the leap so for example let's say you're selling a course about learning how to code a beginner at content may say something like I

just made the best course for coding or there's a hundred different modules in my course but most people will look right past that because it doesn't trigger the fear it's highlighting the features and features don't sell fear sells instead better content might be talking about how other Industries are firing a lot of people but the one that isn't is software development this would subconsciously instill the fear that a non-developer might lose their job and so by taking the coding course and becoming a developer they may be able to protect themsel and it doesn't all have

to be negative in this way it could play out in every scenario in every industry let's say you launch a new brand of running shoes you may pay cool famous athletes to wear them and you're doing that because it appeals to Runners who are afraid of not being cool this is obviously a very popular Playbook and what most clothing brands do but it's very crowded and easy to see through because so many people do it another angle for shoes might be to say that you are building them for longevity because they're specifically designed to protect

your ankles which will appeal to Runners who are afraid of not being able to walk when they're older or arthritis or a number of health conditions this would obviously be a much deeper fear and a smaller audience but way stickier now here's a tactical tip a good way to hide the fear is to bake it into a curiosity loop at the beginning of the content for the foot Paine shoe example you might start content with Nikes being sued for all these Runners injuries or 90% of 80-year-olds can't walk because they wore this brand of shoes

the Curiosity Loop of what you're talking about makes people want to hear more and it makes them not think directly about the fear the fear slides to the subconscious but they of course hear it so the framework is step one figure out who your Target customer is that's really key step two figure out what their biggest fears are as a collective step three figure out how to message or show that fear coming to life without expl itly saying it and this Nuance this art is where the gold is but this is only the first half

of the equation the second half is showing that your product is the best solve to quell the fear so if someone's afraid of that foot injury and you make a chart showing the percent of injury for every Footwear brand and yours is the best that might be a way to show that your brand is best designed to solve that fear and now this is a really key point on the content side the goal is to establish the fear immediately and then compress the time that it takes to demonstrate the value that your your product could

be the solve in other words you want to show that your stuff solves the fear as early as possible in the content you can give lots of other deeper examples throughout the content but you want to demonstrate value as soon as you can now what does this mean let's keep going with the foot pain shoe example if you spend the first 90 seconds of a 2-minute video hammering the foot pain and talking about the injury over and over without demonstrating value it's possible that many viewers that feel this pain will churn before you get to

the last 30 seconds talking about the product because it's so intense the fear and pain is so intense they don't want to listen to it but if they know that you have a solve that might be coming later they might stick around that's why the best marketing messaging clearly establishes a fear teases the solve presses on the fear to amplify and then gives the rest of the solve when fear is at a maximum that's the cycle and this Loop works for any product any brand any time any channel it always works so to revisit the

full framework step one figure out who your Target customer is step two figure out what their deepest fears are at as a collective step three figure out how to message that fear coming to life without saying it explicitly step four tease the solve for that fear as soon as possible step five amplify the fear and step six demonstrate the solve by now you probably get it but let me show you two examples of me doing this in practice also if you like the way I think about this stuff I write this thing called wavy where

I break down viral content and extract the best learnings and Frameworks out of it my goal is to make this like a god tier resource for anybody that makes content mark marketers Founders creators people are loving it if you want it links in the description now for the examples it's important to note that number of views is actually not the most important metric here the most important metric is dollar conversion views Grows by shares dollars Grows by actions it's of course helpful to have views and shares to get more eyes on something if it's optimized

but in this video I'm talking about optimizing for dollar conversion I'll make another video in the future talking specifically about the views and just amplifying the number if that's what you're interested in so for conversion this is a good example of a video I made it's about this thing called brick which is a super simple productivity tool that helps you block out apps on your phone for certain periods of time let's watch the first part of this video together ever feel like your phone controls too much of your life well this thing just fix that

it's called brick and it changed everything for me but before I get into why I just got to say this is not sponsored I'm making this video because the brick has become my single biggest productivity hack what I needed was a way to temporarily disable social media before bed on walks in the gym when I'm working I was at the point where I'd be scrolling for hours without even noticing now this video drove over $10,000 in sales for Brick and only took me 2 hours to make and to break it down first I hammered the

paint which is the fear of missing out on life because the phone is controlling you and this was a bit more on the explicit side because I find with short form video the shorter the medium is the more explicit you need to be on hammering the fear because you just don't have as much time to establish with multiple sentences so I try to be pretty explicit in short form videos with long form videos videos and other formats you have a little bit more time to establish that fear now the second sentence well this thing just

fixed that it's called brick and it changed everything for me that's creating a curiosity Loop people are like what is that but it's also teasing that I have some solve it's this brick device the third part is me saying what I needed was to temporarily disable social media so this is me pressing on the fear pressing on the pain and then the fourth part is me breaking down how Brick Works and what the solve actually is by the end if someone watched this and they also experienced the pain of scrolling too much and feeling they

were missing life this is going to be a perfect solve for them it was an Impulse buy and so it converted highly here's the second example in the same category I actually used this as inspiration for the brick video so the hook is the same this is called The Light phone which is a super minimal zero screen phone where you can't use social media let's watch this video together you ever feel like your phone controls too much of your life well these guys invented the light phone and as soon as I saw it I knew

it was a home run the design is super simple intentionally it's meant to give you back control over your dopamine you've got the ability to call and text and a couple other tools like podcast music notes and directions but that's it no social media no anxiety inducing notifications no internet browsing it's a phone as a tool not a Vie the screen is a black and white matte finish like what you see on a Kindle and because of that there's no blue light messing with your eyes or internal clock now these guys didn't pay me to

say this but I think I'm going to get one of these it's $2.99 and honestly some weekends I just want to get rid of my iPhone and be more present this is the first thing I've seen that would let me do that while still being able to get around and get in touch with my friends what do you guys think does this resonate or did they take it too far from the mainstream so for the first part I use the same hook here really talking about the fear of missing life fomo of missing life because

you're on your phone and then the second part was teasing the solve teasing the phone saying well these guys invented a solve and it's I knew it was going to be a home run the Light phone showing it that's kind of teasing that solve and then in this case the rest of the video was actually me intertwining the amplification of the fear and the solve because short form is so compressed I didn't have a lot of time to show here's the fear you're losing dopamine you're losing control and then separately show the solve so I

kind of intertwined it but you can see both of those components here this video got 2.3 million views and I think it crashed their website the team reached out I'm pretty sure it flooded them with orders now it's important to establish that not every piece of content is designed to drive purchase otherwise it would be a pretty uneventful and not fun internet but in my mind every piece of content should be designed to have the viewer take some action whether that's to sign up for a newsletter or to follow or something else if it's a

newsletter the fear should be eliciting the fear of not knowing certain information which would make someone subscribe you can either do that by making a video that's so good that it pulls them into your bio looking for other sources of information and subscribing or you can just say if you want to stay up to date follow and that creates that fear that lack of information all right I can talk about this forever I'm going to end the video here thank you guys so much for watching if you like this video you like how I talk

about psychology and marketing strategy make sure to like And subscribe and we will see you guys on the next one peace