Is Your Business in the Killing Zone?
In the competitive environment of sports each athlete has experienced how it feels to be in the “Zone”. The famous psychologist Abraham Maslow described this state as a “Peak State” and discovered that it even carried mystical and religious elements within the experience. While athletes know that this peak zone is crucial to breakthrough performance, they often don’t understand how to enter this “zone” on command. This is why there are stories of baseball players having superstitious practices during a world series like not changing their socks until it is over. They aren’t aware of where their brilliance comes from so they just hope and pray it won’t leave them.
What many don’t understand is that this brilliance flows from what scientists call system 1, or the unconscious. Most of our lives our system 2 wants to feel in charge and tries to exert control over most of our functions. Unfortunately System 2 is actually quite slow and clumsy when it comes to making fast fluid decisions and movements. So in sports and in martial arts we train to perform and stay in this system 1-controlled mode. We try to leave our conscious baggage, issues, biases, likes, dislikes and preferences at the door.
In marketing we must accomplish the same internal mental state shift when evaluating our own marketing efforts. We must divorce ourselves form the inner dialogue of our own biases and look at our website and advertising with the objective eyes of our viewers. In fact, our viewers are making most of their decisions about bouncing from your website, connecting with a headline and completing a purchasing by using their OWN system 1. So I f we can’t quiet our own system 2 (conscious thought) while evaluating our website we will completely miss the triggers telling our visitors to stay or go.
In the martial arts fight, you have a myriad of techniques that you can use to strike an opponent. Your best performance mindset is to not be biased toward any one in particular. You only have a single desire to strike and win and you let your system 1 mind choose whatever it wants to accomplish that. Any bias would only slow down the process.
It is the same evaluating your website from a visitor perspective. Your visitor has a very well-defined goal and desire. Once you learn to see the website only from that angle, instead of what you want them to do as the business owner, you will be shocked at how tangled, confusing and directionless your website might be. If you can learn to design from their point of view, satisfy their goals and needs then you will have a successful web marketing campaign.