Match Your Prospect’s Search Image
Match Your Prospect’s Search Image
The animal inhabitants of the Costa Rican rain forest spend most of their time and energy looking for food and trying not to become food. They’ve evolved an amazing array of predatory and defensive strategies in the never-ending battle for survival. For example, bird species that feast on insects have a huge array of choices – thousands of different potential meals. It’s more overwhelming than the dinner menu at the Cheesecake Factory.
Constraint #1: Too Much Information
When my family and I hiked in a Costa Rican rain forest for four hours, we saw exactly one animal – a hairy tarantula standing in the middle of the path, with a "you want a piece of me?" expression. The animals were there – we could hear them, and even see their pictures in the laminated card we got at the gift shop, but the place looked like a greenhouse ghost town. Everybody was hiding or camouflaged in the varied and verdant environment.
Finding the animals was like playing "Where’s Waldo?" Except that instead of hundreds of people in red and white stripes vying for our attention, the multiplicity of leaves, mosses, ferns, and barks obscured the hundreds of animals evolved to hide in plain site.
I tip my hat to those insectivorous birds who choose to make the rain forest their home and restaurant. Anyone looking for animal protein in that place has got to have amazing eyesight.
Constraint #2: Limited Processing Power
Birds have small heads, which means limited cranial capacity, which means their brains are, well, bird-brained. Small. Not a lot of processing going on in there. Think about the computer you bought in 1994 trying to run Second Life and YouTube.
The Strategy: Search Imaging
To recap: the birds can see tons of stuff – about 7 times more detail than humans – but can’t deal with all the information because there’s more stimuli than capacity to process it. (Sound like us on the Internet?)
Even though there are lots of palatable species of insect available to them, the birds focus on one or two at most because they lack the brain processing power to take in and evaluate the entire visual landscape. So they create a "search image" in their head before they start looking for food, and only pay attention to what matches that search image.
They miss a lot of potential dinners (having no capacity for opportunism), but rarely go hungry. That’s how your prospects are looking at Google’s search results.
They are overwhelmed by the sheer size of the web. By the amount of information available on every single topic. Websites, articles, videos, audios, PDFs, emails, banners, popups, blog posts, blog comments, tweets, SMS, voice mails, argghhhh…
Keyword = Search Image
Which headline matches the search image? Only one – Industrial Clean Room. It captures the eye immediately, because that click requires less thought, less expenditure of processing energy, than any of the others.
Don’t Be Mechanical
More on that strategy in a future BOPzine. For now, just remember that your prospects aren’t just searching. They’re hunting. With eyes that can see more than their brains can process. If you want to get caught (and you do), then match your ad to the search image they’re already carrying.
This Week’s Product Offerings: Links You Should Visit
Check out www.LeadsintoGold.com – my first info-product, and still a favorite.
BONUS BOP QUOTES (for reading this far)
A man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest.
- Paul Simon, "The Boxer"
- Rodney Dangerfield
