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The ultimate goal of any marketing campaign is to try to influence human behavior. Therefore, the most successful marketing campaigns include and use certain principles of human psychology. Psychological principles in marketing are a powerful weapon that should definitely be applied in advertising campaigns.

 

Psychological principles in marketing

Understanding these tried and tested psychological principles will make you a more effective trader. Here are some psychology principles you can use in your next marketing campaign. 

 

Fear of loss

People hate to lose. As a species, we naturally strive to avoid loss. The principle of aversion to loss means that the desire not to lose something is actually much greater than the desire to gain something.

In other words, the negative effects of loss affect us much more strongly than the positive effects of equal profit. For example, the emotion of losing a 1000 dinar banknote would be much stronger than the pleasure of finding a forgotten 1000 dinar in a coat pocket. Fear of loss is a phenomenon that explains why people feel guilt more strongly than they feel praise.

In marketing, the fear of loss is closely linked to the behavior of users and customers. The idea is that losses and shortcomings have a more significant impact on decision-making than gains and advantages.

In marketing, this principle can be used to increase the conversion rate landing page-eva. To achieve this, let your messages play around with the idea of ​​avoiding loss. Be sure to emphasize on the site what users will miss if they do not opt ​​for conversion and create urgency around their products and services.

Another common application is to create a customer loyalty program that allows customers to collect points or discount coupons. Once they get a discount, it’s much harder for clients to opt for a competing brand, because leaving means losing the reward they’ve earned.

 

The paradox of choice

The paradox of choice is a psychological phenomenon that describes the paralyzing feeling that people get when they are given too many opportunities. Choices are a good thing, but too many choices can make it impossible for your customers to make decisions. We wrote in more detail about this phenomenoni here.

Vendors can take advantage of the choice paradox by limiting user options. This principle can be applied to almost any digital object - e-mail, landing page-eve, chat bots… Create a clear user path with the minimum possible number of options to achieve the result or behavior you want. For example, remove navigation from the landing page on which the conversion is performed, so as not to distract, and offer only one on the site pages call to action.

 

Bait effect (price psychology)

Price psychology is the strategic use of price tactics to increase sales. Buy one, get another free one and other common methods are all applying price psychology.

One of the most common tactics we all know well is lowering the price of an item from a round figure to a figure lower by just one pair. Isn't that amazing? Lowering the price of a product from, for example, 500 dinars to 499,99 significantly increases sales.

The bait effect is defined as a phenomenon where consumers change their decision between the two options offered, when they are presented with a third option - "bait" - which "asymmetrically dominates". This phenomenon is also called the "attraction effect" or the "asymmetric domination effect". Prospective customers are usually offered three options. The latter option is the most expensive, and is rarely chosen. For comparison, the middle option is perceived as the most valuable considering the ratio of the price and what is obtained, so it is most often bought. Some companies specifically mark these prices and offers as "most popular" in order to attract additional attention.

 

It is known for sure

People tend to develop a penchant for things and products just because they are familiar to them. The more often we are exposed to a certain stimulus, the more favorable we experience it. As a result, the songs we often listen to on the radio become more and more attractive over time.

Psychological research supports this. In one well-known experiment, psychologist Robert Zajonc showed Chinese characters to non-Chinese speakers. Zajonc showed each character 1 to 25 times, asking study participants to guess the meaning of the characters shown. The more often a study participant saw a certain character, the more positive meaning it gave him.

However, be careful because too much exposure and bombing with one and the same advertisement can have a detrimental effect. 

 

Urgency

Order now! Hurry up! Don't procrastinate! Just a little more time! No doubt you have come across examples of urgency used in marketing. Urgency is one of the most common psychological principles applied to marketing campaigns.

It is a simple and clear idea, and an incredibly powerful aspect of human psychology: urgency causes people to act quickly. According to the psychology of behavior, emergencies cause people to shorten their thinking period and act quickly.

Urgency can be used to drive conversions and sales. If you create a strong sense of urgency on landing page-s of the site, you will successfully encourage people to take the action they want to take (log in, subscribe, register, download, etc.).

How to create urgency? Here are some examples to think about.

Add a clock, timer or countdown to your offer. There are only so many days, hours, minutes left until this incredible event.

Use temporal (temporally related) words: immediately, immediately, hurry, quickly, etc.

 

Psychological principles in marketing they are used so often that we often do not even notice them. But these principles are an incredibly powerful way to influence behavior and manage the decisions you want people to make, even on a subconscious level.

 

 

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Made by Nebojsa Radovanovic - SEO Expert @Digitizer

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