The Ultimate Instagram Guide for Non-profits – Explore Page

PART 2 – How to get on the Instagram Explore Page

Check out PART 1 for the basics.

The Explore Page caters to an individual user’s specific interests. The algorithm of the Instagram explore page is to offer users the content that matches what they look for and interacts with. So if you get to the explore page of a user’s account that is because they regularly look for and interact with the kind of content you post and therefore they are a perfect match for you and what you offer. It is the best way to expand your potential market, as they are the ideal match for you. This is exactly what any business wants from Social Media.

But with over 95 million photos posted per day how do you get to be high enough on that Explore Page to get noticed by your customers and supporters?

Be Specific about who you are targeting

What shows up in a user’s Explore Page is dictated by what they have interacted with before and what others in their network are following. So you need to know exactly what your audience likes and interacts with. If their network are commenting on your posts and liking them, they are more likely to see you too.

Build Engaged and Active Followers

Ask for interaction with the post, encourage followers to tag their friends in the comments, offer contests, and giveaways. The more comments and likes you have the more likely you are to get higher in the Explore feed. Having a call to action is essential in getting interaction.

Harvesting with Hashtags

Instagram users search for the content they like with keywords and hashtags. They also follow hashtags that they are interested in. Using hashtags will drive a lot of traffic to your account.

Use hashtags that are specific to the interests of your followers, things that they might be looking for, that’s how they will find you with a hashtag search. Don’t use hashtags that they wouldn’t be searching for. When choosing hashtag by popularity remember that the popularity of the hashtag maybe from your competitors rather than your followers.

These are some of the most popular hashtags for the non-profit and charity sector, and they need to be mixed in with the hashtags that are more specific to your sector or work.

• #GivingTuesday — 1’154K
• #CharityTuesday — 86K
• #givingback – 2’355K
• #4change — 60K
• #activism — 1’735K
• #advocacy — 638K
• #begrateful — 193K
• #cause — 794K
• #dogood — 2’339K
• #DoSomething – 738K
• #volunteering — 1’884K
• #charity — 10’774K
• #CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) — 611K
• #foundation — 9’696K
• #NGO — 1’190K
• #nonprofit — 4’768K
• #crowdfunding — 1’440K
• #donate — 5’069K
• #fundraiser — 3’409K
• #fundraising — 2’477K
• #giveback — 4’059K
• #charityfundraiser – 60K
• #philanthropy —1’331K
• #aid — 470K
• #change — 19’424K
• #changemakers — 644K
• #humanity — 5’186K
• #impact — 2’236K
• #socialgood — 955K

Another great use of hashtags is to offer something that people want, maybe free access to a webinar, or a downloadable activity. Get people to use your hashtag on their posts to enter a free draw or competition to win a free ticket.

Knowing what hashtags are commonly used for is another key to using them effectively. Use a tool like ‘tagdef’ to find the current popular tags and what they mean.

You can add up to 30 hashtags, but 8 might show more focus for your post and get more focused results. Experiment with hashtags, keep it fresh, maybe rotate them so you can see which are getting the best results for you.

Posting in the description used to be the habit, but many marketers are now finding that posting the hashtags as the first comment gets better results.

More about hashtag strategy here: https://blog.hellosocial.com.au/blog/the-perfect-instagram-hashtag-strategy

When to post and how often

There are interesting statistics to be found on best posting times, such as this one from Sprout Social.

But don’t forget to check your own user stats to see when your viewers are looking at your content. You can find this on your Instagram Insights tab from the top-right menu. It will tell you when your followers are most active.

Interestingly during Covid, there has been a change in habits, with more people accessing social media during the working day and less in the evenings.

The regularity of posting is important for keeping in the minds of your followers as well as Instagram algorithms. Many will advise posting several times a day, to ensure that your followers will see your post, but remember to make sure that your content is a welcome breath of fresh air to them.

Work with Influencers

Influencers already have a huge reach, so to tap into that has a fantastic impact. However, there will be hundreds of brands wanting to partner with an influencer and they will not partner with anyone. Influencers have built a very close relationship with their audiences, who trust what they have to say. So they will only partner with a charity, or business, who they have a real synergy with and who their followers would enjoy the connection. So finding the right match works for both the influencer and the organisation.

An influencer doesn’t have to be huge to work for you. They just have to have a following in the right niche for you. A small focused niche, which is an exact match, is far better than a huge audience of not very interested people.

Summary

Getting onto the Explore Page is all about getting the right content to the right people at the right time. The more you know about your audience and what they want the easier that will be. Getting this right will have great results.

