The Secrets of Human Behavior Applied to Social Ads

0:00Sarah Levinger: I'm Mari Smith, known as the premier Facebook marketing expert, aka queen of Facebook, and this is actually my 14th time because I have been at every single social media marketing world. There is no amount of sophisticated technology that can ever take the place of live, in person, IRL, heart to heart, face to face. You could very well meet some of your best friends, clients, joint venture partners, alliances, have opportunities, podcasts, speaking engagements, it's extraordinary. So come on in for this beautiful, in-person experience. Get tickets at socialmediamarketingworld.info.

0:37Welcome to the Social Media Marketing Podcast, helping you navigate the social media jungle. And now, here is your host, Michael Stelzner. Hello, hello, hello. Thank you so much for joining me for the Social Media Marketing Podcast brought to you by Social Media Examiner. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner, and this is the podcast for marketers and business owners who want more exposure, more leads, and more sales. Hey, I've got some exciting news. We have recently launched a mini series that you can find over on YouTube called Press Play, The Road to 3000. It is a short form docu series where we are revealing the crazy path we have to try to grow social media marketing world to 3000.

1:23So if you want to check it out, head over to YouTube and look at the playlist and you will see what's going on with that show. By the way, if you are new to this podcast, be sure to follow this show so you don't miss any of our future content. Let's transition over to this week's interview. Helping you to simplify your social safari. Here is this week's expert guide. Today, we'll explore how to use behavioral science to create social ads. My special guest is a consumer behavior analyst who helps e-commerce brands improve their online ads using psychology-based creative strategy. She's the founder of Tether Insights.

1:59She co-hosts the Brain Driven Brands podcast. Her community is Tether Lab. Sarah Levenger, welcome to the show. How are you doing today?

2:08Sarah Levinger: Thank you for having me. This is going to be a great conversation. I'm so excited to dig into all this stuff with you. I'm doing well. Thank you. Love it. Well, let's get into your story. How the heck did you get into behavioral science and online ads? It's a roundabout story. And I always tell people like, I wish I had like a deeper, cooler story because I feel like a lot of people have. I'm sure there's something amazing about it. Let's hear it. So I started in marketing when I was very, very young, 2021, I would say. I went to college for maybe two semesters and then I had a graphic design professor who told me, you know, if you're good at this and you really like marketing, you don't have to get a degree in it.

2:41Sarah Levinger: You could just go get a job and start freelancing. And I was like, great, I don't want to pay for college. So I dropped out of college at 21 and then I went straight to the workforce. Wait, when you say 21, do you mean the age of 21 or do you mean 2021? Age of 21. Age of 21. That was a long time ago. This was like 18 years ago. So I've been a marketing a long time. So I started out in this industry as a freelancer. And of course, I needed the money. So anybody that came into my ecosystem and said, do you know WordPress websites or like Facebook ads, any of this stuff, I would just be like, yes, absolutely.

3:10Sarah Levinger: I know how to do that. And then I'd have to go learn how to do it very quickly because I didn't actually know how to do all these things. So at the time, this was very early 2000s. YouTube was not really a thing yet. There wasn't a lot of tutorials on how to do this type of stuff over there. So I'd go to the library of all places and I would just check out all these marketing books right next to the marketing section was this giant section on neuroscience and early childhood development and like all these really interesting things about how the brain works and all this type of stuff. So I was checking all that stuff out because it was interesting, not because I needed it for any reason.

3:41Sarah Levinger: And then I did that for like 10 years. And so I would digest these big textbooks from the eighties, all kinds of weird stuff in there. but it didn't really like start to like leak into my career until I got to paid advertising in 2020 when I started to apply it to ads in particular. So as soon as I started to take all this knowledge from 10 years of just digesting all these books and apply it to paid, all of a sudden I started to see all these really cool things happen because I could test quickly. So yeah, my journey is odd. It's all from the library of all places. Love it. So what are you doing now?

4:13Sarah Levinger: I currently have quite a few things that I'm working on. I'm a consultant for DVC and e-commerce brands, specifically on the paid advertising side. But luckily, psychology kind of applies to everything. So I typically am working with performance marketers on acquisition. So we're working on lead gen. We're working on sales from paid ads, Facebook ads, Instagram ads, TikTok ads, those types of things. I have a community that I run where I teach people creative strategy and how to apply psychology to their advertising work. And then I also have a tool I'm building, a SaaS tool That kind of takes my brain and puts it in like tech format.

4:46Sarah Levinger: So yeah, all kinds of things. Love it. Well, what do you see as one of the biggest misconceptions when it comes to ads? Because I know that obviously there's a lot. What's one of the big ones that you see out there? One of the biggest misconceptions I see most often stated by most marketers is the fact that ads are supposed to sell. I don't think this is true. I don't think every ad is supposed to convert somebody. into purchasing a product or, you know, signing a form or whatever it is. I think a lot of ads these days are forced to do so when they would actually be better suited to something other than just selling, reach or promoting the brand or getting brand statement out there.

