Marketing Psychology: Influence Your Customers

Every business wants to know how to increase customer engagement and influence purchasing decisions. Isn’t that why focus groups are used? Information on how the product will be received is what leads to determining marketing strategies, which in turn, lead to influencing buyer decisions.

The key to influencing customers is understanding their needs and buying habits – this is where marketing psychology shines. It anticipates consumer behavior by taking into account cognitive biases, emotions that affect decision-making, and factors behind motivation. The following are just some of the psychological marketing strategies you can employ to influence your customers, and thus, their purchasing habits.

Tell a Story

To appeal to customers, tell a story. Unlike a simple advertisement, a narrative humanizes your brand and can inspire action. Attention spans are short, and stories help your brand stand out from the rest. How? By forming a human connection.

Not only are stories more compelling to read, but they are also more memorable. The human brain is designed to respond to stories. An excellent example of this is Jennifer Aaker’s class experiment at Stanford University. Students in a class were asked to make a 1-minute pitch, in which only 10% used stories. When the class was asked to remember the pitches, 63% remembered the story compared to only 5% who remembered a statistic.

Here's what to do – ditch the logic. Consumers aren’t rational creatures anyway. Tell a good story, stick in customers’ memories, and wait for engagement to follow. Appeal to emotions, talk about the origin of a product, or even how the company came to exist. Heartwarming stories are especially powerful and draw customers in like moths to a flame.

Start Small

Instead of pushing for purchase, start small. One of the most commonly used principles of marketing psychology, the foot-in-the-door technique refers to asking customers for something small at first in order to influence them to agree to a later, bigger request.

While many think of the traditional door-to-door salesman employing this marketing psychology trick, this can easily be adapted to digital marketing. CTAs are an easy way to do this – a classic example of this is asking users to sign up for a newsletter or an email blast, and then using those to promote sales.

Free trials are also great at utilizing this technique. Once the consumer is invested and has already used your service, it encourages them to take the next step and purchase a subscription. This also utilizes the principle of loss aversion – check out my article on psychological principles used in marketing to learn more.

Reward Brand Loyalty

Establishing a loyalty program is an effective marketing psychology technique. Not only does it reward your customers and condition them, but it also encourages them to spend more money in order to receive more perks. Advertising memberships and loyalty cards encourage repurchases and don’t just attract customers – it retains them.

Loyalty programs can also lead to referrals, encouraging even more sales. If done right, loyalty programs can also poach customers from other brands. For example, the Sephora Beauty Insider Sale was a bi-annual event for years, with the three tiers of Beauty Insiders being eligible for different percentages of discounts and early access. However, recently, because Ulta’s more regular sales were attracting more customers, Sephora started implementing more sales. The different tiers also encourage more shopping since they promote competition and exclusive benefits.

Use the Power of Words

Language is an important part of marketing. It is our chosen way to communicate, and word choice, grammar, and rhetoric can have a substantial effect on consumer perception, and thus, purchasing. Marketing psychology optimizes the use of language to evoke feelings such as trust, create urgency, and effectively frame the message.

Using terms such as “certified”, “authentic”, and “guaranteed” can evoke trust in a brand or product, while labels like “organic” and “gluten-free” cater to people’s values and ethics. Marketing is all about consumer behavior, and to effectively target consumer behavior, one has to target the customer’s needs and values.

For example, if two brands of cereal are both free of animal products, but one is advertised as “vegan”, vegetarians and vegans will probably opt for the latter. Not only does this eradicate the need to check ingredients, but it also appeals to their values. The same can be said for cruelty-free makeup. Brands that advertise their cruelty-free status or display the Leaping Bunny logo appeal to those who are or are thinking of being, cruelty-free.

Utilize Senses

A picture is worth a thousand words, especially in digital marketing. Encouraging sales through engaging the five senses is called sensory marketing. Since human beings experience the world through sensory stimulation, it is only natural to use this to drive sales.

Marketing psychology uses the senses to create positive, memorable experiences for customers. Sight is only one sense that marketers focus on – digital marketing should also embrace hearing. Appealing to more than one sense is a surefire way to make your brand or product memorable and can even become a unique selling point. Harley-Davidson even tried to trademark their exhaust sound in 1994 – of course, this didn’t really work but it goes to show how important sensory marketing is.

In addition to high-quality, vivid pictures, visual cues like font choice and color can be factors that turn potential consumers into customers. Classic jingles and slogans target hearing, but so does background music. This is especially effective when used on websites, and in UX design.

Promote Until the End

Even the best of us give in to impulse purchases from time to time. Approximately 84% of Americans have made impulse purchases some time or the other. While this is most common in physical stores, it has also been used in digital marketing. Simply using the word “now” has been known to trigger urgency, resulting in impulse buying, with flash sales being a common way of encouraging impulse purchases.

One way of incorporating this is suggesting similar items or items that others have liked when the customer is checking out. “Recommendations for you” often get us, especially if the website features one-click buying and a preview of the item. Users can purchase the item without ever leaving the page, making the decision fast and easy.

Influence Your Customers Now

These marketing psychology tricks can be used to take your digital marketing success to the next level. However, we all get busy and need to focus on other aspects of your business. That’s where I come in – with a B.S. in Psychology, a master’s degree in Business Administration, and 12 years of experience in the field, I can help with everything from social media marketing to website development!

If you’re interested in discussing this more or any other topics on digital marketing, feel free to contact me to keep the conversation going!