More here: https://sproutsocial.com/insights/instagram-explore/

Leave a comment bellow to tell us how you have succeeded on Instagram, what activities worked best for you?

The Ultimate Instagram Guide for Non-profits

PART 1 – THE BASICS

AIMS of using Instagram

There is no point in any organisation spending the time and effort on any social media journey without an aim and a strategy to get there. Here are 5 focused reasons to use Instagram.

1. Reach and foster a younger audience (71% under 35), to give your cause longevity.
2. Grow – Reach larger and targeted audience, 1 billion monthly users (2018) it’s the second largest social platform, the algorithm is to match the right people to the right organisations.
3. Engage People – very high response and engagement rate – get a reaction from people (major part of the sales journey).
4. Your Story – Who you are at a glance, share beneficiary stories – Inspire & educate your supporters with who you are and what you do.
5. Increase donations and support, as a natural consequence of getting the first 4 right.

Decide who to target – know your audience

Who is your target audience, do a customer profile on your supporters and find out what kind of people they are. People will only take action if your content is relevant to them. Create a few different supporter profiles by researching your best supporters. For this you could start a conversation with them, thanking them for their support and asking them what they like about supporting you. You could send out a poll asking what kind of content they would like to see more of, what hashtags they like to follow, or what other related interests they have. You could also look at their social media posts to see what interests they have. Finally, you can take stock of your own social posts that have performed the best.

Make sure you have a business profile, so you can:

• You can add “Nonprofit” to your bio
• You can have access to more advanced analytics, like the number of impressions and reach
• You can add a phone number, email, and location, so it’s easy to get in contact with you
• You can create Instagram ads
• You can make a Donate button to add to stories
• Link your Instagram and Facebook pages, to run adds on both platforms, and qualify for your supporters to use the Donate Stickers

Use the Donate Sticker on Instagram stories

Verified non-profits can put ‘donate stickers’ in their stories. In fact, all their supporters can do this too. When they make a story, they can select a ‘donate sticker’ to put on it, when they select the donate sticker it offers them a list of all the charities they are following so they can choose which one they want to support in that story.

More on how to make Donate Stickers: https://www.wholewhale.com/tips/how-to-make-instagram-donate-stickers/

Work the Link in Bio

Don’t forget to do more with your ‘Link in the Bio’. You don’t just have to put your web address and leave it at that. Try changing this to highlight whatever you are promoting at the time. Link to a video, website, webinar or even to Linktree, which will show people a whole list of links they can chose from. Each day a post could refer to the link in the bio for more information on that topic; “link in bio for full story”.

Tag people

Volunteer of the week, someone you’d like to thank, a partner, or maybe an organisation that you are working with. This will make sure that they see your post and engage with it. The more engagement you get the better as it will help you to show up in users’ feeds.

What is the best type of content?

The aim of content is to create a nice place to hang out. So don’t talk about business all the time, share the human side of the organisation, the related interests, the kind of things that your audience would like. Fun content is often a great way to lighten up a feed that deals with quite serious issues. This can be the place to share more the more personal sides of the team, behind the scenes, candid shots of what you do as an organisation, because it can connect with fans on a deeper level. Sometimes it’s good to let your hair down, all of course in moderation.

Quotes do get a lot of engagement on Instagram. Make sure they relate well to your cause, and share the values that you hold. An app that makes it easy to make image quotes is called ImageQuote.

Engage through Involvement

Getting followers involved helps them to feel more connected to you and your cause. Contests and giveaways are very popular.

User Generated Content (UGC) is another great way of doing this. Create a simple branded hashtag for a campaign. Then ask your followers to take relevant pictures (offer instructions) and post them with that hashtag. You can show the best ones on your account (remember to tag & thank them) and at the same time, you are getting exposure through the other posts with that hashtag. This works well because its grassroots engagement and people trust regular people and their friends more than a marketing team. It can be as simple as take a picture of yourself wearing our branded tee-shirt, or wearing our brand color. These kinds of activities are creating brand ambassadors.

Instagram Stories

These go to the top of users feeds so they get more exposure and as they are only there for 24 hours people are encouraged to look now. It’s a good way to engage younger audiences too. You can also add a donate button. They can include polls, gifs, hashtags, tags, stickers, and locations. They tend to get more engagement than normal posts.

If you have over 10’000 followers you can also use a swipe up feature on stories to link them to other content. 15 – 25% of people swipe up on a link in branded stories.

You can also save stories as ‘highlights’ too so they are placed in circles below your contact details. These are the stories that could benefit from a longer life.