5:27Sarah Levinger: A lot of these ads just try and convert and do nothing else. So elaborate a little bit more on what they should be doing. Tell me a little bit more about that. In my view, I think advertising kind of runs in two different veins. So you do have the conversion side, which is critically important for a lot of these brands, especially in e-commerce. But for most brands, ads are supposed to do basically one thing, and that's build recall. And I think that's really critically important for marketers to realize these days is we see so much advertising. And when I say advertising, I'm not talking about strictly just ads that come from a brand.

5:58Sarah Levinger: A tube of toothpaste with a brand on it or a logo on it is advertising, right? If your friend comes in and she shows you the purse that she just got, that's advertising. It's word of mouth advertising. If you go out and you see a billboard, that's advertising, right? So advertising comes in a lot of different forms. But in my mind, recall is one of the most critical pieces of getting to a conversion. Because if I don't remember that you exist, there's really nowhere for me to convert to. Because now I'm just kind of randomly converting off of anything that I find in my ecosystem. So I'd rather work on recall and conversion at the same time.

6:33I love that. And it makes total sense because it's getting harder and harder for us marketers. to basically get attention amongst our organic routes, right? Because on the email front, there are algorithms that are stopping our messages from getting into the inbox. They get stuck in promo. On the organic social side, the reach isn't there as much as it used to be anymore. And it's really, really, really hard to basically have our customers remember us or even our fans remember us, Like funny little story. I was doing this video series called Mike Thoughts from the Porch and I did 72 of them before I retired it.

7:14And it wasn't until the last one where I said, I'm stopping doing it where a bunch of people is all this, the first one I've seen.

7:21Sarah Levinger: Isn't that always the way to they're like, wait, keep going. So I'm with you on this completely. So when we couple behavioral science and ads, what's the upside? Like it said another way, if people pay close attention to what we're about to unravel today, what are the benefits waiting for them on the other side? Oh my gosh. I feel like they're endless. Cheaper customers in general, typically you can go farther with it. Meaning your ads will last a lot longer. You can reach a lot more audiences that you've never reached before. You also can figure out pretty quickly why your ads are working and what you need to do next.

7:55Sarah Levinger: And that's kind of the reason why I've been so, so like sucked into this realm of marketing, behavior science, consumer psychology, because if I can tell why people are resonating with a particular piece of creative, whether it's on ad side or organic side, I know how to duplicate that success. And that's very, very difficult, I think, for marketers to wrap their minds around because everybody wants to be able to produce unlimited winners. Just every single thing we post is a banger. I don't know that it's easy to do that without understanding why it actually won. So yeah, I mean, behavioral science can help you with the metric side and the conversion side, all those different things.

8:33But overall, as a marketer,

8:35Sarah Levinger: it kind of helps me with the decision fatigue because it helps me identify which pieces are working. Love it. Okay. So before we get into what we're here to talk about today, which is behavioral science coupling with ads. Is there any kind of foundation work we need to establish here or any kind of basic concepts that we need to describe to people that we can build on top of? Yes. There's a few that I think probably come to mind the quickest. The very first one I would say is obviously, stating the obvious here, times have changed. The social ecosystems that we currently market into are drastically different than they used to be.

9:12Sarah Levinger: And that's just on organic side. The paid ecosystem has also changed pretty quickly within the last probably four to five years. I think people are desperate for connection. Anybody that's on a social ecosystem is scrolling, scrolling for the dopamine and the entertainment. Yes. But a lot of it comes down to, I'm looking for something to validate how I feel in my experience as a human. I'm looking to connect with something. Now, the interesting part about this is TikTok actually changed a lot of how these ecosystems work, mostly because they built their feeds different than Facebook or Instagram, or even like Twitter or LinkedIn had built them before.

9:49Sarah Levinger: All of their ecosystems are built on interest graphs. So those of you who don't know what an interest graph is, it basically means that any piece of content that we put into this system is gonna get served to somebody based upon whether or not TikTok thinks they'll be interested in it. Not based upon if they follow this creator or if they've typed in this search term before. it's just based upon there's something in this content that Sarah might like maybe it's a dog like whatever it is in here we think Sarah will like it so we'll serve it to her and see and then those interest graphs over time just get bigger and bigger and bigger it's it's kind of own neural network so something to keep in mind before we like dive into the deeper kind of topics in here is because uh the social ecosystem is different now and interest graphs are a part of the conversation we all have to keep in mind that whatever concept you're creating organic or paid, it has to be suited for interest and taste, not so much just like topics and keywords.

