This special ingredient used with Content Marketing provides an amazing opportunity. It gives you the ability to connect to readers in a way that may have been potentially overlook.
When you come across post like, “These Emotions Make Customers Do This”, “Avoid Using These Words Or Lose The Sell” or “25 Action Words And How They Help Customers Make The Decision YOU Want“, is all a part of Psychology. Understanding what causes people to act a certain way, gives you the upper hand when creating and marketing your Content.
We actually use psychology everyday whether we realize it or not. The most important part of your content is the Headline. When creating a headline, it is important to create it in a way that catches readers attention, bring about the desired emotion and causes them to click on the link. This can be difficult to do in about 50 characters but understanding what triggers certain emotions in readers can make it much easier to accomplish.
On my last post, I have an infographic about how to responding to negative comments. One commentor pointed out some good information he learned about how specific words can cause certain emotions to arise in the person reading it. Even though it is practically impossible to connect with everyone in a way they will not get offended, confused and so on.
His comment made me really look at everything I have been writing since then. It is amazing how words that seem unimportant, can cause someone to misinterpret the over all message.
How Psychology Fits Into Content Marketing
Lets start off looking at the meaning of psychology. Psychology is an academic and applied discipline that involves the scientific study of mental functions and behaviors. Basically, it is knowing what things causes people to act or feel a certain way.
This is all that we try to accomplish with our content marketing. When we are crafting any type of content, we want to bring forth any emotion that will cause the reader to click-through our website, share our content on social media, subscribe to our email list and so on.
How Content Marketing Fits Into Psychology
Lets look at the meaning of Content Marketing. Content marketing is the technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire and engage a clearly defined target audience in order to drive profitable customer action.
When we begin to push our content to the masses, we have to connect with the readers on some kind of level. We can share our content all over the web but if we don’t connect and bring emotions that causes action, we will do a lot of work and only receive minimum results.
5 Emotions That Cause People To Buy
Greed. ‘The Reward’
It is our nature to want more. Think about infomercials for example. “Buy this for 9.99 and get a second one Free.” Even though we may know this is a selling tactic, it still brings an emotion in us that wants to get something for Free.
Fear. ‘Missing out’
Who wants to miss out on a good thing? Lets look at another tactic used in infomercial, you may also see this on plenty of landing pages. “This offer will expire in this amount of time! Don’t miss out!”
We know we will see this product again but missing out on that free offer makes us want to act now. Fear is a commonly used tactic to make people buy right now.
Altruism. ‘Helping others’
Plenty of people just want to help others, regardless of whether or not they will benefit from it. Which is why these popular clothing companies, where you by a piece of clothing, another of that same piece is sent to someone in need, have such success.
For the group of people in this category, when ever they have the opportunity to help others, they jump on board and open their wallets.
Envy. ‘You can’t win’
Regardless of how humble one may be, we all have a competitive nature. Some more intense than others but it is still there. If we are given the opportunity to be ahead of the game, we are all over it.
Everyone doesn’t sleep outside and wait for hours to get a phone because it is the normal thing to do. Well, it is for some
Pride. ‘I’m smart’
Pride can be a dangerous thing. Pride can cause us to do things we would not normally do. When the right wording is used, you will feel a sense of entitlement and you will have to have it.
Something to think about
When we are using text to communicate, it is very easy to get things misinterpreted. It is part of our job when creating content, to know and use the best wording that will produce the desired action.
Ana Hoffman has an excellent post on leveraging you content marketing system. It will surely guide you in the right direction.
I read something not to long ago that was extremely interesting. It read “Philosophers have long recognized that language is inherently vague, being an imperfect representation of thoughts and ideas.” Do you agree with this statement?
I sure do! I’m sure you have had a moment, of trying to explain yourself but the words coming out your mouth make no sense but they do in your head.
We must use content Marketing to attract and engage our content, while using psychology to trigger the right emotions, in order to get the best results possible!
Is catchy good enough or do you focus on using words that bring out certain emotions when writing your content?
