Buyer Psychology Says This Method Is Superior To Paid Ads

Jeffro (00:00.962)
Welcome back to Digital Dominance. Today I’m joined by Ray Cornell, former psychologist turned copywriter and CEO of Cornell Content Marketing, where she helps B2B businesses build thought leadership and long-term growth without relying on short-term tactics like ads. Ray’s expertise lies in psychology-driven marketing, which she uses to attract pre-qualified, pre-sold buyers. And we’ll be diving into how understanding buyer psychology can lead to more engaged, loyal clients while even possibly eliminating the need for ads. So Ray, welcome to the show.

Definitely. I’m stumbling over your name because it’s spelled R-A-I. So my brain wants to say Rye, but I know it’s Ray. So I apologize if I stumble on that. that’s all right. It’s unique and it helps people remember you. So Ray, I am intrigued by your take on ads because not only do you want to move away from them because they’re expensive, but you say the ads are manipulative. Now, I know sometimes we see fake scarcity and arbitrary deadlines. So OK, I see

Rai Cornell (00:33.297)
Thanks so much for having me.

Rai Cornell (00:39.147)
Yes.

Rai Cornell (00:45.842)
So K happens all the time.

Jeffro (01:02.39)
That’s manipulative. But what about the everyday, straightforward ads from a local business promoting their services? Do you view those as manipulative as well?

Rai Cornell (01:12.018)
No, they don’t have to be. So ads can be a great way to get in front of people if you’re using the right language. But it’s all about that language. And too often people fall into the trap of special offer just for you. No, it’s not. It’s not just for me. Don’t insult my intelligence. I know you’re putting this in front of thousands of people. Or hurry up and get this before it’s gone. Well, you know what? I know you’re going to be offering the exact same deal in two weeks when we have Black Friday. So don’t lie to me.

really an opportunity for you to build trust with the prospects that you want to connect with. And too often businesses fall into the trap of being so short-sighted and wanting to get those initial conversions and clicks that they end up destroying the relationship before it even has a chance.

Jeffro (01:56.715)
Yeah, no, I agree because when you do that, you’re, it’s kind of like a short term win, but it’s going to hurt you in the long run, right? You’re trying to take a shortcut, but it’s undercutting your own integrity and that’s not going to help you.

Rai Cornell (02:07.013)
Exactly.

Rai Cornell (02:12.178)
Bingo. Exactly.

Jeffro (02:12.641)
So let’s talk about the other side of it then, because ads can be expensive and you advocate for eliminating ads as part of a long-term strategy. So what are the drawbacks to relying on ads?

Rai Cornell (02:25.212)
Yeah, so when you’re doing ads, have to constantly pour money into them in order for them to work. And then on top of that, people are very resistant to ads. It’s why we invented TiVo. It’s why we now have ad blockers. It’s why people subscribe to things like Netflix and Hulu, where they don’t have to be bombarded with advertisements on cable television. People are constantly trying to avoid ads.

So with that knowledge that human behavior is always going to be resistant to the tactic and the fact that you have to pour tons of time and money into them to get them to work and you’re constantly having to evolve the method to get it to work in front of the people who are becoming more resistant, it is fighting an uphill battle. Whereas if you go with a more long-term strategy,

That’s going to set the foundation for you to have a really sustainable marketing strategy that grows over time and actually works in the opposite direction. It gains momentum with every passing week, every passing month, and you pay once to create the things, and you never have to pour money into that one piece ever again.

Jeffro (03:39.564)
Well that sounds great of course, but I’m going to push back a little bit because I know some people have bills to pay today and if they can run ads and put a dollar in and get two out, why wouldn’t they keep doing that for as long as possible?

Rai Cornell (03:53.64)
So that’s the thing, it’s a short-term mechanism. If you need results now, yes, run ads. But you have to be building something that is going to have more longevity and sustainability in the background. And yes, that takes time, but if you can use the ads as a stopgap while you’re ramping up your long-term demand generation strategy, then you can eventually turn the ads off and not have to pour so many resources into them, while then leaning on the mechanism that you were building all along.

Jeffro (04:26.09)
Yeah, no, and I like that. So can you talk a little bit about what you should be building then? I’m assuming it’s some form of content marketing or platform. What does that look like for you?

