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Rai Cornell Psychology-Driven Marketing Strategies with Rai Cornell

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Tired of marketing that pressures, manipulates, and leaves a bad taste? Rai Cornell shows how understanding what makes your customers tick can transform your business. Learn how her ELITE framework helps you connect authentically, ditch the FOMO tactics, and turn buyers into lifelong fans. 

Psychology-Driven Demand Generation: Building Trust Without Manipulation 

Ever feel like most marketing advice pushes you toward manipulative tactics? There’s a better way to generate demand and build lasting customer relationships – one based on psychology and genuine problem-solving rather than pressure tactics. 

The Problem with Traditional Marketing 

Many marketing strategies rely heavily on creating artificial urgency through countdown timers, limited-time offers, and fear of missing out (FOMO). While these tactics might drive short-term results, they often leave customers feeling manipulated and resentful toward your brand. 

A Psychology-Based Approach to Demand Generation 

Instead of using pressure tactics, consider building your demand generation strategy around positive psychological outcomes. This means: 

1. Creating dopamine hits by answering all your prospect’s questions 
2. Generating serotonin by making customers feel seen and heard 
3. Building genuine bonds through transparency and trust 

For example, being upfront about pricing on your website serves multiple purposes. It satisfies the customer’s immediate need for information (dopamine), builds trust through transparency, and saves your sales team from wasting time on unqualified leads. 

Understanding the Stages of Change 

Every potential customer goes through distinct stages before making a purchase: 

• Pre-problem awareness 

• Problem awareness 

• Brand and solution awareness 

• Consideration 

• Evaluation 

• Decision 

• Action 

The key is creating content that meets people where they are in this journey. Most companies focus only on the final stages – pushing their solution to people who already know they have a problem. But the real opportunity lies in reaching people before they even realize they need help. 

Building Trust Through Content 

Here’s how to build trust throughout the buyer’s journey: 

1. Break down fears by providing detailed illustrations and case studies of what working with you looks like 
2. Answer questions others won’t – especially around pricing and potential drawbacks 
3. Solve adjacent problems with free content before introducing your solution 
4. Create resources that help prospects at every stage, not just the buying stage 

B2B vs B2C Considerations 

While these principles apply to both B2B and B2C, B2B requires a more nuanced approach. You’ll need to create content for both gatekeepers (researchers) and decision-makers: 

• SEO-optimized blog posts and resources for researchers 

• Detailed buyer’s guides and ROI calculations for decision-makers 

• Email nurture sequences that speak to both audiences 

• Content that addresses both logical and emotional drivers 

The Power of Authentic Problem-Solving 

When you focus on genuinely solving problems instead of pushing for quick sales, something interesting happens: customers often choose you even when you’re more expensive than competitors. They might not be able to articulate exactly why, but they “just like you more.” 

This approach works because it aligns with how humans naturally make decisions. By removing pressure and creating positive psychological experiences, you make it easier for customers to choose you – while building the kind of trust that turns them into long-term advocates for your brand. 

Remember: good marketing shouldn’t feel manipulative. It should be the mechanism by which people find solutions to real problems in their lives. When you approach demand generation from this perspective, you create win-win situations that benefit both your business and your customers. 

Ready to transform your marketing approach? Start by examining your current content and asking: “Does this make our prospects feel good about engaging with us?” If not, it might be time to shift toward a more psychology-based strategy. 

Psychology-Driven Marketing Strategies Episode Transcript

Rich: My next guest is the CEO and strategic marketing consultant of Cornell Content Marketing, helping B2B businesses become thought leaders by creating long-term demand generation strategies, and eliminating costly and unnecessary short term manipulative tactics like ads.  

Her marketing approach is psychology driven to ensure businesses attract pre-qualified, emotionally engaged buyers. 

Today, we’ll be discussing how you can better understand your ideal customer and what makes them tick, to build lasting relationships and grow your business with Rai Cornell. Rai, welcome to the podcast.  

Rai: Thanks so much for having me, Rich. 

Rich: So I discovered that you have a background in psychology and criminology. And I’m just wondering, how does that influence your marketing approach?  

Rai: Yeah, so I started down the path of becoming a counselor in the prison system because I’m fascinated by human behavior. What makes people tick? What makes people motivated to do good things, bad things, things that they think are good but are actually bad for them. I want to understand that inner working.  

And oddly enough, after getting burned out in the mental health world, I worked at substance abuse counseling centers, community counseling center, a mental hospital. I just completely burned out on that world and the revolving door of how it treats patients.  

So I threw myself full-time into my side hustle, which was freelance writing and freelance copywriting, and it was incredible how much my understanding of human behavior and my experience of working hands-on with clients in those counseling relationships really translated into designing marketing strategies. 

