Marketing professionals have used psychology to influence customer behavior for years, often having great success.
Having the insight into a few psychological principles is always helpful while creating websites, marketing your products, creating posts on social media and many such things.
Using psychology helps improve consumer experience and help in leads into conversion. Understanding the human mind will help understand the consumers and in turn developing your campaign to market. However, the difficult part is to converting complex psychological concepts into actual actions that would convert into decisions.
Color- Color psychology has always been the main ingredients to grab user attention. Different colors convey different messages.
For example: Blue conveys tranquility, sense of trust or loyalty; Red conveys passion, drive, warmth; green conveys balance, nature, harmony.
It is very important to understand the color and its messages because if the content and color don’t match the users get weirded out. You can think of it as a Chinese restaurant coloured green or a website that sells natural products of Ayurveda in the color red. Is it not unsettling?
- Match the content and the colors of your website.
- Use colors of urgency like red or orange to evoke the motion.
- Showcase your brand color in your content. E.g.: Facebook (Blue)
Simplicity- it is one of the main criteria to enhance user experience. According to the research conducted in the University of Basel stated that visitors on a website judge the website in just 0.05 seconds! Thus it is vital to keep the website and its content as simple and relatable as possible, which will help the humans not to automatically ignore certain information. One could say that why emojis and GIFs are so trendy because they not only help in displaying realistic emotions but also faster and a simpler way of conveying what a person is feeling.
But how does this help in content marketing? At the end of the day, we got to write the information. Well, then why not write it in a way it is most catchy?
- Use a lot of pictures. After a tiring day you just want to know the gist of the whole content and not read 2 pages on it! Here is where pictures come into play. Pictures and graphics help summarize the whole content helping the users to simplify comprehending the information.
- Keep the language simple. No one wants to keep checking the dictionary to understand what a word means, it is too exhausting! Keeping the language and the topic clear will not only help ease your own work but also stop the users from getting irritated.
- Focus on one topic. There are a lot of articles wherein writers want to share numerous ideas into one blog post. It just makes user’s think- “What does the writer want to say?” making them confused. It is better to focus on one topic per blog or post or article to help convey your message clearly.
- Use hashtags. It is essential to use hashtags in social media posts for it to reach maximum audience of interest. It also helps the post to trend and go viral.
Proof- Most of the audience don’t want to fall for the gimmicks of the marketers in the industry. Is it not what all of us do? We check through ratings, reviews and comments before buying and product or even going to a restaurant. We believe what a friend or a stranger on the review says more than the product description.
This is due to the psychological principle of social proof, which basically means that people are more likely to act when they see others doing it. This becomes more important when the digital presence of your company grows.
- Use relatable information and real-life case studies in the content.
- Collaborate with influencers to promote your brand.
- Establish trust with the audience.
- Make the audience comfortable to talk about your brand.
In conclusion, these concepts will not only help attract customers but also improve your content naturally. Applying these concepts to your projects will take time and consideration at the beginning. But before you know it, these principles will become a natural part of your content planning