What is Marketing Psychology? 

Through the combination of behavioral science, neuroscience, and psychology we’re able to create effective marketing messages. These three fields work together to influence a comprehensive strategy that attracts, convinces, and converts more customers.

Once you understand how the human brain works, it is much easier to connect with your ideal customers and activate their psychological triggers that drive decision-making.

With psychological information at your fingertips, you can design persuasive ads that reach your target audience, create content that captures the attention of your target demographic, and even design landing pages that result in ice-cold leads turning red hot by purchasing a low-ticket offer.

Understanding Neuromarketing: The Combination of Behavioral Science, Neuroscience, Psychology, and Marketing

When it comes to understanding how the human brain works, neuroscience has been leading the way. Neuromarketing takes the knowledge learned from neuroscience and essentially combines the findings with behavioral science and psychology to produce effective marketing strategies. 

According to the author of Brainfluence, Roger Dooley, “Neuromarketing is the application of neuroscience and cognitive science to marketing. This can include market research that tries to discover customer needs, motivations, and preferences that traditional methods like surveys and focus groups can’t reveal.” 

Neuromarketing uses a number of methods to understand how the brain works, including neuroimaging (fMRI and MEG), electroencephalography (EEG), and psychophysiology.

This field exists simply because the more data you can obtain on your customers, the more you can hone your marketing messages to meet their needs and desires.

Behavioral science on the other hand allows you to understand how people behave in familiar and unfamiliar situations. This knowledge can help you develop marketing messages that are more likely to be accepted by your target audience.

Meanwhile, neuroscience provides a deeper understanding of how the human brain works and how the various parts of the brain communicate with each other. This information can be used to design marketing campaigns that are more likely to result in customer conversion rates.

And of course, psychology helps you understand human behavior which can be used to create persuasive ads, develop marketing messages that are more likely to be accepted by your target audience, and design landing pages that are more likely to result in customer conversion rates.

Overall, one of the most important aspects of neuromarketing is its ability to identify consumer trends. 

By tracking consumer behavior over time, neuromarketers can identify patterns that indicate what kind of messages are resonating with their audience.  

Influencing Consumer Behavior Within Your Marketing Funnel

A marketing funnel is a visual representation of the path a prospect takes from first awareness of a product or company to ultimate purchase. The funnel helps us understand where potential customers are in the buying process, and what steps need to be taken to move them closer to a purchase. 

If we are to oversimplify a marketing funnel, it would boil down to these three steps:

• Awareness: The prospect becomes aware of the product or company.
• Consideration: The prospect becomes interested in the product or company. 
• Conversion: The prospect purchases the product or company. 

If we want to increase conversions and grow our business, we need to first understand the underlying thought processes of our audience and what’s influencing them. 

Consumers are usually motivated by two things: reward and punishment. 

Rewards are anything that makes you feel good (like getting a compliment from a friend or winning an award). Punishments are anything that makes you feel bad (like getting a notification about your credit card payment being late).

The way you reward and punish consumers can have a big impact on their behavior. 

For example, if you want someone to buy a product, you can give them a reward (like getting a freebie or discount code for their next purchase) when they make the decision to buy, and you can penalize them if they don’t buy (like increasing the price after 24 hours or removing a fast-action-bonus).

Three psychological triggers that often move a prospect through the marketing funnel include: 

• Recognition: When the prospect recognizes the need for the product or the company.
• Desire: When the prospect desires the product or the company. 
• Urgency: When the prospect feels an urgency to purchase from the company.

While these psychological triggers can be powerful motivators, they should never be used to manipulate prospects into making purchases they don’t really want. Instead, they should be used to help prospects recognize their need for the product or company and their desire to purchase it.

Remember, the psychology behind marketing is a complex and intricate process. By understanding different psychological concepts and theories, we can develop more effective marketing strategies, specific to the needs and desires of our target consumers.

Using psychological triggers to move prospects through your marketing funnel can be very successful, but it requires careful planning and execution.

The Importance of Implementing Psychological Insights to Create a More Effective Marketing Strategy for Your Business

There is no doubt that psychological insights are an important part of any successful marketing strategy. These insights can help you to understand your target audience, create relevant content, and launch effective campaigns. 

In addition, psychological insights can also help you to identify and address potential obstacles to success. By implementing these insights into your marketing strategy, you can create a more successful business overall. 

Basic Marketing Psychology Insights To Begin Your Strategy

• People are influenced by their emotions when making purchasing decisions.
• People are more likely to buy products that they believe will make them look or feel good about themselves.
• People are more likely to buy products that are familiar to them or that they have heard good things about.
• People are more likely to buy products that are affordable and within their budget.
• People are more likely to buy products that are marketed to them in a way that resonates with their values and beliefs.

5 Commonly Used Marketing Psychology Principles

1. Reciprocity Principle – This principle is based on the idea that if a brand does something good for you, you are more likely to return the favor and have increased cooperation in the future.
2. Information-Gap Theory – This theory suggests that when someone has a gap in their knowledge in a topic that interests them, they will take action to find out what they want to know.
3. The Scarcity – This idea suggests that humans place more value on the things that they believe to be rare, and place a lower value on what can easily be accessed.
4. Social Proof  – This theory relates to the fact that humans trust products more when they know others who can validate their value.
5. Loss Aversion – This theory points out that most people would prefer to avoid losses compared to acquiring gains.

Your marketing strategy will always need a bit of psychology to succeed. If you enjoyed this blog post, you’ll love the podcast episode where I expanded on these topics. Listen in by searching for “Content Strategies In Sweatpants” on your favorite podcast app.