Rich: Now a lot of people who go into copywriting, they’re definitely copywriting schools of thought, and a lot of them lean heavily into psychology. Did you find that when you were getting into copywriting that you were also paying attention to some of the leaders in copywriting and some of the styles in copywriting, or did you pull entirely from your background in psychology?  

Rai: So oddly enough, and not to be too much of a rabble rouser, but a lot of the copywriting and marketing training that I’ve seen out there actually teaches people things that I think are just gross. They’re just manipulative. They’re trying to dupe people into falling for clicking on a particular ad or buying a particular product.  

There’s all this training and, if you can call it ‘skill development’ around how to manipulate people. And I set out to do the opposite. I want to create marketing that makes people feel good, that really creates authentic problem solution relationships between companies and the people that they’re trying to connect with. 

Because there’s no reason for marketing to be the bad guy. Marketing should be the mechanism by which we find solutions to the very real problems in our lives. So why do we need to teach young copywriters and content creators these manipulative tactics when we can really teach them things that are win/win across the board. 

Rich: All right. Love it. Now part of the way that you help businesses exceed is through your ELITE Method. Can you quickly break down that framework for us?  

Rai: Yeah. So the ELITE Method, and I won’t go into each and every step because it’s such a granular process, but it’s really all about looking at what you’re putting out there through an objective lens. 

And this often takes a third-party partner to do this for you. Because I like to say when you’re inside the bottle, you can’t read the label. So even though you’re creating these things, you don’t really know how someone on the outside who doesn’t have your experience, your background, your understanding of your company, your solutions, your products, you don’t understand how somebody who’s encountering that for the first time is really getting an impression of your brand.  

So you have to first objectively look at, examine, that’s the first E, what you’re really putting out there. Then you really need to create a strategy based on the positive psychological outcomes that you want to happen. So a lot of things that I advise my clients against are things like short-term ad strategies and these really high-pressure sales funnels where there’s not even navigation to click out of the video that you’re being forced to watch. And all of that makes people feel like this claustrophobic FOMO combination of icky emotions, and they’re associating that with your brand. 

Whereas if you instead focus on a psychological outcome of giving them this great hit of dopamine of satisfying all the questions in their brain, and really making them feel this bond, and giving them this hit of serotonin where they feel bonded to you because they feel seen and heard and recognized and they feel important in your eyes. Then suddenly you’re creating these positive associations where that person is not only going to become a lifelong loyal customer, but also they’re going to be your biggest cheerleader and biggest word of mouth marketer.  

Rich: Now I love that. And I’m sure a lot of people like the idea of that as long as we have the runway to make that work for us. 

I’m sure you must have had some clients who show up and say, “Great. But what can we do now?” What’s the quick win here, and what do you respond? Do you just say, “I’m sorry, this is a long-term game”, or are there some quick wins?  

Rai: Yeah, absolutely. So I want companies to be able to do this with or without me. So I have a toolkit called, The Demand Generation Brainstorming Toolkit, where you can go to my website, download that for free, and you can do this whole process within your team all by yourself. You don’t even need me. If you feel like, okay, now we need some extra help or need help with the content production, whatever, I can help you with that. But you can really do this process within your team.  

It’s a very deliberate and intentional process, but it’s not something that is out of the reach of any company. You can do this. All it takes is for you to sit down and go, okay, let’s actually think about this. Let’s use that empathy that the vast majority of us humans have and put ourselves in the shoes of the person that we want to connect with. And the free toolkit, it walks you through this entire process.  

But basically the long version of it is you want to understand what people are thinking, feeling, and believing at each of the stages of change. So when you first encounter someone who might want to buy your product or service, they already either have a solution or they have no solution, and they are faced with the option of either sticking with the solution they’re currently in, which is always easier. It’s not comfortable, but sometimes people will find comfort in complaining about their current situation. Or, they have to go through the very uncomfortable process of changing or choosing your product or service. And when you can guide them through those stages of change – which that’s a psychological model based on a lot of substance abuse, behavior change frameworks – and I’ve seen it work wonders with people who have the biggest problems that we face in life as humans.  

So if you think of that, that it can really help someone completely turn their life around from rock bottom to thriving, imagine what it can do for something doing a switch to a more efficient or improved SaaS tool, like what you have to offer. So walking them through this process of pre problem awareness, brand and solution awareness, consideration, evaluation, decision, and then this action relapse reaction, tangled at the end there to land them as a client or a customer. 

You are not only making it easier on them to change and adopt your solution, which is going to be better for them, but also you are pre-selling all of the leads that you’re getting to make it easier on your sales team to do their job and have a higher close rate.  

Rich: So if people are so hesitant for change, they find comfort in the way they’re doing things or they just like to complain, what are some of the tactics that you might employ to get them to realize that there is a better solution and the fear that comes with change is worth it? And if you have an example from a recent job or recent client, I’d love to hear it.  

