Marketing and psychology are strongly intertwined. Understanding both and their influences on the respective other discipline is key to decoding the mind of the customer and unlocking full success in your marketing efforts. In this article, we will explore how to use psychology in marketing.
Author Bio: Melissa Schmidt is party of the content marketing team at Conjoint.Online. They provide tools and support for product and pricing research.
Marketing is more or less based on nurturing relationships with consumers to present your products or services in a pleasing and attractive way. As a result, they will want to buy from you or your company
Psychology is a multifaceted discipline that involves the scientific study of the human mind and its behavior.
The links between marketing and psychology are often quite evident. To effectively build a connection with consumers, it is necessary to understand their behavior and their motivations toward making purchasing decisions.
As a marketer, you want to gain the attention of your audience and direct it toward your offerings by making them more attractive and compelling than the competition.
Unfortunately, different people in the audience are going to have different perceptions about the same product. So, a marketer must understand the beliefs, attitudes, and beliefs of the individuals in their audience. Then, they must design a marketing campaign that retains consumers and encourages them to buy from you. Let’s take a look at how to use psychology in marketing by considering the most important tactics.
How to use Psychology in Marketing: 11 Strategies to Unlock full Potential
Relate to the Customer
The best way to motivate potential customers to buy is to tell them that other customers in the same situation have already become successful by buying from you. When you establish a common ground with your potential customers, you will have reached the first and most important step in the psychological process to convince your customers they should buy from you.
Start Small
By starting small and then following up and scaling up your requests, you will convince your potential customers that they need to take action. This “foot in the door” technique is commonly used by nearly every professional marketer. One example would be non-profit organizations. They begin with asking for your email address and nothing more. Then later, they begin sending you notices about their progress and events. Shortly after that, they ask you for a donation.
The opposite approach can be just as effective. Instead of starting small, a large donation is requested at the start. The customer thinks the request is too large and usually turns it down. The marketer then makes a smaller request instead.
The customer forgets that he may have had an even smaller amount in mind originally and only compares the second request with the first. Since it is much lower, by comparison, he decides to buy.
Reward Customers
Rewards are like the stamp cards used by restaurants that give customers something free, or at a lower price, by completing a card with stamps. The process works because of what’s known in psychology as “operant conditioning.”
Operant conditioning is commonly done by rewarding a particular behavior to get more of the same behavior later. However, after time, customers become bored or may decide they do not want to have the product offered.
A more effective way to bring in customers is to reward them randomly when they don’t expect it. Imagine, for instance, a restaurant that gives away free drinks, but they would do it randomly so no one would know when it would happen. The result is that people will go back to the restaurant more and more often to maximize their chances of getting a free drink.
Make an Appealing Sales Pitch
Construct your sales pitch based on what the customer will gain from purchasing your products or services. Think about using relative terms rather than terms that are absolute. Customers will more often think about the amount of money they will save or spend in percentages rather than thinking in absolute terms.
Frame your sales pitch and marketing message in a positive and appealing way. Your customers will recognize and appreciate the value of what you are offering and be more willing to make a purchase.
Appeal to the Senses
Visually seeing a product or service is the most effective sense to entice customers to consider buying. Use visuals when you market your products or services. No matter whether it’s a simple brochure or flyer, emails, your website, blog, or social media, make sure your presentation is colorful and visually appealing.
Sound is also important. When you see a TV commercial, the jingles and sounds help you remember the brand by planting the information more firmly into your mind.
Humans are classically conditioned to retain information best when it appears to be more relevant or important. Jingles tend to stick in everyone’s heads and create an association with your brand.
Capture Early Attention
You must capture and direct the attention of your potential customers as soon as possible. Whether you’re creating a blog and need viewers to pay attention to some image, video, link, or call to action, make sure you have your audience’s attention. Make your products or services stand out or mention them as often as possible.
Simplify Your Webpage
Clutter is distracting. You only have a few seconds to capture the attention of viewers with your website. Any time a page begins to feel cluttered, overwhelming, or difficult to find something, viewers are going to leave.
In today’s age of information overload, no one viewing your website should inadvertently scroll past what you want them to focus on. Always remember that your viewers have extremely short attention spans. Engage your audience immediately to capture their undivided attention. Otherwise, you will lose them.
Make Eye Contact
If you and a customer were standing next to each other, one of the first rules of marketing is to make eye contact. When you are creating an advertisement or other marketing material, try to incorporate the same concept there as well.
Eye contact has declined a lot in both work and social settings recently mostly because of mobile devices and texting. But, humans have been using eye contact for thousands of years to indicate positive or negative feelings. So, if your site has a pair of eyes in it, make sure they look pleasant and confident, and look directly at the viewer.
Prime your Customers
When your potential customers are not knowledgeable about your field or your products, they may want to scamper away early because they feel they are in unfamiliar territory. One of the best ways to combat this is to “prime” your customers with an explanatory email beforehand. This will give them useful knowledge about your products and services and make them more comfortable later when you make your sales pitch.
With an email, you can give your potential customers a heads-up about the price range of your products. This allows them to have time do to their own research and think about pricing ahead of time before you give them your sales pitch.
Anchoring
This can also be an ideal time for you to use a technique known as “anchoring”. Anchoring is when you begin a discussion about the price of something by starting off at a rather high price. This sets an “anchor” in your customer’s mind as a base. Later, when you offer to sell at a lower price, they will remember the higher price and consider the lower price a good deal.
Anchoring, however, can be a problem when you are faced with a knowledgeable customer who already knows the price of competing products. In most cases, starting out with a relatively high price is simply a suggestion. Anchoring often requires solid evidence and using your own judgment to find the best way to proceed.
Take Advantage of Your Audience
When you want a potential customer to remember your products or services, you need to coerce them into working for you. The more they think about your products or services, the more about them they will remember.
Incorporate activities or quizzes into your marketing campaign. Ask your website viewers rhetorical questions about what your products or services can do for them so they actively are thinking about them instead of just observing your sales pitch. When you increase their depth of processing the information from your sales pitch, the more they will lean toward buying.
Successful marketing depends on using psychology effectively. For this, it is critical to understand how to use psychology in marketing. By applying the various strategies discussed above into your company’s marketing strategy, you will have an effective head start into selling your products or services and be more successful at marketing than ever before!