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8 Fascinating Studies Every Entrepreneur Should Know

There’s one thing that every entrepreneur must understand to truly grow a successful business.

That one thing is human behavior.

Understanding human behavior will help you become more effective at marketing, sales, productivity, copywriting, and even product development.

And there’s no better way to develop an understanding of human behavior than through research.

Researchers have been conducting studies to understand why we behave the way we do for decades, which is great news for entrepreneurs. Research studies can help us understand our markets to better position and price our products, increase our sales, and communicate to consumers.

Here are eight studies every entrepreneur should know to become far more effective in your business.

1. The Illogical Reasoning Study

You know that saying “it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it?”

It turns out that this isn’t just an over-used quote; it’s actually true.
A study done by Ellen Langer from Harvard University had subjects ask people lined up at a photocopier whether they could cut in front of them in a line to make their own copies.

That’s where the “how you say it” part comes in: the message with all three test groups was the same. The subject wanted to cut ahead of them.

However, in one group, the subject asked to cut ahead without a reason, simply asking if they could make copies by saying “may I use the Xerox machine?” They were only given permission to cut ahead in 60% of these cases.

In the second group, the subject said: “May I use the Xerox machine, because I’m in a rush?” This was far more successful than the first group with 94% allowance.

The third group, however, also gave a “reason”, although the reason made no sense. They said, “may I use the Xerox machine, because I have to make copies?” Even though everybody standing in line also had to make copies, 93% of people let the researcher jump ahead.

This demonstrates that people are far more likely to follow through with a request if there seems to be a reason for the requester to make it – even if the reason makes no sense. This study proved that we have blind spots when somebody uses the word “because” to make a case for something they want us to do.

Lessons for Entrepreneurs

As an entrepreneur, the results of this study will help you craft more effective sales copy, marketing content and messaging around your brand. Don’t underestimate the power of a simple word!

2. The Reciprocity Study

Over the past couple of years “content marketing” has become a buzzword.

That’s because content marketing works so well in today’s information era, where advertisements are being replaced with giving away valuable information for free.

But have you ever wondered why content marketing is so effective?

It’s because content marketing – or adding real value to people’s lives, even for free, through publishing audio, visual, video, or written content – activates our reciprocity gene.

As humans, we are strongly driven to reciprocate favors or gifts. This is demonstrated in Robert Cialdini’s book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.

Cialdini describes a study done by Phillip Kunz from Brigham Young University. Kunz sent out 600 handwritten Christmas cards to complete strangers to see what would happen, and over the next few weeks received over 200 back.

This is astonishing, considering Kunz was a stranger to the recipients of his cards; they were acting upon the societal norm of reciprocating when somebody gives us something – even somebody we don’t know giving us something as small as a Christmas card.

Lessons for Entrepreneurs

As an entrepreneur, you may be wondering how this study will help you. But maybe you should be wondering how you can help your target market. After all, if you give them something, they’re likely to reciprocate – and sometimes, they’ll do so by buying from you.

3. The Mimicry Study

Have you ever heard the advice to use the exact words that your market uses in your sales copy?

That’s because when we hear words we use (or think), it resonates with us. If we can create sales messages in the language our target market uses, they assume we know the problem better than they do.

Jay Abraham said: “If you can define the problem better than your target customer, they will automatically assume you have the solution.”

A study done by Rick Van Baaren in the Netherlands demonstrates this in action. He had servers in a restaurant take two approaches to confirming an order.

Some servers would indicate that they’d heard the customer’s orders with a simple acknowledgement, and some would repeat the order in the customer’s exact words back to them. Those who mimicked the exact words of the customer saw a 20+% increase in those who tipped, from 52% to 78%.

Lessons for Entrepreneurs

As an entrepreneur, you should be aware of this study because it will help you resonate with their target market. If you can use the exact words and phrasing that your market is thinking or using in your copy, the odds will be tipped in your favor.

4. The Mere Exposure Effect Study

As much as we prefer to think that we like new and novel things, the truth is we have a strong preference for the familiar.

Studies have shown that people look favorably upon something they’re familiar with. In one study, psychologist Robert Zajonc showed participants a character that appeared to be Chinese (but was actually just an arbitrary design). Those who were frequently shown specific characters reacted more positively to the character; the higher the frequency of the people seeing the same symbol, the more the person liked them.

Lessons for Entrepreneurs

As an entrepreneur, the mere exposure effect study can help you with your marketing plan as it helps you understand the buying patterns of the market.