Read More: How Nonprofits Can Use Instagram Stories to Raise Awareness For Their Cause

Schedule wisely to tell a story through your content

To make sure you don’t bore your audience with repetition, make sure you have variety in your posts. Use scheduling software to see what the content will look like as it builds up over time. The home page of your Instagram is like a living shop window, one glance at it will tell your audience what you are about and whether your feed will be nice to follow. If it looks messy and full of repetition and things that don’t connect with their values they won’t choose to follow.

Scheduling software like Later is great for showing you what your content will look like on the home page when the scheduled content has gone up. This will give you a snapshot of the look and feel and allows you to rearrange the content too before it’s gone up that is.

The other great thing about scheduling content, apart from the huge time saving, of course, is that you can tell your story through the structuring of it. Also, you can take advantage of the Days of the week structures too, like Charity Tuesday, Wisdom Wednesday, Freedom Friday, and so on.

Be mindful of events and special dates in your calendar too, make sure you have appropriate content for those dates in place.

READ PART 2 HERE >> for more essentials which when done right will get you on the coveted Explore Page to generate big results.

Thanks to – Instagram For Nonprofits: The Ultimate Guide https://www.wildapricot.com/blogs/newsblog/2019/09/17/instagram-for-nonprofits

Adding to the 4Ps Marketing Mix – the 7Ps and why they matter

The 4Ps Marketing Mix for charities are explored here. So why add to these?

The 7Ps is a modification that gives more clarity for the business service industries, it adds in the three additional areas of People, Process and Physical Evidence.

So can these additions help the charity sector too?

People

Are there enough people to support you? Are there enough customers, people, and organisations who will give you the funding you need to do your work?

Your charity or non-profit may well be fulfilling a vital role in many people’s lives, but if there are not enough people who will support you then you will be limited in what you can achieve. However, with about 7.5 billion people on the planet, it is unlikely that there are not enough people who care. It’s just about finding the ones who do and have the means to fund you.

That means identifying who they are, where you can find them, and how to target them. Your target market. You can’t market effectively to people if you don’t know anything about them. You target funders may not be the general public at all, they may be other organisations, government bodies, and foundations. How you market to organisations will be very different from how you market to individuals in the general public.

But there is another side to the People Equation, and that’s your staff. If you have the right people in your organisation then you will deliver a congruent service and message. Congruence is the key to a successful non-profit or charity because trust is a big obstacle in gaining active supporters. Having the right people to deliver your charitable work and it is done with congruence and attention to detail. It is done with passion, and this shows. This is what builds trust, and trust turns into support.

Even the staff and contractors who help you with communications need to be the right people for you. Those who actually care about the work you do, because it shows in the communications they create for you.

People buy from people because people build conversations, relationships, and trust with people.

Process

Your ability to deliver the product or service that your charity provides.

In the previous post about this topic, we started off defining the service or product from a marketing perspective. So again it’s important to remember the supporter in this, they are after all the equivalent of your customer. Your service isn’t fully delivered until all the stakeholders have evidence.

So it is not enough to develop a process that stops at delivering the service to the beneficiary. The supporter needs to know that their funds have indeed been used as intended and their own needs for a better world are being met. So your process needs to include communicating successes of all your projects to the supporters. Charities often do this well with funding organisations who request feedback and evidence but can forget the numerous individuals who have donated small amounts. But managed well these can add up to the majority of a charity’s funding.

Your process is also about being efficient with funds. All stakeholders want to see that their resources are being properly used, that you are maximising your opportunities to raise money, and delivering on promises not wasting time and money on poorly planned projects.

This is a marketing opportunity too. Communicating how funds are used, showing people that you know how to leverage opportunities to raise money and run efficiently. That doesn’t mean doing everything on a shoestring and not paying for professional services. It is the opposite of doing everything yourself, ‘beg, steal and borrow’ style. That doesn’t get the best people, as has been covered in the first additional point. The best people create the best organisations.

The best systems and processes deliver the best results.

Physical Evidence

Other marketers may use this last P to denote Physical Environment, referring to the workplace or shop. But I’m going to use this last P for Physical Evidence.

I have mentioned this in a number of sections already. But just to re-iterate, if you have no evidence, you didn’t do it.

At least that’s how your supporters will feel. The evidence needs to be real and authentic too. Beneficiaries speaking from the heart, live videos of events made by participants, snapshots from mobile phones documenting an event, or a result.

These are all good content because its real, live, and untampered. Better still to have a professional camera crew there, live at the event to cover real human emotions and responses but with better quality coverage. Amateur footage is OK but it can be very tiring for any audience to watch images waving around, barely catching the subject of the shot. However, anything is better than nothing.

