The Crucial Role of Psychology in Digital Marketing
With how quickly the digital world is moving, brands are constantly vying for their audience’s attention. In addition to effective strategies, content, and graphics, there is an even more powerful factor at play, driving the marketers’ misconceptions regarding the consumer—psychology. Knowing how a mind works and what affects its logical reasoning can be the deciding factor for an effective, or ineffective, digital marketing campaign.
Understanding Consumer Behaviour
Psychology, at its most basic, provides marketers with insight on how to manipulate someone’s mind. Digital marketers who study behavioural science know that the behavioural, emotional, and cognitive patterns of human beings can better assist in understanding what drives people to act. As simple as buying a product, subscribing to a newsletter, or even sharing a social media post—people do these actions for a reason, and marketers need to identify what that reason is to construct deeper campaigns.
The Power of Persuasion: Using Psychological Triggers
Psychology is a marketer’s best friend. There are countless ways in which a marketer can use a psychological approach to manipulate and change how a consumer acts. Some of these principles are more popular for use in digital marketing and are:
• Social Proof: People are social beings and tend to look up to others for validation. Because of this, social media followers and users’ ratings have a big impact on forming a new customer’s trust. Once people understand that others had a good experience with a specific service or product, they tend to try it themselves.
• Scarcity and Urgency: This trigger works with the fear of missing out. Businesses sell their products faster if they use limited-time offers, countdown timers, or say, “There are only X items left.” These practices dangerously motivate people to purchase without considering the consequences.
• Reciprocity: In support of reciprocity, we feel that if someone does something nice for us, we must do something nice in return. Marketers often apply this principle when offering free trials, free resources, or giveaways, which entice customers to purchase in exchange.
• Anchoring: This cognitive bias happens when individuals are making decisions and base them heavily on the one piece of information presented first. This is prevalent in the digital market with pricing strategies, for example, where an item with a high price is positioned next to a sale item or an item at a lower price, which makes it seem like a bargain.
Creating User-Centric Experiences
User experience (UX) is very important in digital marketing, and there is so much psychology behind the design of websites and applications that users love to use. Marketers who know how the human brain filters information, browses the web, and engages with content can design better and simpler experiences for their users.
Exploiting Behavioural Targeting
Behavioural targeting relies on information about a user’s previous activity on the internet with the goal of anticipating and altering their behaviour. From a psychological perspective, this follows the principle known as predictive behaviour. Marketers are able to create tailored advertisements to appeal to specific interests of a consumer by analysing their online activity like search history, social media engagement, clicks, and many more.
Leveraging Emotions through Storytelling
The truth is this—the more you tell customers stories, the more you appeal to their emotions. Leverage emotions and build strong connections for brand loyalty. In psychology, it is proven that stories are easier to remember as compared to mere statistics or facts (Kakas, 2018). Marketers are known to let these tactics aid in bringing fear, happiness, nostalgia, or even pride into play for better audience engagement.
Harnessing Cognitive Biases for Attention
When deeply processed, cognitive biases are reasons why people make poor judgments, but the plus side is that they make the best and fastest types of decisions. With their preconception understanding stream, marketers are able to track and control the steps useful for the brand image and identity. Use bias to capture attention.
References:
Cialdini, R. B. (2009). Influence: Science and practice (5th ed.). Allyn & Bacon.
Kakas, A