You may have heard that people need to see an advertisement on average seven times before buying; while this would depend on your industry and product, this study goes to show that once is not enough exposure for your market.

5. The Foot in the Door Study

Did you know that if you can get somebody to say “yes” to a small request, you have a far better chance of getting them to comply with a bigger request later on?

This is why sales funnels work.

Stanford researchers Jonathan Freedman and Scott Fraser prove this in a study done in the 1960s. They contacted housewives who were divided into groups. One group was contacted with a small request and then later contacted with a much larger request. The second group was contacted with just the large request.

The first group was 30% more likely than the second to say “yes” to the larger request, as they’d already complied with the smaller request.

Lessons for Entrepreneurs

Many marketers believe that this is one way to program behavior of consumers to get used to taking one specific action with your brand. Create small opportunities for your customers to say “yes” to lead to larger requests later.

6. The Choice Study

Variety is the spice of life, right?

While that is certainly true in some cases, too much variety may be hurting sales.

An infamous study done by two researchers from Stanford and Columbia Universities respectively demonstrates that while consumers are more interested by having many choices, they’re less decisive and likely to purchase when given many choices.

The two researchers set off to a food store to create a sample display of jams. Coupons were offered to the customers who stopped to sample the jam.

In one part of the study, six flavors of jam were displayed. In another part, twenty-four flavors of jam were displayed.

What they found was that no matter how many jams were on display, the same number of jams were sampled, but 27% more customers actually purchased some jam if they only had to choose between six flavors rather than twenty-four.

Lessons for Entrepreneurs

You can use this information in your business to increase your sales. Take a look at your product offerings; are you offering too many choices? Remember, offering too many seems interesting to customers but it doesn’t convert to sales.

7. The Decoy Effect Study

Let’s say your business offered two products, and your preference is to sell more of one of them. How could you increase the sales for that one product?

Maybe you’d advertise it more, lower the price or offer a bonus for those who purchase it. But have you ever considered introducing a third, less desirable product to increase your sales of the one?

As outlandish as it seems, this can work, and is called the decoy effect.

This study was conducted by Itamar Simonson, a popular researcher in this field.

95 shoppers were initially asked to choose between two paper shredders. The first shredder (A) was the cheaper and less efficient model. The second shredder (B) was both more expensive and efficient. In this case, 79% of the shoppers selected the first shredder (the cheaper, less efficient).

However, the researchers then added a third option (C). This option was the middle of the line for efficiency but the top of the line for price; it was more expensive than A and B but more efficient than A and less efficient than B.

Though the introduction of option C didn’t change the other two options, 74% more participants chose option B.

Lessons for Entrepreneurs

This study demonstrates how our decisions change depending on the options we have available. You can use this in your business to offer “decoys” if you want to increase your sales of a specific product.

8. The Virality Study

How amazing would it be for a flood of traffic, followers, and sales to all of a sudden hit your business?

If you’ve ever wanted a piece of your content to go viral, this study will be useful.

Jonah Berger, best selling author, conducted a study that proved that things that elicit certain emotions are far more likely to be shared.

The study elicited both “high arousal” and “low arousal” from participants by having them jog on the spot (a high arousal activity) and watching emotional videos (a high arousal activity), and then asked if they were more or less likely to share the video or content with their friends.

It turns out that high-arousal activities (emotion, physical activity) increased the likelihood that the individuals would share the content by over 50%.

Lessons for Entrepreneurs

When crafting content for your business, ensure it elicits emotion from your audience (or that they’re at the gym when they consume it!).

Conclusion

If you understand the implications of these studies on your business, you’re farther ahead than most people in understanding human behavior – and therefore, the behavior of your market.

Application of these eight studies will not only help you earn more revenue through your business, but also save you and your team the time and effort of trying things that won’t work.

About the Author: Nathan Chan is the Publisher and CEO of Foundr magazine. He is extremely passionate about entrepreneurship and has interviewed some of the most successful entrepreneurs on the planet today (Richard Branson, etc). He shares all of these interviews at www.foundrmag.com.

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7 New SEO Opportunities In 2016

The changing Google landscape brings extra value to those who adapt Google updates are always a two-edged sword. Those who rely on elderly strategies may find their rankings falling like the last leaves of winter, while traffic slows like the […]

Post from: Search Engine People SEO Blog

7 New SEO Opportunities In 2016

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Written by Aleh Barysevich, Link-Assistant.Com

The post 7 New SEO Opportunities In 2016 appeared first on Search Engine People Blog.