Rai Cornell (04:37.122)
Yes, I am the biggest proponent of content marketing. So you guessed it exactly right. It is content. So in order to build those long term relationships, you have to start by forming a relationship based on problem solution win-wins. So what I mean by that is if you are going after somebody who has a business problem, and I mostly do B2B marketing, so you can do the exact same thing for B2C and just think about what the consumer’s problem is.

But if you’re going after that business relationship, you have to first think about, where are they when they are having a problem? And it may not be the problem that is directly tied to your solution. That’s the missed opportunity that a lot of companies forget to look at. They look very narrowly at, okay, what’s the problem that we solve with our product or service? And they only speak to that. But if you actually look at everything that leads someone to realizing they have the problem that you directly solve and you create content that speaks to all of those stages of change, then you’re gonna start capturing them and filling your pipeline way earlier and you’re going to have more touch points so that by the time they’re actually ready to buy your solution, they’re already pre-sold and then that makes your sales team’s jobs way easier.

Jeffro (05:59.254)
So let’s say you’re starting from scratch. Should I start by creating the content that’s targeted at the buyers who are ready to go now and just need to be pushed over the edge or the ones who are problem unaware and I’m just educating them from scratch?

Rai Cornell (06:03.804)
Mm-hmm.

Rai Cornell (06:13.896)
Typically, I like to do it in the reverse order. So if you think about the stages of change, which this is a psychological model that I used a lot when I was working as a substance abuse counselor. So I worked in a drug rehab center. I worked at a community counseling facility. I worked at a mental hospital and everything that we do in trying to help people change their behaviors, particularly around substance abuse, is based on this stages of change model. And it’s widely applicable, not just for substance abuse and rehab, but we all go through these stages of change where there’s the pre-problem awareness, where they’re not even aware that they have a problem. Then there’s the problem awareness. Then there’s the contemplation stage where they’re thinking about changing, but they haven’t decided. Then there’s the decision stage, and then there’s the action stage. And you can probably recognize that this follows very closely to the sales funnel. So if you start at the bottom of the sales funnel and that closest to ready to take action step, and then work backwards. That’s going to give you the most efficient use of your time because you’ll capture more of those people who are ready to buy, approaching being ready to buy, thinking about being ready to buy, and over time you’ll widen your net.

Jeffro (07:27.36)
And then once you’ve gone through all of that and created content for each stage, then that’s probably the point where you can start considering pulling back on ads as you see people coming through the content funnel essentially, right?

Rai Cornell (07:40.996)
Exactly. And what we see typically with the clients that we do this with is their website traffic skyrockets, their followers on LinkedIn skyrocket. They start getting more engagement. They get more opt-ins for the resources that they’re putting out there. If they are running ads, especially things like video ads on LinkedIn, they actually get more engagement and more watches because they’re building a foundation of a trustworthy brand that cares more about solving the prospect’s problems.

than about selling and manipulating and capturing their contact information just for the sake of high pressure sales tactics.

Jeffro (08:14.166)
Yeah. So what about which platform to put all this content on? Obviously, we’ve got YouTube, which can be evergreen if you do it right, and it’s a search engine. And there’s others that are more temporal in nature that kind of are posted and then disappear after a while, like Twitter and Instagram somewhere in the middle. And then you’ve got LinkedIn. Where do you recommend posting? Or how do you recommend doing that so that your content continues to reach people over time if you’re not running ads?

Rai Cornell (08:23.774)
Mm.

Rai Cornell (08:28.222)
Rai Cornell (08:41.532)
Yeah, so you’re gonna hate my answer. It totally depends. It really depends on who you’re trying to reach. Where do those people hang out? Where do they go? When they have questions, when they have problems, do they go to Google? Do they go to Bing? Do they go to conferences and events? Do they go to their peers? Do they go to LinkedIn? Where are they going? Maybe they go to Reddit. You never know until you dig in and actually investigate your target audience to figure out what the predominant behavior is.

Jeffro (08:42.507)
Ha ha ha.

Jeffro (09:08.817)
Yeah, and I was thinking earlier as you’re talking about this, this pairs really well with a good SEO strategy because if you’re creating this content and you post it on your website in a way that’s helpful and organized, then you can optimize those posts for particular keywords so that when people do search on Google for this question, you’re going to come up, whether it’s a video that you posted or an article that you wrote out, and now they’re in your funnel essentially, right? And you have your call to action at the end or get them on your list so they get the next piece of content and so forth.