Your evidence forms the backbone of how you are perceived in the marketplace. So when possible, get professional coverage. This will make your offering memorable, shareable, and even remarkable (encouraging comments and interaction).

Documenting the physical evidence is what will ultimately make you a leader in your niche.

Again, I hope you have found this explanation of the 4Ps extended to the 7Ps useful for the charity and non-profit sector.

I’d love to know if it helps you or even if you disagree with any of it!

Please leave a comment below, ask a question, or share your own expertise.

The 4Ps Marketing Mix, and what it means for charities

Marketing for charities and non-profits is an essential skill that you need in your repertoire. After the Coronavirus pandemic many charities closed down, as they did not have a strategy in place to tell the world what they were doing and why they were needed.

In this post I am going to look at the 4Ps of the marketing mix created by E.Jerome McCarthy back in the 1960’s. It is still relevant today, but I have offered my interpretation for how charities can use this to get the supporters they need, to do the essential work they do.

The 4Ps

Product

What is the ‘product’ or ‘service’ for a charity or non-profit?

Most organisations may assume that their ‘product/service’ is the beneficiary of their offering. But for marketing in the charity sector, this is not a very helpful way of looking at it.

From a marketing perspective, the customer of any organisation is the person who pays for something, who gives money. Not the person who receives the charitable offer. So for a charity that is the supporter, the person donating to your organisation. Your supporter is your customer.

So what do you give them? What is your customer paying for? They want you to do the work you do because they can’t do it. So you are working on their behalf. You are delivering the solution to your customers’ problem. Your customer is worried about the loss of trees, for example. So you create the solution of planting trees, on their behalf. You are delivering the solution for them, and in doing this you give them hope for the future, you make them feel better about the things that concern them that they can’t do anything about on their own.

Your customer is your supporter, and you are giving them hope. You are alleviating their distress about the future. Your product or service is the way you do this. So if you are a charity offering to dig Wells to give people access to clean water, your customer is your supporter, not the person who benefits from the clean water, your service is providing the Well to help people, the beneficiaries.

So what is your charity’s product or service? The happiness of the beneficiary and the way you have helped them. The service is the Well serving clean water and the people benefiting from it. The service is the trees you have planted, with the resulting reduction of CO2 and the world’s people benefiting from it. A product might be something to reduce the effects of Tinnitus or a set of school workbooks. These offerings give the customer a feeling of hope, relief, and a lessening of their own private distresses.

Price

Getting the price right is tricky for any organisation, whether business or charity and non-profit.

Charities need regular income from their supporters so that they can plan their projects and grow. Different price points work for different types of supporters. It’s not based on their income and affordability, its based on how invested they are in what you are doing.

If a supporter has connected deeply with the cause, they are more likely to pay more. The story of what you do may resonate with their own personal story. They may identify on a personal level with the suffering that you are offering to alleviate, so they will support you because it is a way of healing their own trauma. For example, people can project their own personal suffering and feelings of loss and rejection onto an animal and become a committed advocate for them.

This is the power of using stories to explain what you are doing and why. Supporters see the stories that you tell, and they become symbols of their own personal story. That is how empathy and engagement work in film, the audience sees themselves in the central character, even though they may not be aware of it. They are the main character of their own life story, so they are also empathising with the main character of the film story too.

Charities do have a key benefit over business though in terms of prices. They can set a range of suggested donations, and the supporter can choose the one that most closely reflects their level of personal investment in the story of the charity.

Price is still an issue to be given a serious thought. Setting a donation request too low will communicate a lack of confidence in your ability and need to solve the problem, and equally setting the donation request too high will alienate the supporter. Charities often find something to compare the donation to, to make it easy for the supporter to put the amount in context. “A monthly donation, for as little as the price of two cups of take away coffee, will change the world….”.

Place

Where will your supporters find you? Or more to the point, where will you find them?

This can be looked at in terms of where they are and where do they spend their time. What social media platforms do they use, which TV stations do they watch, where do they go at the weekend? This will tell you where to place your marketing, and what kind of marketing product to use. Social media content, videos, e-books, online courses, TV adverts, banners at airports, teddies at the supermarket checkout, that kind of thing.

The distribution channels that you use need to align with the supporter. If the main support for your work comes from the pester power of children, then you may benefit from offering soft toys as a reward for support. On the other hand, if the supporter is deeply concerned about waste, plastics, and pollution, it would be worth avoiding printed materials with plastic windows and large printed glossy booklets. It may sound obvious but these details do get forgotten and supporters are lost because of it.

