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5 PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES TO HELP YOU UNDERSTAND YOUR PROSPECTS

/ Editor - 23 April 2018

Did you know there are 313M Monthly active users on Twitter, that a lot of users just on one social platform alone in fact 7.476 Billion of the total population use social media daily.

Like any business, you’re most likely asking yourself how do my customers use these platforms. Well, the base of any Social Platform is (surprise, surprise) to be social. Human Psychological theories is a great way to cut through all the noise and reach your target market.

Using Human Psychological theories to help better understand your audience and how they work. So today in the post will be about 5 different Human Psychological theories that can improve your marketing and how you can use them.


1. Social Proof

Social proof is when people make you adopt the beliefs or mimic the actions of a large group of people you admire or trust. Many people know this as the ‘social influence’, and it all comes down to the fact humans love to follow others behaviour. How else would you explain some of the horrific trends?

How to use the social proof theory in your own marketing?

You can use social proof in many different ways to improve your business marketing.

  • User-generated Content:
    Content made by users like testimonials, reviews and social mentions all 3 are great ways for leveraging social proof.

  • Sharing Buttons & Sharing Counter:
    Adding social plugins and sharing buttons to your blog will display the number of shares a piece of content has. If visitors can see that people have shared your post already, they are more likely to share.

They work because both show positive experiences from your customers and show to new prospects your business is trustworthy. Therefore, if you have any other forms of social proof, you should promote them.


2. The Decoy Effect

The decoy effect is a psychological occurrence that means consumers are more likely to change their mind between two options when you show them a third less appealing option.

How to use the decoy effect theory in your own marketing?

Think about the New York Times with their subscription offers

Compare the weekend deals and week deals separately.

  • Saturday-Sunday for $2.50
  • Against The Extended Weekend (Fri-Sun) for $2.50

  • Weekday (Mon-Fri) for $4.99

  • Against Daily Delivery (7 days) for $4.99.

So why did The New York Post add two more options? They added the first two options to make the last two options look so much better.

When creating product pages for your business you can take advantage of the decoy effect by using the same principle for your pricing strategy.


3. Information-Gap Theory

The information gap theory of curiosity develops when we feel there is a gap between what we know and what we want to know. The theory was developed by George Loewenstein in the early 1990s, proposes that we have a strong emotional response when faced with an information-gap.

How to use the information-gap theory in your own marketing?

You will need to create content that generates curiosity with your readers and then offers information that fills the information gap.

The easiest way to make curiosity in your campaigns is by crafting attention-grabbing headlines.

A formula created by Michael Masterson called the 4U’s this is used for creating effective headlines it says that all headlines should be unique, ultra-specific, useful and convey a sense of urgency. So when making a headline, test out a variety of options until you find a combination that uses each of the four U’s.
There are a few tools out there that can do it for free, Co-schedule is one that I use.


4. Confirmation Bias

Confirmation bias is a psychological theory, where people seek out information that supports their views whilst ignoring evidence that doesn’t. when it comes to confirming their pre-conceptions or self-hypothesis, many people are biased in their selection of supporting evidence.

How to use the confirmation bias theory in your marketing?

Find out about the positive perceptions that your customers hold about your business and produce content on your blog that reinforces them.

if you are trying to combat negative confirmation bias about your company, you will need to support all claims within your content with hard facts and research. If you use unfounded opinion to try and reverse negative confirmation bias, you will struggle to get your customers to believe in you again.


5. Paradox Of Choice

Often in marketing, providing people with freedom of choice is seen as a positive thing, because it offers your customers full control over their choice. However, if you give customers too much freedom of choice it can have a bad effect.

The paradox of choice created by Barry Schwarz suggests that providing customers with a limited range of choices has psychological benefits because it reduces anxiety for shoppers.

How to use the paradox of choice theory in your own marketing?

Try not to overwhelm your prospects by providing them with too many choices, or too much information to digest in one go.

Consider producing marketing materials that focus on a maximum of Three key points at a time. This extends to the creation of CTAs, where less is often more. So provide customers with just one or two clear paths to follow after they have consumed your content.


Using psychological theories to consider how your prospects think and what might work as a result can improve the way you market. we are living in an Information Age, where there is a lot of information being shared every day and anything that can help you cut through the information and help you better understand your customers will pay off with sales conversions in long.

If you enjoyed this article and have any questions or just want to know a bit more feel free to leave a comment.

 

This post was originally posted on MPH Creative Blog as a guest post by myself

Editor - Published posts: 41

Editor | Loves Scientific Marketing | Hates Bad Marketing |

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