Marketing involves more than finding a nice looking photo and publishing it for the world to see, with your fingers and toes crossed that it will reach the right audience.
One of the first stages of releasing a campaign or an online post to drive engagement is brainstorming what will work and why?
The answer? It lies within psychology.
Knowing what content is needed to prompt a specific reaction is a process that requires a deep understanding of the human touch. In fact, it has its own term: Marketing Psychology.
What is Marketing Psychology?
Marketing psychology is the use of psychological principles within marketing strategies. It involves applying what we know of human behaviour, cognitive biases and emotional responses to influence consumer decision-making processes.
By understanding the underlying factors that guide audience decisions, marketers can adapt a customer journey to resonate with their target audience.
How Marketing Psychology is used in Real Life Situations
When you think of elevators, it may be coupled with the feeling of anxiety. What if we get stuck? What if I fall to my doom?
On the other hand, when you think of elevator music, the tone is light and tranquil.
Why is this the case? Marketing Psychology.
When skyscrapers first started to appear around the world, elevators became a necessary accessory to help workers reach higher levels. However, stepping into a small metal box and hoping to come out on the other side was not something that appealed to many.
Elevator music was therefore introduced to calm people’s anxiety and take their minds off the gravity of the situation, which benefited the workers, their employers, and elevator manufacturers.
With more relevance to the world of digital marketing, psychology can be just as effective.
Colours are often used as a psychological tool to encourage certain emotions within the viewer. Red is often associated with urgency and danger, yellow with positivity and optimism, and black with power and security.
For audience-specific techniques, many marketers research the interests of their demographics to be seen as a more relatable persona.
For example, in the current climate of social media, influencers have popularised a huge number of beauty products amongst younger teens. One brand in particular that has witnessed a soar in popularity since its products became viral on TikTok is the skincare brand, “Sol de Janeiro”.
This brand in particular has profited highly off a marketing psychology technique called “social proof”, in which audiences are more likely to desire a product if it has become popular amongst others.
Due to their status amongst beauty influencers on TikTok, a large portion of their demographic is teenage and pre-teenage girls. Therefore, the way that they have marketed themselves on their own TikTok account is through viral trends that many of their audiences’ favourite influencers have also partaken in to grow engagement.
Another interest that the brand has invested their marketing efforts into is creating their very own universe in “Roblox”, an online game that has a 60% demographic of under 17-year-olds. As well as playing on the interest of their audience, creating a sense of urgency is a technique that encourages audiences to act quickly.
Using this, the Sol de Janeiro Roblox universe was created as a “limited time only” feature in celebration of the Brazilian Carnaval festival. Leading up to the end date of the campaign, multiple TikTok were released, urging fans to get involved while they still could.Overall, this campaign accumulated over 6.2 million views on TikTok.
With this kind of success being built from the foundations of marketing psychology, it is clear why such techniques are so widely used across marketing departments when it comes to engaging a community and growing interest.