Hold Marketing Accountable: Persuasion Architecture Methodology

Persuasion Architecture for Marketing Optimization

Persuasion Architecture is a framework, methodology and software tool set developed by Future Now Inc. to plan, build and optimize, persuasive systems on-line and off-line, irrespective of channel. The unique benefit of Persuasion Architecture is that it allows you to scientifically plan marketing scenarios from a customer-centric perspective and optimize them.

Persuasion Architecture guides you to document every assumption based on your customer persona's motivations. It then asks the Persuasion Architect to predict the scenarios that those personas (buyers modalities) will navigate. On-line, Persuasion Architecture uses it's web analytics scenario language (PAXML – Persuasion Architecture XML) to measure scenarios and optimize against those predictions. This scenario optimization process, is a six sigma process, that allows the Persuasion Architect to understand whether it is the execution or the assumptions that need correction.

Persuasion Architecture^TM is the result of eight years of intense focus on optimizing online marketing. It is a framework for planning customer-centric interactions, specifically across the media-agnostic spectrum wherein the customer initiates, progresses, and controls the conversation with the organization. Gone are the days where marketing was about broadcasting your message to passive prospects as recipients of your message. Today's reality, your prospect's need to be actively engaged as participants in your marketing communications. By formulating the conversations an organization will have with its diverse constituent segments, Persuasion Architecture allows practitioners to plan, build, and optimize the persuasive impact on those segments.

We've spent an entire book explaining Persuasion Architecture in-depth (see our recent #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller, Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? - Persuading Customers When They Ignore Marketing), but the philosophy behind it is easy.

Future Now invented Persuasion Architecture our framework for conversion rate marketing optimization to help businesses adhere to one simple core principle:

So, how does Persuasion Architecture match your objectives to those of your customers or clients? By providing detailed answers to three (would-be) simple questions at every stage in a website or multi-channel communications plan:

1. Who is your audience?
2. What actions do you need them to take?
3. What information do they need in order to feel confident taking action?

Although it may sound easy, successfully implementing Persuasion Architecture requires plenty of hard work and planning. Persuasion Architecture is not a "black box" solution; rather, it's a comprehensive process to map the entire customer experience across communication channels (e.g., website, radio, print, TV, or between departments within large organizations).

"After adopting Persuasion Architecture, we have seen significant growth in our web revenues. Our website jumped from 14th to 8th 'most useful' website in the life science industry according to a Bioinformatics survey published at the end of 2006. I credit our success to the training and methodology we learned while working with your team. Thanks again!"
Fraser Marlow, Head of Ecommerce, GE Healthcare

In today's marketplace, it's necessary to integrate your marketing and sales efforts--online, offline and across channels. Now more than ever, customers are in control, and it's essential to engage them on their own terms. (Funny, since those are the only terms they'll accept.) Persuasion Architecture gives you the process and the tools to do just that.

Better Process, Better Results…

Interactivity has changed the nature of marketing by extending its reach into the world of sales and customer relations. Today, marketers are called upon to do more than raise awareness and drive traffic; they are required to anticipate customer needs, meet those needs and measure return on investment for every piece of their budget.

The best companies have always listened to their customers. However, simply listening to customers is no longer enough. All too often, the customer neither understands nor cares about the complexity of any given company's multi-channel sales process. Businesses may think of themselves as multi-channel, but incustomers' minds, channels are irrelevant.

These days, experience is the brand--and the customer is in control. The boundaries between marketing, sales and customer service are blurring. To acquire new customers, to deepen relationships with existing customers, to reach decision-makers, to measure marketing results, to generate more leads, to improve lead quality, to reconcile selling channels, to increase product awareness, to close more business and to develop the brand, these disciplines must be thoroughly integrated.

Marketers usually design communications suited to their goals, but those communications all too often miss the mark of customer relevance. The good news is that your customers are already telling you what's relevant to them--in their blogs, web searches, message boards, etc.--every single day.

Persuasion Architecture helps your business create customer-relevant experiences by designing the persuasion scenarios in which your customers engage as they evaluate your business, services, and products.

Although Persuasion Architecture methodology is utilized to successfully plan a variety of communications systems, it is most commonly used to:

• Uncover your marketing objectives
• Wireframe a strategic plan to accomplish these objectives
• Storyboard the tactical steps necessary to implement this plan

Persuasion Architecture begins with intelligence collection in a process we call "Uncovery". The goals of the Uncovery include:

• Knowing/Understanding Your Customers
  • Their needs, motivations, and their buying process
  • Using customer research, web analytics, societal archetypes
• Knowing/Understanding You, The Persuader
  • Your goals objectives, principles and values
  • Products, Services, selling processes
• Knowing/Understanding The Environment
• Competition
• Context of the sales process
• Brand strength

Uncovery is used to identify Key Performance Indicators for the project. It's critical to outline how you will measure success in advance, as it provides the groundwork for understanding how to optimize once your website or campaign is launched.

"By taking a holistic approach to customer-centric communications planning,Persuasion Architecture keeps marketing accountable, success measurable, and implementation far more intuitive than it otherwise would be.[With Persuasion Architecture] Future Now provided a complete and practical solution that exceeded our expectations. They showed us how to design persona-driven experiences to satisfy the needs of our different types of visitors. They helped us write content that educates, simplifies decisions, and gets visitors to take action. And they left us with a thorough methodology, tools, and a new way of thinking - all of which we still use today. We look forward to working with them again and recommend them highly." ""
Allen Boyce, Elance

The data and information revealed through Uncovery shapes any and all supplemental stages, including Persona Creation (see Waiting for Your Cat to Bark for step-by-step instructions). Personas are the empathic vehicle that guide the team through remaining phases. Personas enable you to see your company and products through your customer's eyes, keeping you customer-centric through every step of the process.

Start Planning with Persuasion Architecture Today

Although we're the experts, Persuasion Architecture^TM isn't just a Future Now service; it is a methodology that can be learned and applied directly to your business. In our latest bestseller Waiting for Your Cat to Bark, Future Now co-founders Bryan & Jeffrey Eisenberg explain the unique challenges facing marketers in today's fragmented media landscape and show how Persuasion Architecture^TM can help you capture and maintain your customer's attention by:

• Articulating your business goals and objectives to match those of your customers
• Defining Key Performance Indicators to accurately measure success
• Segmenting your customers into personas based on psychographic research
• Demonstrating value of your products and services to potential customers in their own language, and on their own terms with Customer Personas
• Creating momentum with each step (or "micro-action") customers take at various stages of their buying process, so they're comfortable taking the critical actions (or "macro-actions," such as a purchase)
• Mapping your content in a way that is clear to web designers, copywriters, advertising agencies, or anyone else who
• Injecting relevance into each customer touch-point in a communications process
• Planning persuasive scenarios to include and account for each of your customer angles of approach including all of their buying modalities
• Optimizing your sales process to ensure that your online, offline, or multi-channel strategy is working to its full potential

The Persuasion Architecture methodology, including the MAP^TM Suite software, as well as other Future Now intellectual property is available for licensing. If you think your organization is a good fit with ours, contact us to strike up a conversation.

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