The Psychology Absolutely Necessary For Your Digital Marketing Campaign

How familiar are you with psychology? There’s a chance that you’ve listened to classes in high school or college, but the real question is how much of it has stuck with you? And if something has, are you implementing it into your marketing efforts today? Because, if you are not, there is a high probability that your company’s marketing is crippled.

The reason why psychology is important to marketing is that it is basically all about the way your customer base is affected by various psychological factors. If you don’t have a proper understanding of what makes people form their buying decisions, your marketing campaigns simply won’t do as well as they could. If you understand how people think, you can improve your marketing efforts a lot.

The big “Why?”

As a marketer, you need to comprehend why your efforts resulted in particular occurrences. If there’s a big spike in client performance, you need to be fully aware of why it has come to it. It could be a variety of reasons, the improved targeting that you have applied, seasonality, activity among your competitors, etc. It’s not much different from the way that a psychologist evaluates their results. They need to be well aware of why an increase of dopamine makes you more susceptible to schizophrenia. Basically, both psychology and marketing depend on insights and understanding the big “Why?”

What makes your customers tick?

There is a wide variety of strategies and factors that can influence what your customers buy. When you properly implement psychological triggers into your marketing campaigns, you are bound to get much better results. These strategies can be broadly summed up into two groups.

The first is rational marketing. This is a strategy which promotes the product’s general quality and practicality by underlining its benefits rather than features. In other words, you target the rational/logical consumer.

The latter is emotional marketing. In this case, the strategy dives into factors that affect the customers on a personal level. This means that it focuses mostly on color, tone, mood, and lighting, in order to advocate brand loyalty and boost conversions.

Emotion-driven behavior

The truth, however, is that the majority of customers base their buying decisions on their feelings and experiences, more so than on the information that they are presented with about the product’s features and benefits. Therefore, it is essential to your marketing strategy that you engage with your customers’ emotions. You can do this via storytelling, enticing use of images, compelling subject lines, and an effective copy. By engaging with your customer on the emotional level, you make then unconsciously rationalize what they are going to do.

Social proof

There is a lot to the fact that we are affected by how the crowd perceives things. If someone else has done it, we are more likely to follow in their steps. This is enhanced by the fact that many people have done the same thing. So, if you have a website that shows a growing amount of follows and likes, you are more likely to engage your customers to buy from you. This is because people look for validation as a part of their whole decision-making process.

Reciprocity

Proficient consumers are well aware of the value of their data. Still, if you offer them something that they will find of equal value, they will be willing to exchange that data with you. For example, if you offer a 20% discount to people who sign up to your newsletter, they are certainly going to be more interested in doing so.

Web design

In this era of the internet, you must not forget about the importance of your website and proper web design. Your website is the headquarters of all your digital marketing efforts. When people interact with you online, they are looking for the perfect user experience and the way you design your website has a strong psychological effect on how they perceive your brand.

There are many essential web design items that you need to pay attention to, such as navigation, typography, space, CTA-s, images, videos, style of the buttons, etc. Furthermore, proper web design appeals both to people and search engines, and SEO is an important aspect of bringing relevant traffic to your site.

Commitment and consistency

The fact about us as people is that we want to be seen as reliable and true to what we say and promise. There are small ways that you can get your customers committed to your brand, such as having them subscribe to your means of communication, or taking part in a program that you are holding. This way, there is a higher chance that they are actually going to buy from you.

Working with the data that you gather

Your marketing team needs to profile the data that they receive from your customer base and see what its significance is in statistical terms. This means that you are coming up with trustworthy conclusions based on the data that you have gathered, which will help you create and modify your marketing strategies. It’s very similar to the way that psychologists inspect the samples that they get, as they need to get reliable conclusions too.

It is essential that you don’t take the results that you get at face value. You need to go deeper than that. Investigate further than the last click, in order to find all the paths that lead to conversion. This way you can gather deeper insight into the way your clients make decisions, and then implement that knowledge into your marketing plans. Basically, it’s all about taking all the factors into account before you come up with the final decision.

Coming up with a positive buying environment

It has been proven that online businesses have merely five seconds to draw a visitor’s interest, and during this small period of time, a prospective customer forms an opinion about your business. A positive buying environment isn’t really related to the products or services that your business provides. It’s much more about creating the perfect user experience, properly phrasing your online content, and constantly promoting a positive perception of your brand, so people are inclined to believe that the purchasing decisions that they are making are right for them.

Basically, it is essential for every marketer to understand the psychological factors that they can use to improve their digital marketing strategy and influence their customer base. It is particularly important that they understand how their target market and customers think. Not having the proper grasp on the psychology of how your clients make their purchasing decisions will make it much harder for you to come up with a strategy that will bring the kind of results that you are after.

About the Author

Nick Brown is a blogger and a marketing expert currently engaged on projects for Media Gurus, an Australian business, and marketing resource. He is an aspiring street artist and does Audio/Video editing as a hobby.