Psychological Insights To Improve Your Content Marketing In 2021.'Review'
Psychological Insights To Improve Your Content Marketing In 2021.
We are thrown into a sea of content puzzles. There is content that drives information to us, unconsciously and consciously.
While you sit in the yellow bus ‘danfo’, you will find various information fighting for your attention. My soda challenge in 2021, started unconsciously after being flooded with the benefits of abstaining from soft drinks online. Two months down the line, soda challenge in the mud.
From the moment you switch on your phone, you are swamped with a plethora of information. If left unchecked, may affect your day. These messages are designed to take action.
From a business’ point of view, what happens when your customers take action and shows interest in your product/offering, but your process and rate of consummation drives them away. What this does is that the perception generated about your business may scare further conversation/content you have with them.
It is imperative that you as a small business owner, understand the various marketing funnel and relate with your customer.
AIDCA model represents the process that the buyer goes through, on their journey from being aware of a marketing proposition, until they make a buying decision.
AIDCA marketing model was developed by P. Kotler and can be used to further explain the audience interaction with your products.
The AIDCA copywriting model will help you to get a better response:
1. Headline or the opening line gets Attention
2. Product or service description generates Interest
3. The offer/proposition produces Desire
4. Guarantee/reassurance gives Conviction
5. Call to Action generates sales
AIDCA can be used throughout content marketing, from your newsletters to your ads, down to your blogs and other marketing collaterals.
Psychology of Products
As explained by CXL Institute, here are tips to ensure your product’s content is relevant.
Engage your users.
Complete the Action
Keep them coming back
Create an investment
1.0 Engage your users:
To effectively understand your customers’ behaviour, you need to:
- Be flexible with your content to fit any kind of interaction or digital interface.
2. Focus on their immediate environment and available choices to foster engagement.
3. Use the needs of your customers rather than the needs of your brand to encourage purchases.
Don’t get me started on the importance of engaging your customers. However, for today’s lesson. I will be drawing an example of a time I created a content piece for a hospitality brand, trust me I thought I knew the intricacies of the services offered based on my interaction with the client. An interaction with one of the customers in the Lagos branch made me realize my mistake. Yes, I had created the buyers’ persona of my audience. Yes, I knew the services offered and the brand’s unique value proposition. What I did not consider, however, was the behaviour plan of the customer:
When defining a behaviour plan:
Think of what they must do out of the product, not just in it.
The need for the product/service in the first place
Think of the user’s story.
In this case, I had been targeting high network individuals, without considering this customer, a newly hired professional who had saved up for a weekend getaway.
Once this is done, implement your engagement with these two categories:
- Engaging Content (Information)
- Engaging Functionality (operation)
We will dive into this in the next article.
1.1 Focus on triggers.
Now that you have engaged your customer, cue in triggers to signal them to start using your product or service.
Triggers remind me of getting your gun ready to take a shot. A trigger is a mechanism on a gun that makes it shoot a bullet, or at least that is what I was taught in all of my James Bond’s movies.
Trigger 1: Reciprocation
Use what you have to get what you want.
If you give your users something useful before asking them for anything, they are likely to reciprocate by doing business with your company later on.
Don’t quote me, quote Randy Garner. And yes, this does not mean your brand should do giveaways to generate more leads, because ‘ e go choke your business’ instead:
- Give useful information away for free.
2. Offer a useful service for free
3. Do discounts and promotions
4. Consider holiday freebies.
5. Develop the CSR arm of your organization
Trigger 2: Social Proof
People look at the behaviours of others to guide their action.
#thinkaboutit. Do you remember a time when you saw others do something and thought it was correct, you decided to join in? Why do you think social media challenges and influencer marketing works?
How To Apply This To Content
1.Show website visitors and blog viewers, the number of times your content was shared.
2. Include reviews and testimonials
3. Show readers the other content people similar to them has also read and shown interest
Trigger 3: Scarcity
This principle explains that people tend to want what they can’t have. The fear of missing out sometimes trigger people to take action, if not used properly though can backfire.
Offer time-sensitive deals
Ensure your content shows exclusive benefits
Highlight new products and also products that are in short supply.
Other triggers include Priming, Framing
There are two categories of Triggers also:
Internal Triggers: Internal triggers are psychological conditions that trigger your customers to use your product.
Hunger
Boredom
Happiness
Desire
For many users, Instagram is a harbour of emotions and inspiration becoming a persistent routine in our daily lives. That’s why even at work, you are tempted to click to find out.
External Triggers: There are small nudges that cue users to take action- directly or through learned association
Online triggers:
Notifications
SMS
Links
Emails
Word of mouth
Offline triggers include:
Alarms,
Printed reminder sheet
Asking someone a question
Complete The Action:
Now that you have engaged with your customers, it is important to get them to take action — no matter how small you think it is. Your process should be made simple to help your customers, website users navigate your sites or apps and complete actions like submitting a form, making an enquiry and so on.
Answer the following questions:
What’s the key action for a user to take?
Is the current process making it easy for them to do that?
How can we simplify the process?
Can we make it more clear?
Can we make it easier to complete?
I and my team have been stuck on the third question, so you are not the only one. Perhaps before the completion of my study at the CXL Institute, I would be able to share what we did to simplify our process.
I hope that these weeks of learning and content journey has helped you in understanding Digital persuasion as I have.
You can also read up on how to get your audience hooked on your website. Click here to learn more: https://adepeju-adenuga.medium.com/simple-ways-to-keep-your-audience-hooked-692dfcc461f7
