Using Psychology In Online Marketing

The emergence of social media has given a lot of options for online marketers to access new avenues for advertising. Marketers now have the means to share products through Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and other forms of social networking. However, to make your campaign effective you need to know how to influence people. This is where employing psychology into your strategy comes in.

Psychology is not about manipulation or taking advantage of what you know about the human psyche. It is about understanding how people think so that you can cater to their needs.

In a podcast hosted Creative Thirst, Bobby Hewitt, along with Convert,  shared insights on how you can use marketing psychology in designing your website. Picking up where we left off, we delve more into the different types of psychology you can employ to influence the decision making of a customer. Psychology is not about manipulation or taking advantage of what you know about the human psyche. It is about understanding how people think so that you can cater to their needs.

Human Psychology, Marketing Psychology And Social Influence

Though not everyone can be influenced right away, successful businesses are using human psychology to target the emotions and personalities of people to successfully promote their brand or product.

Human psychology is an amazing program of science that analyzes the mind, behaviors, decisions and actions of fellow humans. It can be surprising how we sometimes behave on certain things especially towards the people we value the most. In a wide marketplace, people are making decisions according to several factors. Though not everyone can be influenced right away, successful businesses are using human psychology to target the emotions and personalities of people to successfully promote their brand or product.

Going back to the “Monkey see, Monkey do” principle, we discussed a few weeks ago, people are unable to make the appropriate mode or behavior and tend to look towards other people for social proof in order to determine what behavior they have to take. There are plenty of good products out there and the competition is pretty high for brands. Due to social influences, potential customers are most vulnerable to marketing feedback and values based on justified sources which will lead to their final decision. Social media sites are excellent examples of online social proof and are moving more towards being a social tool than it was ever before.

In an extensive point of view, people are actually influenced by social institutions, the people they interact with and their individual socialization. Their choices can either be good or bad, they might be unconsciously assessing certain clues and instinctively processing based on the behavioral force of others and easily influences by others – but this is what social influence is all about and it is a very powerful marketing approach that marketers and companies can use.

Social Psychology Principles

People are actually influenced by social institutions, the people they interact with and their individual socialization

It’s every marketer’s and business owner’s job to know why and how their prospects and customers behave. There are a lot of reasons behind it and these are determined as social psychology occurrences. If you would never implement it in the first place, then you can’t take advantage of the powerful social proof online phenomena.

[Tweet “Marketing departments are using shopper insights more extensively than merchandising”]

Armed with important social psychology principles, you can implement the best marketing approach and help you increase your conversion rate effectively;

1. It operates most effectively when we’re observing the behavior of people.
2. It explains why testimonials by ordinary people online are so powerful vs. the paragraph of marketing about why the product is the greatest in the world.
3. We tend to believe regular people more than we believe the company because we see those regular people as more like us.
4. People use the actions of other people especially when we view those other people to as similar to ourselves.
5. We’re subconsciously assessing how close they are to the belief streak we possess, before assessing if we should follow the crowd actions.
6. It is a phenomena or observational learning. People may benefit from coordinating their choices such as listening to reading or watching the same things as others or the so called wisdom of the crowds.
7. A belief that other people know more than us.

Are you ready to take advantage of the social psychology for your everyday marketing? Let us know what you think! Come visit us at Convert to know more about CRO and A/B Testing.