Rai Cornell (09:16.008)
Yes.

Rai Cornell (09:24.637)
Yes.

Rai Cornell (09:38.494)
Exactly. And ideally, you’re publishing your content in multiple platforms and multiple methods. So if you do a blog post or a white paper, for instance, which is written, then turn that into a video, turn it into an audio file that you can chop up into clips, turn it into an email sequence, turn it into a downloadable file, whether that’s an infographic or if it’s a blog, turn it into an ebook.

repurpose that content in as many ways as makes sense for your target audience.

Jeffro (10:07.785)
So here’s a question. How sophisticated do get with the follow-up and nurture email sequences? if someone opts in on a blog post that has content targeted at a problem unaware person, do you have one automation for them that gives them the basic stuff, or do they just get dropped into the weekly newsletter and kind of they just come along for the ride with whatever you’re talking about today?

Rai Cornell (10:33.686)
It’s little in between. So we wouldn’t have email sequences for each individual stage of change because what’s going to happen is people want to move from one to the next. How can I get someone to move from the pre-problem awareness segment into the awareness and consideration or contemplation stage if I’ve tagged them as only pre-problem awareness and I’m only sending them that type of content. So what you need to do is have a little bit of overlap.

Jeffro (10:43.079)
You

Rai Cornell (11:02.694)
so that you’re giving people opportunities. Let’s say they’re tagged with pre-problem awareness, but you send them contemplation content and they engage with that. Well, then suddenly you can tag them with contemplation tags and you can move them along.

Jeffro (11:16.201)
Well, yeah, and that was kind of the idea, right? If you’ve got multiple entry points to your nurturing sequences, eventually everybody ends up on the same path once they’ve gone through the progressive levels of content. I mean, this obviously takes a lot of planning to create all of this and do it in a way that makes sense. So it’s not just kind of scatterbrained, like all these different topics. It needs to feel natural for the reader to feel like they’re being, getting more information that’s helpful.

Rai Cornell (11:20.008)
Yes.

Rai Cornell (11:26.674)
Right.

Jeffro (11:45.243)
and meeting them where they’re at. So how do you help people figure that out instead of it just being kind of like, well, here’s another topic I can post about.

Rai Cornell (11:56.066)
Yeah, yeah, you’re exactly right. That’s kind of the, unfortunately, that’s the default behavior for a lot of companies that don’t take the time to put a lot of thought into what are we going to plan out? Oftentimes the content that my team and I plan out, we have at any given time, probably about a year and a half’s worth of ideas. And then we narrow it down based on priority and which vertical or industry are we targeting at the moment? And what do we think based on

the data of previous content is going to perform best, and we narrow it down and we create a three month calendar. So you absolutely need to be thinking ahead more than just, what should we talk about this month or this week? We have a buyer psychology profiling kit that looks like a matrix of the different stages of the funnel, as well as the stages of change. And we map that to the internal experiences that are going on for the person at

each individual stage of change. So there are things that they’re thinking, feeling, believing, and desiring, and you need to put yourself in their shoes, really empathize with the person who’s dealing with those particular problems at that particular state of mentality in trying to get them to change their behavior over to your particular product or service. And if you can think through all of that internal

experience that they’re going through, you can come up with some incredibly powerful content. And that that ideation process, which usually can take just a couple of hours, will really set you up for a successful year of content marketing.

Jeffro (13:33.831)
Yeah, because once you’ve tapped into that, it’s almost unfair, right, if you do it right. That the person feels like you’re speaking right to them, you have the exact solution that they need, and you’ve already removed all the objections in your content, and they’re just like, all right, where do I sign up? So that obviously takes effort, takes practice, which I’m sure you guys have kind of perfected that over time, or you’ve got a lot of experience doing that.

Rai Cornell (13:42.462)
Right. Exactly.

Rai Cornell (13:54.28)
Bye.

Jeffro (14:02.217)
Can you tell us about what it means to have a 90 % pre-sold buyer? Is that something you target, right?

Rai Cornell (14:08.558)
Yeah. Yes, exactly. So one of the things that I hear from companies a lot is, we don’t want to give it all away. We don’t want to give away all of our information. We don’t want to give away our, I hate this phrase, but our secret sauce. They are afraid of sharing too much too soon when really what you need in order to get that buyer 80 to 90 % pre-sold before they ever even speak to someone on your sales team.

