6 Psychological Strategies to Improve Your Content Marketing

SEO Specialist

Content Editor

Copywriter

Medium

In reality, there are many ways to psychologically influence people through your content marketing.

Following my previous

8 psychological strategies to improve your content marketing

, you can mix these strategies to influence your writing.

Here are 6 more ways to influence your audience through psychological strategies:

1. Frequency Illusion

Firstly, define the

frequency illusion

strategy, this is a psychological technique that is a cognitive bias in which, after noticing something for the first time, there is a tendency to notice it more often, leading someone to believe that it happens more frequently.

In most instances, this will happen when you see a particular advertisement, such as for a particular car, and then everywhere you’ll go, you will spot that car more frequently than you might have previously, do you think that they’re more popular (when they’re not really — you just see them more)

Within your content marketing, this strategy needs to be displayed in the elements of content distribution and being able to market that content as much as possible within your repurposing strategy.

This includes the ‘rule of 7’, where your content needs to be seen by a prospect or a reader across your distribution methods, which may be social, email, etc. In these instances, there is a strategy of ensuring people see your content, especially if you want them to convert.

2. The Endowment Effect

Within the psychological and behavioral economics fields, the

endowment effect

is based on the finding that people are more likely to retain an object they own than acquire that same object when they do not own it.

This is the aspect of being able to create a sense of ownership of a product or service which you offer once they’ve bought it.

Within your content marketing strategies, being able to put out content around your product. This can be within an array of mediums whether that's your blog, ebook, email newsletter, etc, just being able to add additional value to the product and service that you’re offering.

3. Confirmation Bias

Towards the elements of confirmation bias within the psychological fields, this is the process of being able to seek out information that you already believe.

This is the ability to only see one side sometimes because you already believe something, and this is the way you want to believe. In theory, this is that people are sometimes biased in their selection of supporting evidence.

Within your content marketing pieces and other supporting marketing pieces, you need to ensure that your content is supporting the evidence which you’ve promoted. This evaluates that your content should have a supporting consistent message throughout your campaign.

On the other side of the negative impacts of confirmation bias on your business, if you are trying to combat negative confirmation bias, you will need to support all claims made within your content with cold hard facts and concrete research.

4. Loss Aversion

From an array of psychological studies, Loss Aversion is defined by

Loss aversion

as the tendency to prefer avoiding losses to acquiring equivalent gains.

For your marketing, when you’re linking to the elements of loss aversion you need to properly understand what makes your audience and psychographic segmentations tick and to be able to understand them properly.

For products and services which include the use of free trials utilized the loss aversion to be able to take advantage of the buyer’s tendency to make the product or service seem more valuable whilst they’re using the product.

This is so when the free trial is over, the customer will feel attached and see it more like a loss than an addition so they want to keep the product or service which you’re offering.

5. Information Gap Theory

In psychology, the information-gap theory of curiosity develops when we feel there is a gap between what we know and what we want to know. Within this strategy, there is the theory that you want to understand the information that you don’t know.

Arguably, this is one of the easiest theories to capture whilst you’re understanding and writing your content for the marketing efforts which you’re pushing towards.

Within your content marketing, you need to be able to generate curiosity within your content. This is where the writing comes into play, starting with the headline for your content, this is where you will first capture the attention of your audience.

Once you’ve promised the pieces within your headline, you need to be able to give the audience what they want within the content, this is the content that brings value, knowledge, and information to your audience so they can learn something new.

6. The Decoy Effect

As defined in marketing, the decoy effect, which is also known as the attraction effect, is the spectacle whereby consumers will tend to have a specific change in preference between two options when also presented with a third option that is asymmetrically dominant.

With your content marketing, this is the element where you want to be able to sell a specific product, based on the three different segments which you're offering your audience.

Although it seems like you’re giving them an offer, based on the information, they will pick a specific one based on the decoy effect making it seem like they’re getting more of an offer. This results in more money being spent than someone may have usually.

TedTalk — Are we in control of our own decisions?

If you’re interested in this particular strategy, there is more information in this video by behavioral psychologists Dan Ariely.

This is shown by the elements of purchasing products and how psychology can sway people into buying a specific product.