Rai: Yeah, absolutely. So a lot of the things that companies will employ to help people make that difficult change transition are things like FOMO, the fear of missing out, or this ticking clock countdown. We see this a lot around Black Friday, “you only have until this date to save this much money.” And the implied message is, “or else you’re stupid and, why are you even in charge of money? You should be more responsible than this. Of course you should buy this right now.”  

So rather than using those things that end up leaving people feeling pressured and manipulated and oh my god, I don’t even have time to think this through. Instead, provide all the things that make them have a positive change experience. So for example, breaking down fear, a lot of people are afraid of the unknown. Give them illustrations, vignettes, case studies of exactly what it looks like to work with you. Another thing is answering all of the questions that others do not. 

So there’s a great book called, They Ask You Answer. And I believe the author is Marcus Sheridan. He has this great theory around publicly displaying your prices. Because when people are shopping for things and they come up on your sales page or they come up on your pricing page and they just want to know how much does it cost? Can I even afford this? Is this even something I should be considering? And you don’t display those prices.  

First of all, you’re frustrating them. And you’re not providing that dopamine hit of, oh, I have this gap in my brain of knowledge. Let me find the square peg that goes in the square hole and have that satisfaction feeling. Instead, you’re leaving them feeling deprived. And then you’re also burdening your sales team because when that person reaches out to your sales team and says, “Hey, what’s the price?”, and it’s really not within their budget, then it’s a lose/lose situation. Whereas if you’re upfront and you’re transparent about what your pricing is, you’re instantly building trust with people while giving them that dopamine hit of satisfaction by giving them the square peg to fit in the square hole. 

So you can really pre-sell people along the way by breaking down fears, answering all of the questions that they might have, and then building trust in the sense of just providing free resources. So the more information you can give them, and this goes back to the whole stages of change model where oftentimes companies think that they need to solve the problem at the very end of the stage of change.  

Meaning, what do we want to sell? Let’s solve the problem that our product or service solves. But there’s so many things that lead up to that. And if you can also solve those problems with free content, free resources, tools, videos, social media, content, infographics, whatever the case may be, that is going to build trust along the way. 

And this is the thing that I love seeing happen. When we do customer interviews on the other side of the sale, oftentimes we hear from the people who have chosen our clients is, “Yeah, you guys were more expensive, but I just liked you more than the other companies I was considering.” And that’s the thing is if you can build trust and build that relationship along the way, you can even charge more. and nobody’s going to bat an eye because they value you, they just like you. And they can’t even articulate why most of the time.  

Rich: That all sounds great. And this sounds like it’s a great fit when the person on the other side knows that life is not perfect. Even if they’re not compliant or they like to complain, they’re okay with their situation. It does seem like everything up until this point, there has been some level of interest on their side to make a change.  

Do you have any recommendations or suggestions that might be around demand generation if a client, if somebody listening, is saying people don’t know about my product, they don’t even know that they have a problem. Have you ever run into a situation with a client like that? And then how did you address that issue without advertising? 

Rai: Yes, absolutely. So demand generation is one of my favorite things to do in content marketing because it’s exactly what you said, making people aware of these best kept secrets. And these companies who really have something genuinely problem solving, genuinely they’re trying to better the way people work and live, nobody knows about them. And let’s solve that. Let’s solve that problem. Which is, how do we get people to know that there’s another way?  

Not to be a broken record, but if I go back to the stages of change model, there is a stage called pre problem awareness, where someone is not even aware that they have a problem. And in that situation, that’s where you need to create content that pokes at that problem to make them aware of it.  

For example, I work with a CPR training platform that competes with some of the biggest names in the country, like the American Heart Association and the American Red Cross. A lot of people don’t know that my client exists. They know implicitly about the AHA and the ARC, but they don’t know about my client. And so what we do at the very beginning part of the funnel, which aligns to this beginning part of the stages of change model, is we start drawing attention to the fact that are you having trouble getting your team members to do things that they’re responsible for doing, but that isn’t mission critical? For example, having a valid CPR certification. We’re not even talking about training. We’re not talking about cloud-based record keeping. We’re not talking about automation. We’re not talking about any of those things that my client has to offer. We’re talking about managing humans.  

And when we can speak to a CPR instructor or a training administrator or a safety officer within an organization and say, are you having trouble getting your team to do things that you’re responsible for having them do, but they really have no desire to do. And we give them resources on how to better manage people, build better relationships, inspire people to be more self-accountable. That’s when they go, oh my god, this is really helpful for this thing that I’m struggling with. Who is this company that’s providing this content on LinkedIn, SEO, email marketing, whatever the case may be. Oh great, this is this company called Pro Trainings. Now, let me see. What do they do? Oh, they offer CPR certification and automated tracking and reminders, and oh, they’re accredited just like the AHA and the ARC. Wow. Okay.  