You have to be transparent. You have to give them information. You have to help them envision what it’s going to be like to work with you once they’re on the other side of that sale. If you can answer all of their questions, then you’re building trust. And suddenly, you become the brand that they just implicitly like and trust. And even if you are more expensive than the other companies that they’re considering when they’re shopping around, they’ll be sitting around with their colleagues going,

you know, I know this company is a little bit more expensive than the others, but I just like them. And I feel like they’re really going to be the ones to take good care of us because you’ve been so transparent throughout the whole process. And there’s a great book about this called, they ask you answer. And it goes into the struggle, the internal frustration that we feel as consumers when we’re shopping and we type something into Google or we’re looking for something on a website and we’re stonewalled because it’s

no, you can’t find out that information until you talk to a member of our sales team. No, provide the information.

Jeffro (15:40.147)
Well, and I know you’ve also talked about the modern buyer, the savvy buyer, and how you have to approach them differently. Now, people have been online for decades or their whole life. Whereas before, if you’re making some claim, it felt totally new. And now, your claim not only has to be, it can’t just be the same. It has to be differentiated. It has to be unique. It has to be so specific and maybe relevant to what’s going on right now. To get people’s attention is a lot harder.

Rai Cornell (15:47.805)
Yes.

Jeffro (16:07.318)
And so if you do a good job with understanding the psychology, then okay, that’s going to help a lot. So can you walk us through that, you know, psychology driven approach that maybe has worked well for one of your B2B clients?

Rai Cornell (16:14.715)
Exactly.

Rai Cornell (16:21.276)
Yeah, absolutely. So we work with a CPR training platform that is aimed at finding businesses that need to train their staff in CPR and other life-saving skills in order to have, you know, their business in compliance, to have their licensure renewed, things like that. And so when we’re looking at connecting with their target audience, it’s not just a matter of,

The buyer wants to find a provider that will teach their staff CPR. No, there’s so much else that goes into it. Things like, okay, the person we’re trying to reach is, let’s call them the CPR administrator. They’re the ones overseeing the entire CPR training program. And maybe they’re like the health and safety officer, or maybe they’re the nurse on staff, or they might have any other job titles. But what are their roles?

their roles and responsibilities are things like ensuring compliance, ensuring that people get things done and do certain things that they may not want to do, but that need to happen. And so then if we dive into just those two, I’m not going to go into the whole expansive list or we’ll be here all day. If we look at just those two, what are the things that that person is struggling with? They’re struggling with trying to maintain positive relationships with their coworkers while also

having to be the one to constantly tap them on the shoulder and get them to do the things that they need them to do. So if we create content around how to motivate your employees to do the things that feel like check boxes that aren’t necessarily intrinsically motivating or how to build a sense of internal accountability within your team and making sure that you don’t have to constantly be the nag amongst.

your employees that you’re overseeing, suddenly that person feels armed with tools that they never would have had. And they start feeling supported and seen and validated by a company that offers a solution that’s completely tangential to getting your employees to do things. And yet when they come time to set up their next CPR training program, who are they going to think of? They’re going to think of my client and all the problems that they helped.

Rai Cornell (18:46.758)
solve even if it wasn’t the one that they get paid to solve.

Jeffro (18:49.476)
How many touch points do you think are typically needed for someone to get to that point where they have now locked in? This is my go-to person for this thing.

Rai Cornell (19:01.158)
Yeah, it used to be seven. That was kind of like the running number in all of the marketing metrics. Today, I think it’s double that. I think people’s attention spans are so much lower and their trust is not as freely given as it used to. I think you need to have at least 14 touch points with a prospect before they will be ready to buy. And if each of those touch points adds value to their lives,

what do think the odds are going to be of them actually buying from you even if you’re a little bit more expensive in the competition? Yeah.

Jeffro (19:35.576)
Yeah, it goes way up. And that kind of also brings the question, how can a business measure the success of a psychology-driven, long-term marketing approach compared to traditional ad-based metrics? Because with ads, I’ve got a dashboard that tells me exactly what I’m spending, how many people are clicking. But with something like this, it’s kind of a whole organic thing. So how do I know if I’m doing it right or if I just need to create a little more content, then it’ll start working or better content? How do do that?

Rai Cornell (20:00.434)
Yes.