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Benchmark Email and EU Safe Harbor Certification

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3 Cool New Keyword Tools for Generating Content Ideas

You know how they say you should shake up your work-out routine from time to time to “shock your body”? (Real talk: I never do this.) The same is true of your keyword research routine – changing up your tools is a great way to get new content ideas. The WordStream Free Keyword Tool and AdWords Keyword Planner are old, reliable favorites, but here are three newish/new-to-me keyword tools that I’ve been using lately to find new keywords to conquer.

New Keyword Tool #1: Answer the Public

I saw someone mention Answer the Public recently on Twitter and immediately checked it out. The home page looks like this:

Except the “seeker” is animated. It’s weird. Don’t get distracted. As with any other keyword tool, you just plug in a topic and go. It’s a UK-based tool, but you can select a different country from the dropdown:

Here’s the cool part – the results come back in visual form. First, you’ll see a “wheel” of question keywords related to your topic. I entered “AdWords,” and here’s what I got:

They’re organized into questions that begin with where, which, who, what, when, why, how, and are. I love answering question keywords with content; it’s a really effective way to demonstrate expertise and generate leads, and they can drive a ton of organic traffic (especially if you manage to rank in the featured snippet box, AKA position zero). We’ve already targeted a bunch of these keywords, but I also see a lot of questions that we haven’t tackled yet:

• how adwords billing works
• what adwords are my competitors using
• when to use adwords
• why use adwords editor

On the downside, there’s no search volume data, but if you see an interesting keyword, you can always check it in another tool.

Answer the Public also returns a visualization of keyword phrases containing prepositions, like for, with, without, and versus:

Some keyword ideas I got from this visual include:

• adwords for photographers
• adwords without a website
• using adwords to make money

I like this tool because question keywords and phrases with words like “versus” surface PROBLEMS that your target audience is having and that you can then solve.

New Keyword Tool #2: FAQ Fox

Speaking of question keywords! FAQ Fox specializes in them. This isn’t quite like any other keyword tool I’ve seen. It scrapes Q&A sites like Reddit and Quora to find questions related to your topic of choice.

If you click the “marketing” category, the tool will automatically search relevant marketing subreddits as well as a few popular marketing forums like Wicked Fire and Warrior Forum.

You can also enter your own sites. I searched for “adwords” on Reddit and Quora.com and got a great list of questions:

The questions are linked to the actual threads so you can go check out the full question as well as any answers it already has.

These questions tend to be much more specific and complex than the kinds of terms that people enter into Google, so if you decide to use one in your content marketing, you’ll probably have to use another keyword tool to find a phrase with search volume that you can map to the question. For example, if I wanted to create content to answer the question “Why are branded keywords costing me more in AdWords?” I could go into Keyword Planner to see that my best bet for this topic is the keyword “branded keywords”:

Another awesome way to surface problems that your prospects are trying to solve.

New Keyword Tool #3: KWFinder

When figuring out which keywords to target, it’s always a good idea to take competition into consideration. This will help you prioritize your keyword research – you don’t want to go for the super-competitive keywords first, but you also don’t want to only go after keywords that have very low volume, and that aren’t going to have great return even if you do rank on them.

KWFinder is a cool free keyword tool that shows you search volume, average CPC and both PPC and SEO competition. As with the above tools, I entered “adwords,” then clicked on the magnifying glass icon next to “adwords training.” This gives me a ton of data:

Higher scores are more competitive, so you can see that while “adwords training” is a highly competitive term in paid search (with a score of 91 and an average CPC over $12), the organic competition is pretty low (26). On the right-hand side of the screen you can see a snapshot of the search volume for this keyword over time, as well as some data on the pages that are currently ranking on the Google SERP for this keyword search.

We’re unlikely to be able to outrank the Google support result, but I bet we can beat that Moz community page!

I got lots of new content ideas playing with these tools. Now I just need to go to the gym.

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Google Keyword Planner's Dirty Secrets

Posted by rjonesx.

Sometimes our best data sources aren't exactly up to par. While nearly every search marketer will rely on Google Keyword Planner data at one point or another, especially while doing keyword research, the reality is that the data is often untrustworthy and should be viewed with great skepticism. Whether you plan to use it to help build a paid search campaign or determine which content to write, there are huge caveats to the numbers presented as Average Search Volume. Today, I want to walk through a number of the "gotchas" in Google Keyword Planner data so you can do better keyword research and make smarter decisions for you or your clients' sites.

