3 Marketing Tactics that Influence Customer Behavior

Improving your marketing strategy starts with understanding your audience and why they do the things they do. While you can’t master human behavior overnight, you can learn the best practices of marketing psychology. With 47% of millennials reporting social media as a major influence on purchases, it truly pays to understand this concept.

We’ve highlighted 3 of the easiest ways to take the mind games out of marketing and influence your target markets with a little Psych 101.

Keep It Positive

Have you heard the saying, “Misery loves company?” It turns out the adage may be incorrect, at least on social media. Sure, people complain a lot online, but rarely do you see negative, “Debbie Downer” posts being shared. In fact it’s the feel-good stuff that gets shared the most. A roundup by Kissmetrics found that inspirational, funny, and dreamy posts get the most shares on Facebook.

If you want to increase the share-ability of your posts, get started by rooting them in positivity.

Monitor Reviews the Right Way

We know. This one sounds like a no-brainer. At the risk of sounding like Captain Obvious, we’d like to point out the importance of monitoring reviews (not just collecting them). To analyze your current review monitoring strategy, ask yourself the following two questions:

  • What steps do you take after reading a great review of your business?
  • What steps do you take after reading a not-so-great one?

Sure, you might give your team a high-five after a 5-star review. Hopefully, you follow up with the customer and try to solve the problem after a less than stellar one. But there’s an underlying benefit of these reviews that might not be readily apparent.

Reviews are an online playground for learning more about your target audience. In fact, there’s hardly a better place to learn more about consumer behavior.

Head back to those reviews and look for these insights:

  • Customer language (especially vocabulary used to describe your business)
  • Pain points your customers are dealing with
  • How the pain point was solved
  • The day-to-day lives of your target audience
  • Room for improvement
  • Benefits of your product or service

That last point brings us to an interesting marketing tactic, which we’ll analyze for you below.

Master Emotional Copy

Why do people buy your product or service? Let’s say you sell marketing automation software. At first, you might say people choose your product based on its intuitive interface and analytic tools. Yes, those features are important, but they’re not the core of why customers choose to buy your software.

What really resonates with customers are the benefits (rather than the features) of your product or service.

  • You don’t just automate repetitive tasks (a feature). You give people back their most finite resource: time (a benefit).
  • You don’t just reduce errors (a feature). You help people save face in front of their boss and succeed (a benefit).

Those are your benefits. Tapping into them is an effective way to appeal to the emotions of your customers in an influential way. Your customers want to know how what you’re selling is going to make their lives better.

Whenever you write a piece of new copy about your product or service, start with benefits. This tactic will ensure that whatever you write highlights the life-improving aspects of your business’s output. That’s the real magic behind reaching your audience.

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Published On: Mar 12, 2016