June 24, 2014
Psychological Tricks for Smooth Content Marketing
Focusing on creating unique, high-quality content is a huge part of content marketing, but it’s easy to forget that it takes more than savvy wordplay to really hook your customers. You can use your look and feel to draw in viewers, but spend your time and resources on these simple strategic moves that use marketing psychology to really tap into what your customers are looking for.
Get Primal: Needs and Emotions
Tapping into your audience’s primal needs and emotions is one of the oldest tricks in the marketing handbook. Utilize those facts and figures to support your claims, but focus on invoking emotions like fear, anger, pride, and love, which can be the push a consumer needs. Build your content so that it inspires real, genuine emotions, and encourage your readers to take a stand by sharing their email address or engaging others on a blog post. Including testimonials on your website can encourage this sort of response; seeing the opinion of others can trigger a “herd mentality” that will lead your potential customers to go with the flow and join your brand, and even share .
More Than Words: The Power of Video
A recent study by Animoto showed that 73% of respondents were more likely to make a purchase after watching a short video demonstrating the product or service. Short videos can essentially teach your potential customers how to respond to your product. By showing real people using your product or services and enjoying them in their daily life, viewers can visualize how how utilizing the product or service will work for them, and become more aware of your brand.
Listen to Your Search Terms
Ideally, content marketing should be a two-way street in which your potential customers feel like your product or service has answered a question or provided a solution. As Search Engine Journal points out, it can be very useful to examine your most popular incoming search terms in order to get a clearer sense of what your customers really want. If you see a particular question over and over again, try to create easily accessible content that clearly answers the question.
This may seem obvious enough, but it’s easy to get off track when your focus is on trying to promote your brand. An FAQ is a good first step, but think even further than that – create whole blog posts around a popular search query, or even a blog series based on answering questions alone. We’re often told that everything we want to know can be found on the Internet; if your business can offer quick solutions, your brand loyalty is likely to increase.
Get Colorful
You may have known that red is often equated with anger, but did you also know it can increase your appetite? According to SmallBizTrends.com, 93% of buyers say that appearance played a role in their shopping, and almost 85% consider color to be the primary factor when making a purchase. Brands like McDonald’s rely heavily on this: the golden arches of their signs and the bright red and yellow of their logo encourage urgency, hunger, and positivity, as well as invoking a childlike quality.
Though color may not immediately seem as though it’s directly related to your content, this isn’t completely true. Headlines can be in color, and images, videos and infographics are vital components of content marketing. Consider the colors that you use when creating an infographic; utilize red to draw in focus to the most important points, and orange or yellow for adding excitement to certain facts. Also, keep in mind that neutral and darker colors lend themselves to information-heavy images.
