You’ve probably seen pop-up banners that say, “Congratulations! You are visitor #1,000,000! Click to claim your prize!” back in the early 2000s. Neil Patel of Quicksprout said that shady online marketing tactics like this worked then — businesses got the clicks and website visits they wanted because consumers didn’t know any better.
Today, spammy marketing like this still exists on the internet, but consumers are more informed than ever. They are also now more empowered with anti-spam and ad blocking applications to help them out. No consumer who’s been on the internet in at least the last 5 years will fall for obvious scams like that.
As customers become wiser, online marketers also need to step up their game. Instead of being aggressive and tricking the audience into clicking, businesses must start understanding consumer psychology and applying this in their content marketing strategies.
What is Consumer Psychology?
About.com defines consumer psychology as a “specialty area that studies how our thoughts, beliefs, feelings and perceptions influence how people buy and relate to goods and services.” With that said, the concept lies heavily on influencing — or changing — a customer’s behavior.
Behavior change is exactly what every marketer should be in the business for. If you’re not changing people’s behavior in favor of your business, product, or service, it can hardly be called marketing.
According to Uberflip, a content marketing analytics firm, consumers’ buying decisions are affected factors beyond their awareness. If content marketers can successfully apply consumer psychology in online content, they can better help drive higher brand engagement, improve sales, and, ultimately, strengthen consumer loyalty.
Adam Ferrier, a consumer psychologist, names three factors necessary to change people’s behaviors in his book, The Advertising Effect. These factors included forming a positive motivation, creating skill, and making opportunity available to perform the desired behavior. Read on to find out how capitalizing on these three conditions can improve the effectiveness of every SEO, social media, and content production strategy.
Using Content Marketing to Form Motivation
Motivation can be formed by individual incentive and social. Individual incentive is defined by Ferrier as the idea that at a basic human level we are motivated to undertake a certain behavior either to gain pleasure or avoid pain, i.e. when something evokes the right emotions. Motivation is also caused by social norms, or the idea that we are driven to act in a way we believe would be considered normal.
Satisfying the motivation factor equates to showing people how the desired behavior you want them to take will either reduce pain or increase pleasure in their lives, and you need to reassure them that is a perfectly acceptable behavior to undertake.
For example, marketers must know how to improve a business blog using emotions.If your content is meant for mothers, using key emotions for good content would include a heartwarming write-up to accompany avideo like this from Pampers Japan, or a funny list of Mother’s Day quotes and short stories to induce some laughs.
According to digital marketing expert Aaron Beashel, the key to creating motivation through content marketing is by telling a brand story. A brand story can be defined as the underlying ‘theme’ that disseminates itself across every one of your content pieces, including blog posts, eBooks, webinars and more.
To enhance the effectiveness of your content marketing, create a brand story that presents the benefits of your product without being salesy, and tell that story subliminally across all your content pieces.
Creating Skill with Content Marketing
Changing behavior also involves whether or not the target market in question has the skills to make the desired action. Ferrier cites weight loss programs as an example of this. While a majority of overweight people want to lose weight, very few actually do. This is because they don’t usually have the skills to do so.
All good content marketing educates the reader and creates skill, and the HubSpot blog is a great example of this. They educate their readers on how to do inbound marketing effectively by producing blog posts, eBooks & webinars that aim to teach their target audience of online marketers on how to blog, use social media, create lead nurturing campaigns, and so on. By doing this, they are giving people the skills needed to undertake the action that HubSpot want them to make — which is to encourage marketers to use their marketing software.
To make your content marketing effective, ensure that you are teaching people the skills they need to make the behavioral change you need them to make.
Building Opportunity through Content Marketing
Another factor that needs to be taken into consideration is the opportunity to adopt your product or service, and what matters here is whether or not their external environment allows the audience to do so.
In content marketing, we have internal or owned media, such as the company website or business blog, available for use. At the same time, we need to create the opportunity for our target market to reach us by using external platforms that they are already accessing. These external platforms include using SEO tactics to be visible on search engine rankings, as well as creating great content on social networking websites.
Make sure you have content that addresses the audience’s information needs available at every possible opportunity. As a marketer, you need to remove blockages that prevent them from taking action.
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Marketing and consumer psychology are concepts that are centuries old, but with the rise of the internet, a new communication medium has changed the game.
While online marketers obsess over traffic acquisition and conversion rates, we tend to forget that consumers are real people with emotions that need to be understood and spoken to. With that, it becomes more critical every day to apply the principles of consumer psychology and capitalize on forming motivation, creating skill, and building opportunity today to achieve your content marketing goals.
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