It’s difficult to understand the behaviour of consumers and that is where marketing psychology comes in. It’s basically the science of understanding why consumers make the choices they make.
Lets begin with understanding why small businesses should even bother with understanding marketing psychology. Since competition has drastically increased there are various factors as to why small businesses need to be aware of this in order to grow their businesses productively.
This in turn helps them make better ads, design better services and experiences and help them achieve better and bigger business goals.
In this article we’ll talk about the 3 basic fundamentals of marketing psychology.
3 fundamentals of Marketing Psychology
- Social Proof
- Scarcity
- Reciprocity
-Social Proof
The concept of social proof is similar to social testing, where you wait and see if campaigns and marketing strategies used by other businesses are effective enough to be implied using your own creative ways.
For example influencer and celebrity endorsements as well as customer reviews and testimonials are all part of social proof.
This can further be separated into 6 different categories:
- Expert: Someone who is a professional or has an expertise in the particular field gives a review or a recommendation of the business.
- Celebrity: A famous personality recommends the product.
- User: Everyday users give their recommendations.
- Wisdom of the crowd: Large groups of people supporting a business for example a massive following on social media pages.
- Wisdom of friends: Social connections such as family, friends, friends of family.
- Certification: When an authority labels or gives a certification or badge to your business verifying its quality and legitimacy.
These six categories are the reason why influencer marketing, testimonials and verification on social networks are used as strategies for small upcoming businesses.
-Scarcity
We all know how this works; the less of something there is the more you want it. It’s a basic economic concept that is applied to marketing. Such as when influencers post luxury cars and limited edition handbags on social media.
Large companies take advantage of this by either producing a product in limited numbers or for a limited time, such as Louis Vuitton’s Graffiti collection which came for a limited time but everyone wanted to get their hands on it.
Using scarcity to your advantage is a smart marketing tactic if used with campaign ideas, sales on special days and seasonal releases.
-Reciprocity
A lot of digital marketing strategies involve this process since it provides the consumer with receiving value from the business in the form of a free element such as trials and samples.
This could include giving free premium trials if you own an app or any sort of software. Also reaching customers out through emails could make them feel special which attracts them towards your business. Sharing the content they create with your product makes them feel happy with the service and will make it more likely for them to recommend your product.
Understanding marketing psychology is fascinating but at the same time can prove to be very strenuous. There is much more to this concept however we hope through this article you understand the basics as well as how common it is for people to use it in the marketing techniques for their businesses.