But you also need to think about where you are placed in comparison to your competitors. There will be more than one charity planting trees after all. How you position yourself in the market is essential to getting your fair share of the supporters who need your help to fix the world. Differentiating yourself, being specific about what you do that is different, will help supporters to make a deeper bond with your organisation and way of doing things. It will also put some supporters off too. But it is better to have committed supporters who have chosen you over the competition because of your point of difference, as they will stay with you for longer, and potentially donate more too.

Promotion

You need to promote what you do and what you need in order to do it. That means you need to ask people to donate. And you need to tell them why.

Many charities make the mistake of assuming that people can see what they are achieving and will want to support them without any persuasion. However, it is a competitive market place, and people need to be actively converted into your supporters, otherwise they will simply smile, compliment you on what you are doing, and drift on to the next attraction. Most supporters will genuinely assume that you have enough support already, they will not realise they you do need them, right now.

So what does promotion look like for your charity?

Paid advertising – TV advertisements, Facebook ads, radio commercials, print media, banners, billboards. These all need to elicit emotion in a short space of time with a clear call to action. If you don’t stir up a strong enough emotion they won’t work. The audience needs to get in touch with their own trauma as a projection of the beneficiary, they need to empathise, and feel enough pain to want to do something to alleviate it immediately. Paid advertising is all about using emotion.

Public relations – press releases, seminars, conferences, exhibitions, sponsorship deals, events, word of mouth. A large element of your social media marketing will be made up of public relations content. Sharing your core values with supporters, evidencing the work you have done, educating followers about the issues you are tackling, and why they matter.

Unlike a traditional business, you won’t be looking for customer testimonials, “I was very happy with the way they have planted trees on my behalf” won’t pull any punches. But you absolutely do need to demonstrate and evidence that you have done what you have promised to do and communicate that to your supporters. The world needs to see the evidence that your ‘product’ exists and has produced the desired result. Your testimonials will come from the beneficiaries who can assure the supporters that the work has been done and a change has been made.

Ultimately the best way to promote what you do is through building communities. A sense of connection is a key driving force and people want to belong, they want to connect with others who share their values. As a charity, you are making a stand for something. You are leading a vision of how the world could be. People will gather around your vision, you will attract a community. But you can only do this by communicating your values and your vision. This is your marketing. It’s telling the world who you are and what you believe. So do it well, build a strong community, and change the world.

I hope you have found this explanation of the 4Ps useful for the charity and non-profit sector. We can expand on this too and create a 7Ps model, which will give you, even more, to think about.

I’d love to know if it helps you or even if you disagree with any of it!

Please leave a comment below, ask a question, or share your own expertise.

How habits help marketers

Have you ever wandered “what’s the point of small actions, when we need to make a big impact?”, sometimes small actions can feel like a drop in the ocean. Regular blogging and posting in the short term doesn’t amount to much so it can be hard to stay motivated. Marketers need to build habits to stay on track, so I’m going to be looking at how habits help marketers in many different ways. In this post I’m going to show you how building habits of small actions actually leads to massive impact. I’m going to be using the ideas in James Clear’s book “Atomic Habits ” which is about habit forming, and I’ll look at how habits can be useful to marketers both for our own activities and for helping our customers.

Do you ever feel overwhelmed by the magnitude of the task before you? You want every campaign you run to beat the last one, but maybe you don’t quite have what it takes? Well here’s a story for you:

In 110 years not a single British cyclist had won the Tour De France. The sport in Britain was mediocre. Top cycling manufacturers refused to sell them bikes as it would ruin their brand by association. But Dave Brailsford was hired and turned the team around. Within 10 years they had won 178 world championships, 66 Olympic or Paralympic gold medals and 5 Tour De France victories. How did he do it? Well it’s not all scandal!

Brailsford used a system he called “the aggregation of marginal gains”. So what’s that and how can it help you? You only need a 1% improvement in something to give you huge results. It’s like compound interest, it looks small and insignificant at the start, but eventually builds up to something enormous. As a marketer if you made a habit out of building marginal gains, you can see how it can help you.

This is great news for anyone wanting to build something substantial, we are often overwhelmed by the size of a task, but just making it onto a habit, and making small improvements all the time, we will build something massive. Because each 1% improvement is built on the foundations of a previous improvement and added up over time leads to big change. Marketing is all about consistent activity, which slowly builds results over time, so building our marketing activities into a habit is a very good idea. Consistently improving our marketing activity by 1% increments will give us a large measurable increase in results in a year.