Now suddenly, they are aware that there’s a problem, and they’re aware of my client in a positive light based on something that wasn’t originally connected to the problem my client actually solves.  

Rich: All right. Makes sense. Now that sounds to me, and maybe it is a B2B client, I don’t know, but it almost sounds B2C. I’m wondering, do you have to tailor your strategies different for B2B versus B2C?  

Rai: Absolutely. There’s some different decision making that happens within B2B and B2C. Personally, I love B2B because it’s more complicated. There’s usually this bifurcated audience, and usually a lot of the objections that buyers come to the B2B relationship table with are more pragmatic and logical, yet they’re being decided upon by very emotion driven beings. So I just like this kind of duplicity of messaging that we need to target the logical side of the brain, as well as the emotional. 

With B2C, oftentimes it’s 95% emotion and only 5% logic. The other thing is with B2C, you’re speaking to one person, the person with the credit card. Within B2B, you have to tailor your messaging to the gatekeeper and the decision maker.  

So oftentimes the people who bring the potential solutions, let’s say we have companies A, B, and C and – let me think of an example – let’s say a manufacturing company. A Caterpillar is trying to decide, okay, which company should we go with, company A, B, or C? Well, the CEO, the COO, they might be making the decision, but they’re not the ones who are going to go out and do the research. They’re going to tell their directors, their managers, maybe even their personal assistants, “Hey, go research this for me. Go find, based on these criteria, who do you think are going to be the top three options for us? Then let’s bring these to a meeting, let’s talk to the board. Let’s decide from there.”  

And so that kind of messaging becomes very bifurcated where you have to talk to the researcher, the gatekeeper, and you have to talk to the decision maker. And those two people might have very different motivations. So it does get more complex within B2B. But to me, that’s what makes it so much more fun.  

Rich: Now when you’re creating content for these different audiences, are you placing them in different places on your website or your marketing? Or do you have a message that means more things depending on who you are?  

Rai: It’s all about placement. So think about that gatekeeper. So they’ve been tasked with the job of going out and finding three potential vendors to be better, let’s say I.T. infrastructure providers or help desk service providers, and where are they going to go first? Most likely Google. They’re going to go to Google and type in “efficient helpdesk solutions” or “helpdesk providers in Florida”, or “AI enabled helpdesk”, something like that, that they’ve been in charge of finding.  

That’s where we put things like blog content, SEO, rich resources, videos, infographics, things like that. Then once they latch onto that content, we might have a content upgrade or a resource that we can get their email information and put them into an email funnel from there.  

Once they’re in our email funnel, then we can say, “Hey, are you trying to decide between this and this? Here’s our complete buyer’s guide to making a decision for the most efficient IT infrastructure service provider for your organization. And that is something that we would use to speak to the decision maker. They, the gatekeepers, can be the one who brings it to the meeting. They’re just our little messenger.  

But then we have that content tailored to who is making the decision. So it’s all about layering the messaging based on what the experience is actually going to be for the humans involved and speaking to the right person at the right stage of that decision making process. 

Rich: All right. Now, I’m sure a lot of people are sitting there saying, this sounds wonderful, but to be honest, I’m a small business. This sounds like enterprise level solutions. How can small businesses apply the insight you shared with us today on behavior change without a large budget or with extensive resources? 

Rai: Yeah, so some of my examples are enterprise level, but this is something that you can apply at the most granular level. A kid with a lemonade stand could apply this instead of saying, “Hey, get your lemonade today. We’re only going to be here until 2 p. m. and we’re the cheapest in town. Say, speak to the pain points of the people that you want to address. Talk about how you’re going to provide a refreshing beverage, zero added sugar.  

Maybe you are raising money for your sports team, and you want something that people can feel good about spending their dollar on. Speak to those things and be very honest and create that problem solution relationship. As opposed to choosing the FOMO, and the pressure, and the scarcity tactics. This applies to any business, B2B, B2C, small, medium, large enterprise, everyone.  

Rich: Awesome. Rai, if people want to learn more about you, if they are interested in using your services, where can we send them online?  

Rai: Yeah, absolutely. You can check us out at cornellcontentmarketing.com. And if you want that free brainstorming demand gen kit, go to cornellcontentmarketing.com/demandgenkit.  

Rich: Awesome. And we’ll have those links in the show notes. Rai, thank you so much for coming by today.  

Rai: Thanks so much. 

 

Show Notes:  

Rai Cornell is the CEO of Cornell Content Marketing, where she helps businesses create psychology-driven demand generation strategies that build trust and inspire lasting relationships, with the help of her ELITE Framework. Download her free Demand Generation Brainstorming Toolkit! 

Rich Brooks is the President of flyte new media, a web design & digital marketing agency in Portland, Maine, and founder of the Agents of Change. He’s passionate about helping small businesses grow online and has put his 25+ years of experience into the book, The Lead Machine: The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing.