🧑‍🔬 How Elevate Makes You Want To Learn

Using The Co***etion Bias

Author

Josh Viner
January 23, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

Brain training app, Elevate, has helped over 50 million people improve their communication, math, and memory skills.

Their ads are a masterclass in "edutainment."

They do it with The Completion Bias.

Here’s what I mean:

🧪 The Completion Bias

The Completion Bias is our tendency to want to complete a task we are given. It’s rooted in the neurobiological mechanisms of the brain - completing a task releases our pleasure chemical, dopamine.

🤳 How Elevate Uses The Completion Bias

Elevate’s ads make us feel the need to complete the task we’re given.

Almost all of their hooks ask a question and present a challenge for us to complete within the ad itself:

🧠 How You Can Use The Completion Bias

The key to the Completion Bias is presenting a simple task to your prospects to complete.

To do this, you can:

  1. Use curiosity to kickstart an action

  2. Doubt their abilities (they’ll want to prove you wrong)

  3. Show their progress as they complete the task in the ad

    • This is based on another psychological phenomenon called The Goal Gradient, which states as people get closer towards a goal, they’ll be more motivated and work faster to complete it.

  4. Make them feel good and motivate them as they complete the task

Some hooks using the Completion Bias are:

  • How fast can you [insert a niche-related simple task]?

  • Think you’re [insert character trait]? Do this to find out.

  • If you’re truly a [insert target audience], you’ll understand this:

  • Only 10% of [target audience] get this right. Are you one of them?

All of these use curiosity, challenge the prospect, and subtly doubt their abilities so that they’ll want to complete the challenge.

Speaking of challenges:

My challenge to you this week is to think about how you can hook your prospects with a simple task related to your brand or niche.

How can you use the Completion Bias in your ads?

Let me know how it goes!

Until next time,

Josh

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Some Links You May Find Interesting:

This section includes some relevant articles, videos, or social posts on marketing and psychology that you might find interesting:

  • Atria: A new tool for creative inspiration, research and ideation just launched. I haven’t yet had a chance to try it but it looks very promising and plan to do so this week. It’s similar to Foreplay but has some additional features like review mining, the ability to filter by ad theme, and more.

  • 8 Psychology Books to Read: Some of my favourite books are listed here by Creative Strategist, Sarah Levinger. I’ve read all of them except #3 and #6. Have you read any of these?