10:46I love that. So what I'm hearing you say is there are algorithms that are tracking what we actually are interested in based on our behaviors rather than what we say we're interested in. You know how sometimes I'll ask you to pick categories or whatever of things you're interested in. They ask you that when you first open up TikTok as well, but I ignore it. But what they do is they serve you different kinds of things. And the stuff that you tend to behave differently with, presumably by watching it, interacting with it, liking, commenting, sharing, saving, all that stuff. That's the stuff that is signaling the interest graph about what you really, really care about.

11:24So that means that we are actually in an era right now where it's less about what we self-identify as interest and more about what the algorithms think we find interesting.

11:38Sarah Levinger: Yes. And that comes down to some sort of behavioral thing. Is that really what I'm hearing you say? Oh, yes. 100%. And this is the interesting part about it is if you look at your own feed, if you're a big scroller, I have a big scroller. if you're a big scroller, you'll notice that like on Monday, you'll get served a specific type of content. On Tuesday, it'll be something different. On Saturday, it'll be something else. You'll also notice that it changes by mood. So for instance, if I'm in like a weird mood for a week, maybe I'm feeling like anxious that week or something at work, something with kids, I'll notice that TikTok will start feeding me things on like people like dying in caves.

12:11Sarah Levinger: What? Or like, yes, like bears, like, I don't know, attacking people, like really intense. Just to, just to kind of help you realize it's not as bad as it could be. Is that the idea? Maybe so. Maybe the algorithm knows something I don't, but in general, it's really fascinating to watch because it doesn't happen every week. I have tracked it now because I'm hyper aware of this stuff. I've tracked it to where I can tell some weeks I'm just more anxious than others. So I watch a lot more content. That's just very intense content. Whereas on Saturdays when I'm finally feeling like a little less anxious, I get a lot of like cooking content and like sewing tutorial, like things like that.

12:46Sarah Levinger: And this, the algorithm's updating in real time for every single individual who's on the platform. So I don't get to dictate really where my content goes or who it goes to. And obviously this is not just TikTok. This is across all. Yeah, it's all of them now. So where do we begin if we want to deploy behavioral science in our creative? Where do we need to start? If you're going to do this for yourself, if you want to branch out into like, I need to apply some more psychology to what I'm creating, regardless of what marketing medium it is. In general, I like to start with the how. And the how, I think, is pretty important, meaning how do I want to deliver my message?

13:25Sarah Levinger: That's pretty important. This obviously starts with the message that you want to deliver. And a lot of brands struggle with that one in particular because I think they don't quite know what kind of message do we want to send our customers. But in general, if you have that core message set down, say you're Nike and your message is just like you got to just push through and do it, motivational style. I start with the how. So from a psychology standpoint, there is a very specific psychology model. It's called the valence and intensity model. Sometimes you might hear it called the valence and arousal model.

13:57Sarah Levinger: This one in particular is built to kind of identify how we're actually communicating a message. Now, valence and intensity, two different terms here. Valence has to do with the emotional range that you're activating when you're communicating with somebody. Typically, this is stated as positive or negative. So pretty, pretty easy thing to remember. And when you're talking about valence, you're just talking about is the message positive, happy, good, comforting feelings, or is it negative, more sad, frustrating, disappointing, those types of things. Intensity changes how the valence gets interpreted, if that makes sense.

14:33Sarah Levinger: So how intense a message is will tell us a lot about how important it is. And humans really do resonate with more intense message. Sometimes, not all the time, but in general, if you dial up the intensity, you change how people respond to it. So great example of this. I always bring this example up. I can tell my husband like, oh, did you take out the trash? Like, I'm so sorry. I need your help with this. I completely forgot. Which would be kind of a positive valence, but like low intensity, right? It's happy feelings, but I'm not really intense on my energy. Or I could come back and say, dude, you have missed taking up trash five different times.

15:11Sarah Levinger: What is wrong with you? I am so done with this and I need you to step it up like negative intensity or negative valence and then high, high intensity on it. Now, depending on the mood of the day, whether my husband's had his coffee or whether he's like in a receptive mood, either one of those messages could be interpreted a very different way, which would elicit a different behavior from him. So when it comes to where do we start with content, the very first thing I do is decide, do I want a positive or negative message? And how intense do I want it to come across? I find this intriguing. First of all, let's talk about why in the world this even matters a little bit, right?

15:51Because some people are going to be like, well, why do I need any emotion at all? So talk to me a little bit about that. Like, why does that matter at all? Let's get into that a little bit.

15:59Sarah Levinger: Yes, yes, yes. I have seen quite a lot of research that talks about the fact that emotional messages get encoded in the brain a lot stronger than just logical, factual kind of messages. So the brain will actually remember something that's much more emotional than something that's just straight like facts on a page. And we've seen this in marketing a lot, but you also see in your own life, any sort of hyper emotional experience you typically remember pretty well. And it could be a positive emotion. It could be a negative one. It doesn't really matter. But the emotions, the chemicals that the brain creates around experiences tend to to tell it which things to remember and which things to just ignore.

16:37So now let's talk about positive versus negative. Cause we have a lot of people in the audience that might have backgrounds in copywriting like I do and might have really strong feelings one way or the other on this, but which is better and why? And is there, maybe, maybe there's even a, maybe there isn't a clear answer. Let's talk about it.

16:55Sarah Levinger: Which is better. I think this is going to the weeds a little bit, but I think this comes down to category psychology. Oh, What's the product? What are you trying to sell? Okay. For some products, a negative message is probably going to, you'll get the most response from it. For instance, if you're selling like CO2 detectors or fire alarms, it's going to be hard to be like, protect your family and everything's going to be great and all the things. I don't think consumers are really going to resonate deeply with that. The opposite side of that message would be the negative message would be, this is a dangerous thing in your home and you're not going to be able to detect it.

17:32Sarah Levinger: This is silent and it's also invisible. So if you don't have something in your home, you are running the risk of harming your own family on accident. Now that's a much more salient message. We just split the emotion. So it depends on which product you're selling. Okay. Well, I like that. Let's go with that some more. Let's now talk about intensity. You said it in a pretty non-intense way. Is there a right way or a wrong way to do this? And let's talk about that a little bit. Intensity wise, intensity is the one that varies. I find that valence, positive, negative emotion really depends on the category.

18:09Sarah Levinger: Intensity though, really, it depends on kind of like what brand I want to be. And this is the most interesting part I think about Ecom and DTC is some brands really want to put forward a message of we're not trying to trigger you as a person. We just want to support. We want to help you in your life. We want you to feel better as a human being. That, I would say most of those brands stay in low intensity throughout the year. They don't change the intensity of their messages and it works for them because that's the way the brand is interpreted. For other brands, I push them a little harder to be like, you are just primed for intense messaging.

18:46Sarah Levinger: Liquid Death is a great example of this. Your message is just kind of funny. Your core message is just like, we are misfits. We don't fit in and we don't subscribe to corporate culture. But the way that they've decided to deliver this message, how they've delivered it is kind of intense levels of sarcasm. Hi, my name is Mandy Hedrick and I'm here at Social Media Marketing World. My first time attending Social Media Marketing World and I I had won my ticket and so I attended online and the impact it had in what I could do for my business, immediately it was my goal as a business owner to be able to earmark the dollars.

19:26This is my second time in person, so I just love being in a room full of people that are like-minded. It's a big investment, but I'm not just investing in myself, but I'm also investing in my clients and I will be coming back every single year. I'm already ready to buy my next ticket and book my hotel room. Get tickets at socialmediamarketingworld.info. When we were prepping, you had an example of a watch company. Can you share that story a little bit?

19:53Sarah Levinger: 100%. So I worked with a company, I've worked with them for quite a few years actually, Original Grain. And the interesting part about their message is they were looking at basically how their customers responded to different levels of valence and intensity depending on word changes. So one of the best examples of this, which was basically a six-figure change for them because they changed it across the board. We changed one word from deserve to earned. So a lot of the language that they were using in their ads for probably about 18 months was you deserve to treat yourself to a watch such as this one.

20:27Sarah Levinger: I came in, did a bunch of research for them, trying to understand the valence and intensity that their customers would respond to and found very quickly their customers didn't want or didn't feel that they deserved anything. They felt that they were earning it, which was a totally different valence zone, you could say. Deserve is a little more passive, earned is much more active. So give some tips on how we can get to the bottom of this valence and intensity stuff if anybody wants to try this. Yes, yes, yes. So valence and intensity sounds complex, but for the most part, I do a lot of this work in AI.

21:00Sarah Levinger: So you can actually choose any of the AI that you typically use, the ones that you love. I usually do this in Claude, but you can do it Gemini, Perplexity, whatever you'd like. Take, I'd say probably easiest way to do this is either to take your reviews or to take your current messages, a good batch of ads or organic posts that you have, put them into the AI and then ask the AI to categorize them into valence and intensity zones. Oh, okay. And they don't know what that means. Yes. Yep. It should know what it means mostly because valence intensity is almost always mapped on like a matrix. So there's four different zones.

21:34Okay.

21:34Sarah Levinger: Yep. And what are we looking for after it's done its analysis? It should be pretty quick for you, but things that you're looking for that might be very interesting is what do all of our winners have in common when it comes to valence and intensity? Are we always in zone two or are we typically in zone three for any of the organic content that does well or any of the ads that do well? And then on the hours - Okay, wait, wait, hold on. Just so we're clear. I think you said you started with reviews, right? So did you switch from, if we're taking reviews, are we first analyzing the reviews to see where they are and then looking at what our actual content is and seeing if there's a match?