Dirty secret #1: Rounded averages

By far, the most-used piece of data from Google Keyword Planner is the "Average Monthly Search Volume" metric. This key data point is used in everything from basic decisions on what keywords to use in an ad campaign to complex traffic prediction curves. But can we trust it?

Suppose you run a sports website and two keywords pop up in the recommendations: baseball scores and basketball games. Google Keyword Planner lets us know that each of these keywords has an Average Monthly Search Volume of 201,000. At first glance, you should be able to choose either of these keywords and expect similar traffic results, right?

Wrong. The "Average Monthly Search Volume" is more than just an average; it's rounded to the nearest-volume-bucket (which I will describe later). We know this is the case because Google Keyword Planner also exposes the last 12 months of traffic data. If we average that data, we will see that baseball scores receives 217,275 visits per month, while basketball games averages only 205,750! That is a difference of over 10,000 searches per month, which is obscured by Google KWP's rounding algorithm.

When we took a sample of keywords at the 201,000 Average Monthly Search volume, the standard deviation was 14,621 in the "actual average." In some cases, it was off by over 40,000 monthly searches per month! If you don't look at the last 12 months of data, your annual traffic estimates will likely be off by tens of thousands of visits. What causes this anomaly?

Dirty secret #2: Traffic buckets

Google Keyword Planner uses "buckets" to group keywords by traffic volume. When a keyword returns a traffic volume of 201,000, it isn't because the keyword was actually visited that many times, or really that it was particularly close to the number 201,000, but just that it was closer to 201,000 than the next biggest bucket of 246,000. The next lower bucket is 165,000, which gives us a nice 80,000-searches-per-month wiggle room — within which a keyword might actually fall and still be categorized as 201,000 by Keyword Planner.

After analyzing a massive data set, we found that Google has around 85 different "buckets" for traffic, which are logarithmically proportioned. This means that long tail keywords might fall into buckets which only differ by 10–20 searches at a time, while head tail keywords might see gaps of hundreds of thousands of searches per month. The bigger the search volume, the less certain you can be about the accuracy of the Average Monthly Searches, especially relative to other terms that fall in the same group. In fact, the largest buckets have variances of of nearly a quarter million searches per month!

Google uses this rounding procedure for convenience and, likely, to take into account the real month-to-month variance which can be huge for these very popular terms.

Dirty secret #3: Hidden keywords

Rand had an excellent write up on this issue a while back if you want to read the full details or want a more in-depth look at the problem. However, I thought I'd just throw out some stats here to show you just how ridiculous the recommendation system can be relative to the reality of related words and phrases. Let's start with the phrase "football." In this example, we will start with using GrepWords data to find the most valuable words that contain "football" in them. Then, we simply ask Google what they recommend. How close do they match? What is missed?

The top 3 most-trafficked football-based keywords weren't recommended to us, and only 4 of Google's recommended made it into the top 10. In fact, when we analyzed dozens of Google keyword recommendation reports, we found that only 35% of the keywords were among the most trafficked terms.

It appears that Google Keyword Planner is simply trying to provide a diverse cross-section of terms, but for marketers it means you potentially miss out on huge opportunities unless you dig much deeper. You can battle back against this "feature" by choosing more short-tail terms to seed your searches and setting volume and CPC limits, as the recommendations get stronger and stronger the more specific you get. In the end, though, you're going to miss out on some great terms if you've restricted your research to only Google Keyword Planner.

Dirty secret #4: Combination inconsistencies

If you're like me and spelling isn't your forte, you have certainly seen Google give you the "showing results for {correct spelling}." This is very useful for the searcher, but throws a pretty big wrench into keyword volume metrics. What does Google do in these situations? Does it count all the traffic towards correctly spelled keyword (which is actually showing in the search results) or does it count the traffic toward the misspelling or variation? Well, it turns out it's a mixed bag. Let's take a look at a fairly popular term Texas A&M Football.

In the above picture we see several variations of how one might search for the concept Texas A&M Football.