It’s not just our own habits that we want to influence either. We often want to encourage our customers to build a better habit, for example we might be running a healthy eating campaign. We need to know the science behind how the audience will be able to build this new habit for us to deliver a successful campaign that will get the desired results.

But let’s face it we have all tried to start well-meaning habits, and they just don’t last. So how do you build a good habit that lasts. Well that is the subject of this book and I will share some of the ideas here that I think are helpful for Marketers.

“Forget about goals, focus on the systems instead”

We are told all the time to write down goals and focus on them, but James offers a refreshingly new approach. Goals will look after themselves, so long as you have the right systems in place, and carry out the right activity. He goes as far as saying that you would still reach your goal if you completely ignored it, and just focused on your systems. As a marketer your habits become your systems, so you can help yourself by building good marketing habits.

Winners and losers have the same goals, all Olympians have the goal to win. The goal won’t make the difference, the system will. Achieving a goal is temporary, once you have achieved it you tend to lose it again. If your goal was to tidy your room, it will become messy again afterwards, it’s a yo-yo goal. But with a system in place you will always have your goal achieved, like a system of putting things back in their place. We fall in love with our gaols and think that they will make us happy, and then get disappointed. But if you fall in love with the process then you will always be happy. Goals help you win a game; systems help you continue playing the game.  In marketing you don’t get to win a game, because it’s a game that doesn’t end, you have to keep playing.

To make good habits you need good systems. You need good habits to make sure that your actions are consistent and take up the least amount of effort, so that you have enough energy to give of more complex problems.

When a habit becomes part of your identity you are more likely to keep doing it, ‘I am the kind of person who does this…’. And yet our identity emerges from our habits. So firstly decide what type of person you want to be, then prove it to yourself with small wins. Habits are important because they can change your beliefs about yourself.

The 4 steps to building better habits

Your activity may feel like a drop in the ocean at the start when you are trying to build a habit. It’s not until your habit is established and you have been doing it for a while that you will start to see results, then those habits will really help you as a marketer. By looking at exactly what a habit is, we can see how to successfully build them.

If you break down a habit it starts with a cue; noticing a reward, a reminder, our minds are continuously scanning the environment for a hint to where we might find a reward. This then creates a desire or craving in us for this reward, they motivate us and create a desire for a changed internal state. The response to this is the habit itself, the action or thought that will give us the reward. This purpose of the reward is to satisfy our craving, rewards teach us to remember which actions lead to them. This is the habit loop, they each need to be strong enough for a habit to form.

“Your brain is a reward detector”   (49)

“All behaviour is driven by the desire to solve a problem”    (51)

James Clear

1: A CUE – Make it Obvious

Clarity about what the habit you want to build is crucial – what will you do, when and where? If the answer to that is vague then you won’t be able to build a habit. You need to be aware of your habits before you can change or build on them. Attaching a new habit to an established habit is also helpful, James calls this ‘Habit Stacking’.  Tie a new habit into something you already do consistently. In fact in this way you can tie in a whole stack of new habits.

As well as attaching a new habit to an existing one, you can attach a new habit to a trigger in your environment. By keeping your environment clear of distractions, and placing just the right trigger in the right place to be seen at the right time, it will act as a cue to start the habit cycle. Since the most powerful of human senses is vision, make sure that cues are visual. Think about the visual cues around a shop counter, there is a reason why small packets of brightly coloured sweets are always placed there. If you want to avoid a bad habit, avoid the places where you find visual cues for it. This is why cigarettes have to be placed out of sight in shops now.

If we want the consumers in our campaigns to build a better or more useful habit we need to provide visual triggers in their environment at an appropriate time, with clear instructions. For example the Nectar campaign running in Sainsburys offered signage suggesting people download the new nectar app as people entered the store, they also ran a campaign of field marketers helping people in person to download the app and use it in the store, as well as more cues at the checkouts to prompt them to scan the app on their phone at the till. The aim was to retrain their customers current Nectar habit and get them to build a new habit. To raise awareness they had to make obvious visual cues.

Eventually your habits become associated not with just a single cue, but with the whole context of a behaviour. For example whenever you are networking a string of habits emerge in the form of certain behaviours, and routines for exchanging information. You won’t need to remind yourself to do certain things because the context is the cue. Event managers understand that to cue the right behaviours and actions from people the right venue is crucial. James offers evidence to suggest that environmental triggers are more important in habit forming than self-control. In the Nectar campaign shopping itself was to become the context cue to checking the app for offers and opportunities.