22:06Is Is that the point?

22:07Sarah Levinger: Reviews will be really interesting because, and most people will find this, they're going to be very positive. Most reviews are like, I love this. So it's better if you can get five star all the way down to one star, get the whole batch and throw that in there and then map it to your valence intensity zones. And then you can compare that data set to the data set of your messages and see the contrast between the two, which will tell you very quickly, are we actually activating what we think we're activating language wise? Are we matching what our customers need from an emotional and intensity standpoint?

22:39Love it. Okay. What's next after we've done this? Because I know there's some more fun stuff we're about to talk about.

22:45Sarah Levinger: Yes. Okay. So once I've decided how I want this message communicated, I always draft into who, who do I want this to go after? Now, when I say who, I'm not talking about avatars. I'm so sorry for everybody listening to this. I have beef with avatars. I think that they are overused in marketing. I find them to be such a crutch. And I feel as though we have created this beautiful fabricated version of our customers that doesn't exist. And then we're making very large business-based decisions off of this fake person. So I typically don't look at who, not because I don't care, but mostly because there's so many different people that could use my products.

23:26Sarah Levinger: Most of the time in e-commerce, we see someone who's 18 and 57, male and female, non-binary, Somebody who's Republican, Democrat, owns five dogs, hates dogs. I mean, you see the whole range of people coming in here buying. So it's almost impossible for me to actually nail a description of the avatar. So when I say who, I have a psychology model. This was actually based on a theory, not a model itself, but I created a model for it. This is based off a self-discrepancy theory. And this basically states that there's three different versions of yourself. and this is for all humans on the planet, you basically switch in and out of these three versions all throughout the day.

24:08Sarah Levinger: This has to do with kind of how you see problems and how you see the world. But the versions are basically set to different time periods. So ideal version of yourself, the first one's ideal. This one has to do with the future, very aspirational. So if you see any sort of brands or marketing that's talking about like, you know, this is the better you, you're going to do better tomorrow, like so exciting, like change your life aspirational they're going towards ideal self the second self that we have is actual self and this is typically the one that's very biased and and the one that really loves to validate what they feel so this is is very interesting because actual self is usually activated with um like eco-friendly brands people who are very focused on the environment and this is a lot about like this is who you are today you're not trying to change anything what you're you believe is true and that's actual self.

25:02Sarah Levinger: And then the last stuff that we have is ought self. Ought self is very guilt focused. How do you like you ought, like you ought to be that kind of. Exactly. Yeah. Like you ought to do something. Yep. It's very much like I should have fixed it, but I didn't. And now I feel a little guilty about not fixing it. So we have ideal, actual, and ought are the three that we're looking at. Yeah. Explain ought a little bit. Yeah. Ought is interesting because ought self, typically I see this show up in parental brands, parenting brands or baby brands, because there's a lot of pressure on parents in this country.

25:35Sarah Levinger: Ought self is typically activated pretty well by lower intensity messages, but almost always like a little bit negative messaging. And it's the type of self where you've either been sitting on a chronic problem for a long time, or you're just very, very sensitive to messages that talk about the you that you should be, but you're not, which is a little bit different than aspirational marketing. So ought self has to do with just looking in the past about the things that I should have gotten done and I just haven't done it yet. Okay. So three different versions of self. We've got the ideal self, which is pretty self-explanatory.

26:12We have the actual self, which is your present situation. And then we've got the ought, which really is more like the self you wish you were, but you're not. Is that kind of what I'm hearing you say? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.

26:24Sarah Levinger: Exactly. So what do we do with this? Okay, yeah. So I have another thing that you could use with AI. Usually I like to look at our ads and our messaging that we are currently promoting. So a batch of ads, good batch of organic, landing pages, emails, whatever you've got. And then have AI run this kind of similar analysis to what we did with valence and intensity. So I'll throw this into Claude and ask it to go ahead and categorize our messages based upon who we are activating, Ought self, actual self, or ideal self. Very, very quickly. I mean, the lucky part is LLMs are built to analyze language.

26:58Sarah Levinger: So they're extremely good at this. And I've also tested this across different languages as well. I have somebody running it in Portuguese, Dutch, German, French, Spanish. What was the last that we had? There was another one in there. I can't remember what the last one was. But depending on how your language structure is built as well, your cloud should be able to very quickly tell you which one of these is most common, I would say, in your marketing. Let's say we've identified, okay, we're mostly in the actual or we're mostly in the ideal. What do we do with something like that? Help us to understand how this could unlock something.

27:32Sarah Levinger: If you've got your analysis, your verdict, whatever it is from AI, say you are in this ideal or actual, whichever one it is, the next thing I would do is go see what your competitors are in. So this is the next phase, obviously, of like analysis and marketing is you can take this straight to your competitors and have it analyze their landing pages, their emails, their ads, their organic. And C, are we saying the same exact thing to the same person? Meaning are we in the ideal state and they're in the ideal state? Well, that's a problem because then again, like we talked about the very beginning, recall drops.