Keyword	Corrected?	Distinct Volume
Texas A&M Football	No	Yes
Texas A and M Football	No	Yes
Texas AM Football	Yes	Yes
Texas A & M Football	No	Yes
Texas A& M Football	Yes	Yes

Notice that whether or not the keyword is mapped to the canonical spelling makes no difference, in this case, for the total search volume. Even though many keywords will show you Texas A&M results, Google's volume count is only for the correct spelling of the term.

Now here's where it starts to matter. Let's say that you run a site that sells football attire and you're deciding which schools to include. You look up Google's Keyword Planner data and see that "Texas A&M Football" and "FSU Football" are both searched 201,000 times a month. These keywords seem equal in terms of volume but, in reality, there are many more keywords that are mapped organically to the phrase "Texas A&M Football," which makes its combined search volume much higher. In this particular case, there are several thousand visitors a year that you might miss out on by choosing "FSU Football" over "Texas A&M Football" simply because Google doesn't combine the keywords in Keyword Planner despite doing so in organic search.

This might seem like a reasonable compromise. The Keyword Planner is giving you back the search counts for the keywords, regardless of whether those searches are redirected to a different phrase. This would be appropriate if it was consistent, but with certain punctuation in terms we see Google treat the case completely differently. Take the search terms facebook.com and facebook com. Google reports that both of these terms are searched 7.8 million times a month. Clearly these two variants are not searched an identical number of times; Google has simply mapped the keywords together BOTH in organic search results AND in volume. This forces keyword researchers to build huge keyword lists and go line-by-line removing the edge cases.

Here's a quick tip for you Excel experts out there: Look into using Jaro Winkler distance to find very similar terms that have identical search volume. Often these terms are mapped both in organic and in volume, and you can find those exclusions easily.

Dirty secret #5: Strange recommendations

Sometimes Google Keyword Planner gets the keyword recommendations completely wrong. Here are a couple of the examples that I was able to pull in just a few minutes of brainstorming:

Starting Keyword	Recommended Keyword
baseball glove	boxing glove
pigeon	cabins
calamari	pork chops
rap	country music

Because Google Keyword Planner uses more than just phrase matching to build their recommended keywords, you will regularly find some truly strange entries in your recommended keyword list, or connections that a computer might make but a human never would. Unfortunately, this means you have to be very careful about what you get back, going keyword by keyword if you want to start a paid search campaign based on what's been returned. You simply can't be confident in the relevancy of the results. Can you imagine how many webmasters just blindly added Google's recommendations to their advertising campaigns?

All is not lost

Luckily, there is more than one way to get at and improve the Keyword Planner data using clickstream data sources. For example, we know of two keyword data sources — ClickStre.am and SimilarWeb — which correlate nicely with Google Keyword Planner volumes.

While this data from SimilarWeb is very useful, building a more accurate prediction of search volume for a term requires that you build a regression model comparing the user data to Google's estimates. Moreover, demographic differences between the whole Google user base and those included in the user panels of SimilarWeb and ClickStre.am mean that building a ubiquitous regression model across all the keyword data might not be the best, as the users tracked by SimilarWeb and ClickStre.am might be biased towards different topics. The solution is to build models around topically-related keywords.

For example, instead of modeling all the keywords against one another, if Google Keyword Planner gave you 2 keywords on the same topic with the same keyword bucket (like 201,000 searches per month), you could build a regression model on the fly comparing a sample of topically-related keywords, using that to predict with greater granularity the performance of the two seemingly identical keywords.

While this user data helps you defeat issues of granularity, getting better (both more thorough and more accurate) recommendations for keywords can be a little more difficult. Your best bet here is to use keyword data aggregators like GREPWords, KeywordTool.io, or the upcoming Moz Keyword Explorer.

Keyword Planner is dead. Long live Keyword Planner

Unfortunately, despite all of the strange quirks and outright deceptions of Google Keyword Planner, it's the best thing we really have going for us in terms of getting search volume data out of Google. We can potentially refine some of the data with clickstream data, or get estimates by running Google Adwords campaigns and watching impression counts, or even looking in Google Search Console. But none of these are strong replacements for the Google Keyword Planner.

Instead of letting Google Keyword Planner's problems get in the way of your keyword research, use it to your advantage. Look for the edge cases where a keyword has a ton of misspellings mapped to the correct version, but not combined into the volume score. This could be a great win that your competitors are overlooking because the head term looks smaller than it really is. Wherever there's bad data, there's also money to be made in sweating the details. So, put your gloves on and get to scrubbing your Keyword Planner data. Somewhere beneath the rough is a diamond.

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