Rai Cornell (20:06.844)
Yeah, yeah, great question. So you have to pair the metrics with the behavior. So for example, first we want to see, okay, if someone is seeing our content on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, whatever the case may be, are they interacting with it? Are they engaging with it? Now, engagement is not one of my favorite metrics because people are also not as freely.

out and about with their likes and their comments nowadays. People tend to be much more reserved with their engagement behaviors than they were even five years ago. So that is one metric, but don’t let that be the be all end all. The important thing is if you include a link in your content, how many people are actually hopping over there? And then, so you can measure website traffic. Once they are there, how long are they staying there? So you can measure user sessions in terms of time duration.

And then once they’re on there, are they interacting with any other elements on your page? Are they watching the videos? Are they clicking through to your content upgrades, like your PDFs and your infographics? Are they clicking over to other articles? Are they ideally hopping over to your sales pages, which you need to talk about your products and services that you have to offer? Are they clicking your contact? Are they signing up for your email list? And then this is one of my favorite metrics. Once you get people onto your email list,

Are they staying there? If you send them purely value, value, value 80 % of the time in your email marketing and a sales CTA the other 20 % of the time, if they stay on your email list, that’s a huge indicator that they want to be there and they want to hear from you. Then of course, when you send out that CTA, the sales oriented messaging, are they engaging with that?

That’s going to tell you if you’ve built out this content marketing funnel to properly carry people through these stages of change and get them to do ultimately what you want to do while forming that win-win problem solution relationship.

Jeffro (22:14.776)
Now, the types of content that you’re creating for this, I know some people don’t want to be the face of a content campaign. They don’t want to be a thought leader. Can they make faceless content and do the same thing, or is it not as effective to connect with an audience?

Rai Cornell (22:32.912)
Yeah, that’s a, that’s a great question. you know, if you had asked me that five years ago, I would have said, no, you absolutely have to have a human face. But nowadays I think people are forming more human-like relationships with non-humans. And we’re seeing this in AI and chatbots, the way people interact with Alexa and Siri and indeed brands. So I think you, you know, I’m hesitant to say.

it’s okay to just pull the names and expert titles off of all of your content because if you can do that, you’re going to build so much more trust. But if you really want your brand to be the persona, then go all in on that, but make sure that your brand is human and relatable and has some sense of emotion and imperfection to it.

Jeffro (23:24.792)
Yeah, I agree. think long term it is better to have a real human rather than trying to manufacture that humanness over time. That’s going to get harder and harder to do. Well, this is all really cool and helpful and I agree this is a great way forward that people really need to start considering if they haven’t already and just embracing this. Getting used to being on camera, start putting in the reps, making content, it’s going to be bad at first. if you do the…

Rai Cornell (23:35.185)
Absolutely.

Jeffro (23:50.058)
homework like Ray talked about to figure out the psychological profile, understand what your buyers want to need and where they’re at, and meet them there with the content that helps them. That’s going to help you get a lot farther than just making videos based on whatever you feel like talking about today.

Rai Cornell (23:50.174)
Yeah.

Rai Cornell (24:06.106)
Absolutely. And sometimes the bad content is the best content because it really makes people feel like it’s very endearing to see somebody be vulnerable.

Jeffro (24:12.196)
Yeah. And you won’t know until you start putting it out there. So thank you for joining me today, Ray. I love your perspective on marketing and you’ve given us a great demonstration on thought leadership as well. So for those of you listening, Ray has some free resources available. You can check out her links in the show notes. And I’ve got one last question for you, Ray. What’s the favorite? What’s your favorite part of your job?

Rai Cornell (24:18.12)
Right.

Rai Cornell (24:35.506)
My favorite part is really helping a company uncover what their special thing is. A lot of companies can’t see what’s really special and unique about them because when you live inside the bottle, you can’t read the label. And so getting to help them uncover what’s really gonna set them apart and what they’re really good at, it’s so heartwarming because oftentimes the clients I work with are almost too humble for their own good.

Jeffro (24:42.957)
Mm-hmm.

Rai Cornell (25:02.224)
And then when we get to shine a spotlight on what really makes them stand out, it’s just so much fun to see them come alive.

Jeffro (25:06.539)
That’s awesome. I love that analogy too of being inside the bottle because it’s true. We’re too close to it. Thanks again for being here Ray. Thanks to all of you guys for listening. If you thought this was valuable, please leave a review for the show on Apple or Spotify. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next time.