28:06Sarah Levinger: If we are marketing to the same version of the customer, it's going to be really hard for us to compete on a long-term basis. So I might want to shift away from my deal this month and actually go to an actual person or maybe run more messages towards ought self. Okay. A couple of thoughts here. This is a bit complex, but we as marketers try all sorts of different kinds of messages and all sorts of different kinds of mediums, but the sales page is kind of what the sales page is. So what happens if you're driving someone to a sales page that doesn't match? Do you understand what I'm going? Okay, yes.

28:45Sarah Levinger: So if you have an actual message on the front, ads are organic, and then it's running to like an ideal state on the back, that's not necessarily a bad mismatch, but it has to match what the person wants most. And this is more about understanding like humans and what they're activated by. So for instance, we'll give it a good example. If Sarah is shopping for soccer cleats for my son, right? And I see an ad that says like, soccer season is coming up. Like you really need to get on this. That's ought self. Cause we're activating that kind of like you should have done this, but you haven't done it yet.

29:17Sarah Levinger: Then they run me to a page. That's just like, you're going to be the star soccer mom this year. If you get them these cleats, cause they have, I don't know, ice cream on them or whatever it is. Right. That's an okay thing for me because as a mom, I have two states that I'm trying to solve. Ah, I really want to solve this guilt. that I feel about these cleats. But the second thing I want to do is be the best mom ever. Like I want him to come back and say, mom, everybody loves my shoes. Okay. So, so far, I love this. We started this discussion with talking about how, and we talked about valence and intensity and valence is either a positive or a negative emotion.

29:57It's kind of, you know, is it more of a range or is it more binary, positive or negative?

30:02Sarah Levinger: It's a range. It's a range. Okay. And then you have an intensity on that range, right? Which is like super intense versus not intense, right? Then we layer in the who, right? And we've got this three self model, the ideal, the actual, and the ought, right? Which is kind of the guilt one. So these things are starting to connect together. So just real quick, like help us connect the dots between these things. Maybe give us an example of either something you've done or a brand or anything just to help people kind of begin to understand these concepts and how these connect. A good example that I can bring up, honestly, is Nike because they've been around for so long that it's easy to kind of see where their trajectory is going and the different messages they've put in place.

30:48Sarah Levinger: They've been running this just do it kind of a message, the 1980s, but they've morphed how it comes out often. So sometimes you'll see this just do it message in different places. Oftentimes, though, I'll see it kind of morphed into like motivation comes from within is a secondary message that they'll run, which is not quite the same as just do it. It's a different valence and a different intensity. So when you start to connect these where it's like, OK, when do I use valence? When do I use it? Like when do I use self? A lot of this comes down to what's your core message that you're trying to deliver?

31:23Sarah Levinger: And then where am I going to use it? Am I using it on landing pages, emails, organic? And what's my goal for each? I'm a big, big goal person. We have to decide, am I trying to get conversions with this message? Am I trying to just activate a customer? Am I trying to get recall? Because I'll use these in different capacities based upon what the goal is for the core message. So let's take an example. Earlier, you talked about a CO2 detector, okay? And obviously the CO2 detector is going to have a negative balance because it's about keeping your family safe, right? On the intensity, I would imagine it'll be slightly more intense, like, hey, there's this silent killer in your home and you don't even know what it is.

32:06And it's CO2. Now let's layer in the three different kind of, let's do this in three different examples. Let's go with an ideal and let's do it with an actual and let's do it with an odd just Just so people can understand how that messaging might flow. Are you comfortable enough to free flow it a little bit?

32:23Sarah Levinger: Oh, yes, yes, yes. So if you have negative valence and you're talking about like there's a silent killer in your home, you need to solve it before this gets worse, whatever it is. Ought self with the message that you'd create would be something akin to, listen, this has been on your to-do list for years and you really should have gotten this done. You need to protect them. It's your duty to make sure that your home is safe for your kids. Got it. That's the ought self message. Actual self would probably be like, you're the type of person that organizes their home based upon the technology inside of it.

32:54Sarah Levinger: And you're very, very good at spotting detectors that are not going to work for you. This detector has XYZ. It has all of your things. Here's all of your specs, whatever it is. Come buy it today. We're not really talking about the negative side of it too much. We're only talking about the person that she is. I'm very good at tech. I take care of my home. It's technically what we're activating. Actual self. Ideal self would be something akin to like, you don't want to have to deal with this in the future. Something might happen, but for the most part, we're just going to set it and forget it. Peace of mind is really what you're looking for.

