Psychology in digital marketing. Tricks you need to know
Scarcity
Did you ever have an unpleasant feeling that whatever you’re trying to buy is running out? The scarcity strategy is all about that. It is used to generate a fear of missing out among the consumers.
In consumer psychology, fear of missing out is a syndrome, and it pushes the customer to buy the product or services. In order to generate high demand, digital marketers use various techniques to generate perceived scarcity among buyers. This strategy works in most cases and can easily be used for Digital marketing.
Some of the best examples of generating scarcity could be “50% discount only today or only 5 tickets left” — offers available for a limited time.
Decoy Effect
It is generally used when a company offers three or more versions of a similar product. The smallest version is offered at the lowest price, whereas the margin between the medium and the largest version is quite low. The buyers tend to go for the largest version as they get more quantity that too by paying little extra than medium version.
This tactic has been in-play since time immemorial. You can see it used today in lots of situations –particularly on software sellers’ websites.
Anchoring
The anchoring effect is one of several types of cognitive bias that comes into play when people have to make decisions.
Marketers, entrepreneurs, and business owners assume that most people make decisions by conducting research and then weighing the options. But, that’s not how most people make decisions. People frequently act illogically, making their behavior difficult to predict. And, they rarely take the time to learn the full facts before taking action.
Instead, people tend to unconsciously latch onto the first fact they hear, basing their decision-making on that fact whether it’s accurate or not.
For example, a customer choosing between two pairs of shoes. They look very similar, but one pair costs 40€ reduced from 70€, while the other is going for full price at 45€. Most of the people would go for the reduced pair, naturally. This isn’t because people know for a fact these are the better shoes, it’s because that RRP (recommended retail price) of 70€ has anchored our idea of how much the first pair of shoes is worth at a higher level. Even though they are now the cheaper pair, the idea of their value is defined by the RRP.
Priming
Priming is an important phenomenon in applied neuromarketing. Priming works by using associations made in our subconscious, and are almost always unnoticeable to the subject.
One of the most common examples is the music and wine tasting experiment. The experiment tested music’s impact on customers’ behavior. It was noted that played French music in the supermarket made a huge impact on higher French wine sales.
A commercial website can be designed in such a way that the content of the website act as a trigger which ultimately results in positive user reactions. These responses are measurable by factors such as click and conversion rate, length of stay, or click path.
Social Proof
Social proof is the concept that people will follow the actions of the masses. The idea is that since so many other people behave in a certain way, it must be the correct behavior. Social proof is everywhere in digital marketing — in B2B client testimonials, in Facebook group sign-ups, in freelance portfolios, and so on.
Example of social proof. The reason people tempted to visit one of the restaurants with people in it instead of an empty one is that people assume the empty restaurants aren’t as good. Even if the empty restaurants actually have better food and service, since more people are in the other ones, the assumption is they’re better.
One interesting example of social proof in action in social media is Twitter hashtags. They tell something is worth tweeting about, purely on the basis that lots of other people are tweeting about it too.