One of the best ways to make a new habit obvious is to make an explainer video that tells people what to do, when and where, so that there are no barriers to understanding what is to be done. Give clarity in a message and you are a quarter of the way there, as there are just 4 cornerstones to building a habit. Animation is the most time efficient way to give people clarity on the what, when and where of an activity. Knowing how to build habits helps marketers because marketers are often trying to establish new habits in their customer base. For example this whiteboard explainer video is a great example of making the process obvious for the audience, they are now in no doubt about how to go about getting help from the Health Lodge.

2: A CRAVING – Make it Attractive

A habit has to be something you want to do. You need to find ways to make it more enjoyable. Linking something you need to do to something that you enjoy doing is one way of making it more attractive. James describes the Dopamine-driven feedback loop, and shows that it’s the anticipation of the reward, rather than the reward itself that makes us take action. People need to do grocery shopping, but they enjoy saving money. Seeing the money they save add up, as a pounds and pence figure on their phone, and choosing how to increase that figure increases Dopamine.

One of the most attractive things for a person is to be accepted by their peer group and connected to others. So we are more likely to do the things that are considered social norms. In fact he talks about three levels of social influence, the actions of the people closest to us, the actions of the majority, and the actions of powerful or successful people. In marketing we think about how we can use ‘social proof’ to encourage a behaviour. Everyone else is doing it, so why aren’t you?

A craving usually has a deeper motivation, cravings are connected to survival needs. If we didn’t have a strong craving for something we wouldn’t go through the difficulties and risks associated with getting it. We see a cue, predict what it can give us, then act accordingly. Since our behaviour is dependent on how we interpret something, it’s the feeling or emotion we attach to it that prompts the desire or urge to act.

“Life feels reactive, but it is actually predictive”   

“A craving is the sense that something is missing. It’s the desire to change your internal state…. This gap between your current state and your desired state provides a reason to act…. Desire is the difference between where you are now and where you want to be in the future”    (129)

James Clear

Sometimes all it takes is a shift in language to give something a positive feeling and therefore make it a more attractive thing to do. Suddenly you don’t ‘have’ to do something, you have the opportunity to do it.

Creating a desire in our audience by making our offering seem very attractive is a well known element of what we do. Product placement, lifestyle associations, social proof, are all stock in trade for marketers, its 25% of the picture. Storytelling is a great way to raise awareness of the attraction of our products or services, especially if the reward is not immediate. The sugar content will sell a chocolate bar, but a story will sell an insurance policy. Animated storytelling is a large part of many insurance companies marketing strategy for that reason. Understanding customer habit forming helps marketers to get their message right. Here is a great example of using storytelling to make it attractive to buy a particular book.

3: A RESPONSE – Make it easy

“Repeating a habit leads to clear physical changes in the brain”    (143)

James Clear

People with different professions have more grey matter in those parts of their brains which they need to do those tasks. Creating new neural circuits in the brain takes a lot of energy, through repeated use those circuits forge a pathway and the activity becomes easier. To build a habit you need to practice it, the more repetitions you do of that habit, the easier it gets to do.

Removing friction, barriers to action, and optimising the environment to make the habit easier to do is important. Follow the “Law of Least Effort”. Make the new habit easy to do by starting it with a super quick version. The “Two Minute Rule” idea is that if you just do the new activity for 2 minutes, you are more likely to do it. When you succeed, it positively shapes your identity so that you have belief on your side too. You can then use habit stacking to build up this habit into the full activity that you need to do. Start small, succeed, then build on what you have.

Marketers need to think about this too. Make the point of entry to your product or service easy to do. Amazon know that the one click payment option increases the shop rate by a staggering amount. On a digital platform the more pages people have to click through the lower the finish rate. Every piece of information you ask for will lose a potential buyer. Sometimes it’s a matter of explaining the process to get started with a more complex purchase, we still have to remove the barriers to entry so make sure that the calls to action in a video are easy, and relevant, to do.

Another way of making it easier to start a habit is by taking a big action that will change the way you do things forever, like getting a dog, moving to a new area or paying for a coach. It’s called getting buy-in, when people buy-in to a new activity they commit to making it work. Customers who have invested in something are more likely to continue with it. The success rate of doing paid courses is far higher than free courses, because paying customers are committed to making it work. They actually get more out of the course because they have removed many of their own doubts and concerns at the moment of paying.

Making the desired behaviour easy to do amounts to another quarter of what is needed to get a habit established, and of course animated explainer videos are a great way to lower the entry threshold to an action or process that needs explaining, thus making it easier to do. This whiteboard expaliner video was commissioned by Slough Borogh Council to make it easy for the retail sector to understand people with dementia and how to best help them.