33:26Sarah Levinger: So this particular detector gets XYZ, whatever all these specs are, you know, this is going to be the right version for you. So that's more ideal self because we're talking about the fact that like, you don't want to have to worry about this. Your future self will thank you for getting this particular product. And I thank you for giving those examples because I think that was very helpful for our audience. So, and someone else out there said, thank you. So they, you can't hear them, but they're saying thank you right now. Okay. So we got another thing to talk about. So what's next? Okay. So you decide how your message needs to be delivered, positive, indicative, and how intense you've decided who you want to deliver it to, odd self, actual self, ideal self.

34:03Sarah Levinger: The last thing that I typically default to is understanding where do I want this particular piece of creative for advertising, if you're running ads, where do I want it to fit within the customer journey? Because again, I have beef with all kinds of different marketing models. I'm not a huge fan of the awareness level structure just because I don't think it really helps marketers know what to make for their customers. How do I know that somebody who's in an unaware state is really ready to move to the next kind of like brand or problem state, right? Like how do I move that person forward. And there's oftentimes a lot of customers who are very, very aware of the brand itself, but they're just not in market.

34:46Sarah Levinger: For instance, I'm very aware of Coca-Cola, but I don't drink soda more than maybe two or three times a year. So it doesn't really matter how aware I am. So in general, I have actually mapped my customer journey levels to a Google study that they did on digital ecosystem and how people shop in digital ecosystems in general. This is called the messy middle. I'll have to send it to you guys, the actual study that they did. But they found that there was basically four different categories of behavior that people walk through when they purchase. So four different categories starts with trigger. Something has to trigger you, right?

35:23Sarah Levinger: It's got to be something in your environment made you think about this problem and made you want to find a solution. So that's first is trigger. Exploration is a behavior where people start to search around about the category, not necessarily about your brand, but about the category itself. So people are exploring pages, they're consuming content, they're reading a lot of landing pages, emails, whatever it is. Evaluation happens when people start to try and figure out which two options are going to be best for me. Typically it's two. I don't see a lot of times where people have like five brands, unless you're like my husband who likes to spreadsheet.

35:58Well, and now with AI, you might actually have more too, because people are - That's very true. People are using AI to do evaluations, right?

36:05Sarah Levinger: Very true. It might be shifting. AI is going to make evaluation a very interesting customer journey level. But evaluation is typically between brands or products. And then purchase is just, now I'm kind of waiting for an excuse to purchase something from this specific brand. So four different phases. I like to map this out mostly if I can get a pretty even split depending on what we're trying to do. So sometimes I will put more effort into the middle of this behavioral experience. So I'll do a lot more ads that are exploration style ads or evaluation style ads. If we really need to get more eyeballs, I'll swap most of my creative out so that it's more of this trigger phase where I'm just starting to activate people who are just coming in.

36:46Sarah Levinger: If we need like just straight conversions of revenue, I'll go after purchase level ads. So the nice part is you can mix and match. But overall, this helps kind of map the how and the who onto the when. So I would love to hear a little bit more about these four stages, just so everybody's not aware. First one was trigger. I'd love to understand like a little bit about that one. Exploration, I think any evaluation sound pretty similar. So I'd also love to like understand the distinction between those two. So can you go ahead and elaborate a little bit more on those? Yes. So trigger is interesting because when somebody gets triggered into a purchase or triggered into looking to purchase something, I would say.

37:28Sarah Levinger: This typically has to do with two different types of problems that humans interact with or experience when they're trying to solve some. You either have an acute problem, which is something came up real quick and it's something that I wasn't expecting and it's kind of irritating and I, okay, I just got to solve it. Like a plumbing problem? Yeah, like a plumbing problem, exactly. Or you have a chronic problem, which is something that I've been avoiding for a very long time and I just don't want to think about it. So acute or chronic problems. Trigger focused content needs to speak to one or the other, but it always needs to stay high level on the person's experience.

38:04Sarah Levinger: So for instance, point of view is one of the best content types for trigger focused customers, because it talks about point of view, like you just found out that your entire house is flooded because you had a pipe burst and now you got to fix it. What are you going to do? You're going to call Hank, he's a blah, blah, blah. And it, then we walk into our pitch. Another one that's really good is day in the life, because it talks about, again, my experience. Here's my day in the life being a stay-at-home mom, trying to figure out how to fix this plumbing thing before 3 p.m. when I got to go pick up my kids.

38:35Sarah Levinger: Good content comes a little bit down to storytelling, obviously, which we can talk all about that. But a lot of it comes down to what's the experience that she's having at the trigger moment. Okay. So that's a cheat. Good. Chronic is a little bit different, but yeah. Well, and let's talk about evaluation versus exploration because they certainly sound very similar. Yeah. Exploration is interesting because I think people assume they're exploring the brand and I have to gently tell them, no, they're exploring the industry. So this typically happens when somebody is looking for information on what is creatine?

