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What is marketing essentially about? People tend to focus on majestic designs, perfect SEO, great ads, amazing content, and the like. However, at the bottom of all this is the understanding of the human psyche. If you don’t understand how people, specifically consumers, tick, all your efforts won’t get the full grasp of what they are supposed to do.
There’s no need to major in psychology in order to understand all the ways that you can attract the attention of your customers. You just need to grasp some vital psychology principles that are bound to have a significant effect on how marketing your startup pans out. In this article, we are going to discuss some of the important psychological tips and tricks that you need to apply in order to affect your customer base.
Remember Maslow’s hierarchy of needs?
If you’ve had psychology in high school or college, you certainly remember Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Basically, whenever someone is searching for something such as your product, they are doing so in order to fill out a deep psychological need. What you need to do is understand what that need is and how to use it to appeal to the consumer. You need to underline the basic psychological need that is behind every search for a particular product of yours. While it’s a fact that there are products that can meet more than one need, let’s keep it simple.
Let’s say that you are selling organic food. Then the need is obviously psychological. If you are selling jewelry, the need is esteem. If it’s antivirus software for your customers’ PC, tablet, or phone, then the need is security. So, when you are marketing your product, focus on the tone, and use the words that suit the particular need. You can also use keyword research to find what people are asking about your products. This is how you can easily determine what the intent behind the potential customer’s search is. Then, all you need to do is connect the questions with particular product features.
The strength of your identity and brand
One of the most important cards that you need to play when it comes to your customers is trust. And in order to do that, you need to have a strong brand and identity that people can relate to and put their faith in. In order to have that, you need to really understand who and what you are as a business. It is crucial that you formulate your brand right away because it is going to affect your design, communication, marketing, etc. The way that people connect with brands is quite similar to the way that they connect with other people. If your brand is inconsistent, people aren’t really going to see you as reliable.
The main elements that drive your brand are:
- Mission
- Vision
- Product
- Goals
- Target audience
- Employee perception
Instead of paying for branding, focus on the questions you want to have answered. Ask yourself as well as your employees:
- Why are you in this business?
- What is it that we do as a business?
- Who are our customers?
- Who is our greatest competition?
- What will our company be in 5 years?
- What is our company’s culture?
Start with these questions to have everyone on the same page, and define what your brand really is.
Make what you claim believable through repetition
People are actually quite easily persuaded if you keep repeating your claim long enough. When you define what your message is, it needs to be heard as much as possible, and in the result, it will be more believable. This is what web developers refer to as the illusion of truth. The fact about this method is that it works the best when the user’s attention span is low. The average span is 8 seconds, so you need to do your best to repeat the benefits just enough on your product page.
First, you need to determine what the benefit of your product is. It shouldn’t be a hard thing to do, and the best idea is to go for the most obvious one. Then, you should repeat the benefit(s) throughout the page’s layout 3 to 5 times. The fact is that users scan the page before they delve into its content, so it is crucial that the benefit is underlined in the headline, introduction, subheads, bullet points, and the conclusion.
Impact the customers’ subconscious with sensory words
This has nothing to do with fancy adjectives like high-quality, state-of-the-art, and the like. Sensory words are in fact those that depict and incite a particular feeling. You need to be aware that our subconscious creates a database of sensory data that it receives (such as smell, taste, sound, sight, and touch). When the brain has this information, it activates the specific sensory areas.
What you should do is open up Microsoft Excel and create a table where you are going to input sound, touch, sight, taste, and smell into headers. Then take a good look at what kind of sensory properties your product has. Don’t take too long, because it’s not concrete if you can’t imagine it right away.
In order to truly appeal to your customer base, you simply have to grasp some essential principles of psychology. It’s all about understanding the psyche of the consumer, and then using specific techniques to attract them to your product. Every startup needs to be aware of this because it lies at the core of successful marketing.
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