4: A REWARD – Make it satisfying

Humans evolved in an “immediate-return environment” but we now live in a “delayed-return environment” so of course we will prefer quick payoffs to long term ones. To repeat an action we need some kind of immediate reward. So we can use a reinforcement technique to attach an immediate reward to an action that will not actually incur a reward until much later.

Find a way to visually track your habits, like crossing off each day on a calendar, by seeing your progress you can get a sense of reward from that to help keep you going. A very good way to gain a sense of reward is from having a group or individual to hold you accountable. Having to tell a group of people that you have not hit your target in uncomfortable, but a group celebrating your success is a big reward. In this way customers like to be part of a membership group where their successes can be celebrated.

For our own delayed return activities we can find ways to reward ourselves, for example every time you post an article, give yourself a tea break. The actual reward for posting articles is long term, but the immediate reward of a tea break will keep you going.

In this vein to encourage engagement we need to reward people who comment, by commenting on their comment, thanking them and liking their articles. In digital marketing content may be King, but engagement is Queen, so we need to reward the people who engage with us using competitions, freebies, humour, thanks and comments in return.

From a marketing perspective we need to be creative about how we give an immediate reward for a product or service that in real terms offers a delayed return, like a pension plan. Being able to see savings accumulate and being congratulated for reaching milestones can help. This is where animated stories can be useful again, used to give an immediate reward for an activity, congratulating customers who have reached milestones with a story that highlights the longer-term reward that they will gain.

To start building a relationship with potential customers they need to be rewarded for their encounters with your brand. They may be immediately rewarded through blog content, educational videos, then to join a useful mailing list they are rewarded with a useful e-book or educational video course. The emails they get from you need to be a rewarding experience for them. Gone are the days when a company’s newsletter is all about how great they are. As marketers we need to make sure that there is an immediate reward for any action or habit we want to form.

Here is an example of a film we made for the Steve Sinnott Foundation to make the experience of learning about education needs more rewarding for children in schools in the UK. By using stories and artwork we made the films more rewarding to watch, and so they were more able to engage with the issues raised in the films.

The Goldilocks Rule

“The Goldilocks Rule states that humans experience peak motivation when working on tasks that are right on the edge of their current abilities. Not too hard. Not too easy. Just right.”    (231)

James Clear

The goldilocks zone could be called the ‘flow-state’. Easy enough to do but challenging enough to remain interested in. A habit can become boring eventually, so increasing the challenge can add interest. When habits become routine we can derail them by seeking novelty, which can threaten our success.

James suggests that the most habit forming products are those that offer novelty. This is the concept of “variable reward”. Like slot machines, the variance in wins gives the greatest spike in Dopamine, which accelerates habit formation, by amplifying craving. The sweet spot is a half way split between winning and wanting.  This is a reason why competitions can make great campaigns, as long as they remain relevant to the brand.

“Habits create the foundation for mastery.”    (239)

James Clear

For your own marketing pursuits, when the basic activities you need to do become habit, then you are free to expend all your energy on more complex problems. However if you allow them to turn into mindless repetition, you can ignore feedback, go on autopilot and stop improving, leading to a decline in performance. You need to keep listening to your audience, otherwise you will loose them. So it’s necessary to set goals for improvement and challenge yourself to improve. When you think you have mastered something, challenge yourself to improve. All habits need to be reviewed and improved over time.

The Sorites Paradox

Finally James tells uses the Greek parable of the ‘Sorites Paradox’ to offer the following paradox – “Does one coin make a person rich?”. Well you could say no it doesn’t. But if you keep adding coins, eventually it does, we can’t see the tipping point but there must be a point at which one more coin has made that difference. In the same way stacking one brick on another doesn’t make a wall, but if you keep stacking, eventually you will get a building.

From a marketing perspective building a YouTube channel is a good example of this. You need to consistently build the channel with good engaging content that will educate your audience in an entertaining way. Your channel is built one video at a time, and at first you will not see any difference in viewings or engagement. However if you keep going a tipping point is reached and you will finally have a channel that provides income. Here is an example of one of the many videos we have made with Reflective Films for The School of Life YouTube channel to keep it interesting and entertaining for their viewers.

Its not one 1% improvement that we need, but a thousand of them. Making a habit of small improvements that we action every day, and staking them up to build a better system for delivering results. Atomic habits are the building blocks of a system. The question is, what kind of system are your habits building? You can only change something if you have the right system to change it.

“Success is not a goal to reach or a finish line to cross. It is a system to improve, an endless process to refine.”    (252)

James Clear

Thank you for reading, I hope it has been usefull for you, if it has or if you have questions please leave them in the comments section below.