Digital marketers can no longer afford to ignore the role of psychology in content marketing. Psychology helps serve to understand customer behavior, thus providing leverage over competitors. There are many psychological principles that can be incorporated to improve your online marketing efforts, from content design to user experience.
The Elaboration Likelihood Model, or ELM, is the gold standard for many advertisers on how to successfully persuade your target audience. This method avoids forceful or fraudulent persuasion: bombarding a user with multiple pop up ads or misleading promises is a sure route to failure. Sound tactics to implement this model include enhancing the aesthetics of your content to achieve an engaging but minimal design, boosting user experience, and practicing genial customer service.
ELM presents two opposite methods of marketing design: central route processing and peripheral route processing. The ethos of central route processing states that customers are most interested in your main point. As such, the prime benefit of your product or service should be presented in a clean and concise style, without too many bells and whistles to take attention away.
Peripheral route processing, on the other hand, focuses on side features or attempts to sell a product with flashy, if tangentially related, images or information. This superficial strategy can have short-term results, getting the audience to interact with your brand initially, but it is unlikely to encourage large purchases or repeat business in and of itself. As such, it is generally ill-advised to run campaigns based on peripheral route processing alone.
Certainly, both methods could be feasibly combined strategically into an informative, supportive and inspiring format that helps elevate audiences and sell things.
Have a look at this NewsCred article and then check out our recent blog post, where we discuss how the principles of communication and psychology can be leveraged through the art of using words. Knowing that your words have power and that effective use of psychological triggers can make the difference between conversions versus unproductive exits from your web pages. Reach out to us today so we can help you to maximize this effective use of psychology in marketing.
