Decision-making in B2B marketing is a fickle beast — while practitioners often want to drill prospects with all relevant product information, there’s an opportunity to better understand buyers’ emotions and what influences their decision-making. The answer lies in the psychology behind their actions, otherwise known as behavioral science.
At the B2B Marketing Exchange East event, Shirin Oreizy, Founder and CEO of behavioral design agency Next Step, took the keynote stage with her session, “Behavioral Science: The Human Insights Missing In B2B Marketing,” which highlighted the gap between people’s rational intentions and their actual behaviors.
While we were on-site in Alpharetta, Georgia, I was lucky enough to sit down with Oreizy to dive deeper into the concepts she discussed in her keynote and expand on key areas. While we recorded our chat as part of an upcoming episode for the B2B Marketing Exchange Podcast, which will drop later this year, I can’t wait to share her insights about tapping into buyers’ emotions — so here’s a little sneak peek of our conversation:
Understand Buyers’ Irrationality To Better Craft Campaigns
The first topic we tackled was how behavioral insights can transform marketing efforts, product strategy and overall customer experience. At its core, Oreizy explained that behavioral science is all about understanding a user’s decision-making to craft marketing approaches that resonate on a deeper psychological level. Throughout the conversation and her keynote, she highlighted how these principles can drive meaningful impact.
“Behavioral science is the study of how people really make decisions,” said Oreizy. “I like to emphasize ‘really,’ because we take into account emotions, social factors and environmental factors — whether you’re in a physical or digital environment — to understand how you can get your customers and prospects to make better decisions about your products and solutions.”
She continued that behavioral science is designed to help practitioners relate their messaging and content to their buyers, and the first step is to help see our psychology and irrationality. She noted that there’s a gap between what we know we should do versus what we actually do. To put that into context, Oreizy encouraged everyone attending her keynote to raise their hands if they considered themselves generally healthy. With the hands up, she then ran down a list of guilty pleasures, asking attendees to lower their hands if the following apply to them:
- Did you grab a pastry when there was an apple right next to it?
- Did you binge-watch Netflix instead of going to bed at a decent hour?
- Did you skip your morning workout to sleep in?
“We’re not perfectly rational, and that’s a challenge we see in marketing our products and solutions,” said Oreizy. “When we don’t know what to do, we tend to fall back and give people more information and choices than expected. For example, if I gave you several handbooks about the efficacy of exercise, that’s not necessarily going to be enough to get you out of bed or stop you from bingeing Netflix. The good news is if you can find a way to understand all the ways that people are predictably irrational and document that through research, you can actually take advantage of that and lovingly nudge your users toward the behaviors that are in their best interests.”
Tap Into Empathy To Understand The Messaging That Resonates
B2B marketing doesn’t have the best reputation for originality: Despite having multiple trailblazers in the space pushing the limits of creativity, there are still roadblocks that prevent true connections with prospects and customers, whether it’s budget constraints or lack of internal buy-in. However, there is a shift emerging where marketers are realizing that outside of the business, people have lives that they need to understand and empathize with.
“When we don’t know what to do, we tend to fall back and assume people are rational,” said Oreizy. “Marketers often think, ‘If I feed my prospect more information about our features, solutions or choices, they’ll do the right thing in choosing our solution.’ But if we can think more irrationally about our customers, we can leverage all the research from leading academia to understand decision-making.”
She noted that there are four types of messaging practitioners can implement to connect with prospects”
- Prevention messaging, which is the idea that some humans are more motivated by preventing a negative outcome;
- ‘Game frame’ messaging, which focuses on educating our buyers and focus on understanding how our solutions can help them achieve more;
- Promotion-focused messaging, which focuses on what prospects and customers can gain from using a particular product; and
- Simplistic messaging, which focuses on removing the fluff and leveraging language, design or user experiences to make messaging easier to read and require less mental work.
“Behavioral science takes people’s emotions into account, as well as other environmental and social factors to help us understand which message framework to leverage,” continued Oreizy. “Again, we’re not as rational as we like to think, and we want to leverage our psychology to understand how people make decisions to push them toward our products or solutions.”
Conclusion
At its core, Oreizy’s message focused on accounting for the emotional, environmental and social factors that influence human behavior, rather than relying solely on providing more information or choices. She emphasized that decision-making processes are shaped by deep-seated biases and heuristics that have evolved over thousands of years, often leading us to make predictably irrational choices.
Oreizy’s insights on leveraging behavioral science in B2B marketing provide a powerful framework for understanding and influencing customer decisions. By recognizing that humans are not purely rational beings, marketers can move beyond simply offering more information and choices. Instead, they can tap into emotions, environmental cues and social factors to craft messaging that resonates on a deeper psychological level.