39:08Sarah Levinger: How does protein work? Like what is hydroxyapatite? Like, is that, is that important in toothpaste? Like over time, all these industries that I've worked with, because I've worked with 150 some brands now, I have noticed a pattern that exploration content that is, I don't know, best suited to anybody who is exploring the industry is usually talking about the things that you need to avoid. So don't believe this hype about this particular product. Or it's talking about things that that people just don't know. So for instance, a great long form example, you ever seen the show How It's Made? Oh, yeah, yeah.

39:46Where it's like a documentary or whatever. And they got that.

39:49Sarah Levinger: One of my favorite shows ever. I absolutely adore these people. It's exploration suited. So if I was exploring how things are made and I was interested in like, I don't know, purchasing baseballs, I might type in something like that and consume that content. You know, I have a little fascinating insight here. Um, on the Enneagram, we use the Enneagram inside of our company to kind of help understand all the other employees. I've got some fives and I've got ones and the fives are the ones that tend to want to do deep research and deeply understand something before they make a decision. Deep drillers.

40:21Sarah Levinger: Yeah. Not everyone is this way, but there are people that need to know before they act. This is probably for them. Am I right? If you're a person who loves deep research, you're stuck in exploration phase for a long time for most of the products you buy. You just love it, can't get enough of it, just educate, educate, educate. So if you're not doing that, you could be ignoring a pretty big chunk of your potential audience, right? Yes, yes, yes. And I always tell people, this is why organic is so critical, because in e-com and DTC, we lean on ads heavily to get stuff done. The expiration phase, though, is where I'm just about to interact with your brand and kind of understand, do I like you as a brand?

41:02Sarah Levinger: I still remember how it's made even decades after that show ended because I just liked the brand. And if they ever sold baseballs, I would buy one. And then evaluation. Let's dig into that a little bit. Evaluation is, like I said, where we start to compare brands. But evaluation comes down to a little bit more of what marketers, I think, are real good at. Facts. Give me proof. give me stats, numbers, tell me what ingredients that are in here, how do the ingredients work. You're still doing a little education, but when you're starting to evaluate, now we need to help people understand what's my USP as a brand, right?

41:37Sarah Levinger: My unique selling proposition. How do I differ from everybody in the market? And if I don't differ from everybody in the market, why should you choose me just based on personality? Do you like me? Like, am I interesting? am I fun? Some brands that have done incredibly well in this is like Duolingo. There's lots of different language apps out there, but Duolingo does evaluation incredibly well because most of their content is about liking them and helping people understand evaluation properties just through their content characters and different things about their mascot. So back to the behavior, evaluation comes down to help me figure out how you're different than everybody else.

42:19I bet you a lot of people are focused more on the purchase side of things with the ads, you know what I mean? And they're missing out. But any feedback or tips on how we can experiment with these things?

42:29Sarah Levinger: Yes. So if you want to try trigger expiration, evaluation, purchase, I would start building yourself a library. AI is really good at this as well, where you just start pulling different pieces of content. And this is kind of how I started doing it. Any type of content that stops you, or it's a good story, or it was just an interesting hook. It was just a really good piece of content and stick it in a library. Then you can go through either once a month, once a week, however often you like to do it, and have AI run the same kind of analysis we just did for Valence and Intensity and for 3Self and just ask it, can you go ahead and map this based upon what you see category wise from trigger, expiration, evaluation, or purchase?

43:08Sarah Levinger: What is this piece of content fitting into when it comes to my customer's behavior? Every piece of content fits in one of these four categories. So Sarah, this has been really, really very illuminating. And I have like a bazillion different thoughts for my team, my marketers. If folks want to connect with you on the social, since this is the social media marketing podcast, where's the best place? And if they're interested in some of the things you have to offer, where do you want to send them? Yes. So you can follow me basically anywhere you consume content at Sarah Levenger. And if you want to, I actually have a tool that does all three of these things automated for you.

43:46Sarah Levinger: and it will produce scripts. Right now they're mostly suited towards ads, but it'd be interesting, honestly, to test them for organic as well. If you guys want to check that out though, go to tetherinsights.io. Tetherinsights.io. Sarah Levenger, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us today. It's lovely, thank you. Hey, if you missed anything, we took all the notes for you over at socialmediaexaminer.com slash 741. If you're new to the show, be sure to follow us. If you've been a long time listener, we would love a review on whatever platform you're listening on and do let your other friends know about this show.

44:17You can tag me on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, X, and now on TikTok. And do check out my other show, the AI Explored podcast. This brings us to the end of the Social Media Marketing podcast. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner. I'll be back with you next week. I hope you make the best out of your day and may your marketing keep evolving. The Social Media Marketing podcast is a production of Social Media Examiner.

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