A Guide to User Psychology for Marketing

Impactful marketing isn’t just about presenting a product or service to your target audience. The most effective marketers appeal to consumers on a psychological level and play into their emotional responses. By forging a deeper connection with a target audience, marketing strategies are bound to have a bigger impact.

Understanding the Consumer Buying Process

Most consumers go through a specific process before purchasing a product. This is known as the customer journey, and it involves these steps:

  • Recognizing a problem
  • Searching for a solution
  • Considering alternatives
  • Selecting a solution
  • Evaluating the solution post-purchase

While most customer buying journeys take the same course, the factors influencing each phase of the journey can vary quite a bit.

What Drives Consumer Behavior?

There are a number of psychological factors that push consumers to make certain decisions:

  • Attitudes
  • Age
  • Socialization
  • Perception
  • Socioeconomic status
  • Culture
  • Occupation

Not every marketing campaign has to address every one of these factors to be successful. In order to determine what drives your desired target audience, pay attention to analytics info. This can be information gleaned from past marketing efforts or website/social media analytics. You can also encourage your target audience to share their personal insights through surveys and feedback.

Principles to Apply to Your Marketing Strategy

The following principles can enhance marketing efforts by attracting more consumers and boosting a business’s conversion rate:

  • Emotional Marketing – Consumers often respond strongly to emotional appeals. In this case, marketers can focus on one of the primary emotions to induce a consumer to act: happiness, disgust, trust, fear, sadness, surprise, anger, and anticipation.

 

  • Call to Action (CTA) – Calls to action entice consumers to take a specific action. CTAs can prompt a consumer to make a purchase, sign up for an email newsletter, or stop by a physical location.

 

  • Decoy Effect – This strategy entails introducing a third product (the decoy) when a consumer is making a decision between two products. The role of the decoy is to make the target product more attractive and push the consumer to choose it over a competitor.

 

  • Information Gap Theory – Consumers will pursue knowledge to make up any gaps in information when they’re passionate about a subject. Marketers can design content that entices consumers to find information to fill in the gaps, which leads consumers to websites and social media pages.

Marketing That Merges Technical Prowess With User Psychology

You don’t need to have extensive knowledge of psychology to include essential principles in your marketing strategy. By choosing SonicSEO.com, you’ll benefit from our comprehensive SEO and web design knowledge, which incorporate essential marketing principles. Contact us today to learn more.