Something quite obvious and out there in the open, but most people fail to realize, that marketing is mostly all about mind games. It is about knowing the human psychology to a tea and then using it to benefit your business. It is the art of using psychology tricks on your general audience and dedicated customers to maximize your own profit with these psychological tricks.
That is why, to excel in marketing, it is essential to incorporate high levels of psychology tricks and tactics into your marketing techniques. But the important thing to consider about business psychology tricks is that for them to work and fulfill their purpose, they need to be subtle and unnoticeable. That is basically the entire point of using psychology tricks when promoting your business. Otherwise, the tricks you use would just be considered a way to ‘fool your audience’ and downgrade your brand image. Meaning it would have the opposite effect of what it was supposed to do.
Today we will be dedicating this article to telling you the 10 best psychology tricks you can use in marketing. But first, let us tell you about the phenomenon of psychology tricks itself.
What is Psychology Tricks?
Psychology tricks are clever tactics used to get someone to do something to act in a particular way, without them being aware that you have ‘convinced’ them to do so. Basically, psychological tricks are methods to get people to agree with you by making them feel that it was their original choice all along, and there was no interference in their final decision.
10 Psychology Tricks for Business
Below, you will find a list of 10 business psychology tricks.
1. Clustering
Simply put, clustering is the act of putting topics and information that are closely linked to each other in the same place. When it comes to marketing your business, it means that on your website or social media profile, the products or services that are linked to each other are placed in the same category or same post. This way, their advertised need and significance will be more readily acceptable to your customers. Thus this psychology trick will increase the chances of purchasing this item.
Image taken from Strikingly
2. Statistics
Let’s face it - when we are browsing through a website or looking at a billboard or television advertisement, and we see statistics of any kind, we never really go and fact-check them, right? As a typical human response, we just look at it and think, ‘Huh, that’s surprising information!’ This is why it is essential to include a lot of statistics, which are astonishing or ‘large’ percentages as stand-alone numbers, in your marketing strategies, as part of your psychology tricks and tactics to garner attention and intrigue.
3. Loss Aversion
You can think of loss aversion as the marketing equivalent of the ‘half empty, half full’ glass of water debate on optimism and pessimism. Basically, these psychology tricks are the act of highlighting the gains side of a product or service in your advertisements, and completely ignoring the losses side of it. The loss may be 60%, but if you never mention it and simply say the gain is 40%, it tends to seem like a significant percentage on its own.
4. Use of Decoys
Similar to the fact mentioned above that people never really fact check the statistics they see being advertised around them, they also do not usually check out the ‘other option’ deemed inferior in advertisements. This is a flawless psychology trick. It’s one of those psychological tricks you can quickly get away with without anyone even batting an eye. Let’s say you are selling laundry detergent, and you say that the ‘simpler’ one (the decoy) is not nearly as good. The decoy has no name, so basically, it does not exist and cannot be tested, but the audience will believe you anyway and automatically deem your laundry detergent to be superior!
5. Priming
This psychology trick is all about making sure everything on your site or page is relevant and aesthetically pleasing. For example, you are selling makeup through a website. The background colors of the website and the patterns around the product need to be pleasant to look at. Adding beautiful visual branding elements automatically increases the chances of a potential customer ‘wanting’ to purchase the product. People often buy a product simply because ‘It looks so pretty!’
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
6. Promoting Scarcity
This has proven to be one of the oldest and sneakiest ways to play with the minds of your customers and get them to do exactly as you wish, which in most cases is making an instant or impulse buy! This psychology trick works because you advertise your product or service as having limited availability. You might say only 2 pieces are left in stock, which might even be true. But if no one is currently willing to purchase the product, then the two are plenty, and there is no need for customers to rush to make the purchase. But the trick here is that the customers do not know whether or not others are making purchases of this item. They just know very few are left, which helps easily play with their minds.
7. Anecdotes
This one is all about getting personal and making customers feel like you can relate to them. This psychology trick conveys to your customers that you understand their needs and wants at a higher level than just wanting to simply sell your product. This can be done by adding little anecdotes and stories to your promotions and advertisements from your own life or by creating an entirely new story with its own emotional triggers. Emotional appeal is one of the business psychology tricks that goes a long way in impacting your sales and sometimes even gets customers to purchase products they do not need.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
8. Overexposure
This psychology trick is pretty self-explanatory, but it should not be ignored as it helps increase sales and profits. When we say provide ‘overexposure’, we mean doing everything you can to get your advertisement and its message out there. Be repetitive and promote it everywhere. But make sure that the message you are promoting on different platforms creates the same image for your product. Examples of platforms you can simultaneously promote your business include:
- Social media
- Television
- Newspapers
- Billboards
9. Social Proof
Ever seen an advertisement for toothpaste, for example, where they interview many people, and they all agree on how amazing the toothpaste is? And then, as a little cherry on top, they also interview actual dentists, as they agree to the use of the toothpaste sold.
Whether you like it or not, this has a significant impact on your consumers’ minds when it comes to being drawn to buy that particular toothpaste. This psychology trick is more potent than any factual information about the product, which is toothpaste. So, try to get other people and professionals involved in your marketing campaigns to make them more realistic and reliable for your potential customers.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
10. Keep it Simple
When it comes to taglines and main messages, along with using the overexposure technique, it is also essential to keep them as simple as possible. This not only helps in getting more and more people to understand what you are trying to sell and why, but it also helps in more and more people remembering and recalling your product. It keeps the audience reminded of your ads so that they can come back to it and make a purchase later, even if they were not entirely convinced to do so in the first place.
A Bonus Psychology Trick
As a reward for making it until the end of this post, we want to give a bonus tip that you can use for enhancing your brand awareness, regardless of whichever industry you operate in. The tip is, whatever the actual condition is of your business financials, retail outlet, business operations, profit margins, or ROI, always maintain a professional website to represent your brand.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
Your website establishes the online presence of your business and can be created professionally and effortlessly these days. If you are not familiar with the concept of website builders yet, hop on to Strikingly and check us out. Strikingly is a rising website-building platform that allows you to build your website independently, without writing any code, and without hiring a developer. Our free plan includes all the features required to create a basic website, to begin with. This means you don’t have to spend any money to get started on Strikingly.
Once you get familiar with our tools, you may choose to upgrade to one of our paid plans to enjoy some of our more advanced features or simply continue with the free plan for longer.
