Every decision we make, tends to be based of one either getting pleasure, or avoiding pain. They are the principles that are forcing us to do actions, and both drives us humans to look for ways to make our lives just better.
Since we're all familiar with both feelings because we feel them from time to time, there is a relation that we can make with marketing on the web.
For website owners and search marketers, understanding the needs of customers can help them align their products and/or services better with the audience. But by understanding the pleasure that people are seeking when visiting your website, and avoiding all the discomfort they may feel, you can connect your strategy on a deeper level.
So here is where psychology plays its role. It's the reason why people behave they way they do, And for an effective marketing strategy, you need to understand that psychology to know what motivates your users.
And as a matter of fact, there are a number of other psychological principles that can explain why search marketing on the web is such an effective form of marketing. Understanding why users interact with some search listings and not others can help you create a better user experience, from the initial research, all the way through to sales conversion.
Know Your Customers
It starts with you in creating your own character. It should be your persona; the way that will represent you (and your website with its products and/or services) to the public.
You need to choose the persona that is ideal for your targeted customers.
And because every people behave differently, your need to be flexible in delivering that persona. You may need to approach one with careful and understanding, while approaching another with humor and joy. This will create empathy, the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.
This feeling will help you step outside yourself into the minds of your customers. It allows your to experience their perspectives, and often times, read their minds.
When planning a marketing strategy, you should never forget how humans behave when confronted with marketing materials. Empathy mapping will help you detach from your marketing ego, into a character that is more practical and understanding.
What Do They Want?
People come to your website for reasons. And from the many reasons possible, there should be a purpose that drives them to click on a link that point to your website, read some of contents you have, navigate or others.
Before you do some researches regarding keywords, you should first understand people's intentions. Know what you sell, understand your products and/or services, and see how your solutions can be the answer to people's problems.
Knowing what people want, will help you define the marketing terms and phrases that will lead to action.
And by understanding what people are expecting when visiting your website, you can craft the materials needed for conversion. Your business may need multiple personas to meet different people, but there are usually a few that can understand their pleasure and pain.
Know which drives pleasure and which drives pain will help you create a search strategy that delivers results.
Cognitive Limit
With the internet, there are endless amounts of resources at all times. That sheer volume of information can make users overwhelmed. The same goes with your website.
Information overload happens when there are more information presented than the brain can digest and understand.
When it comes to your website, do you have pages where endless information are presented? Too many text, images and videos, or other animations can clutter experience, making less breathing room for users. How are the paragraphs? Fonts? Are they able to deliver information in a good way?
Information is good. But too many of them can be bad because they will obstruct the real message you want to deliver. This can be the tool of discomfort that causes a high bounce rate.
Simplify your user's experience by formatting your web pages with easy to digest content and a reasonable amount of information and sufficient white space. Break it up even further with visual aids like infographics and supporting images.
Make Use Of Search Engines
Because most websites out there depend on search engines for visibility, you need to trust search engines to funnel some of their traffic to you.
By targeting relevant keywords and doing proper SEO, you should appeal search engine results pages (SERPs) better. While SERPs aren't perfect, they are relevant to users' queries. This is where you need to excel your competitors.
Make your website more visible on search engines by earning people's trust. To get the amount of trust needed for this, you need to see how people relate your business with their needs. You need to understand how your persona appeals them by creating the pleasure they want, while at the same time avoiding their discomfort.
Organic strategy tends to give more pleasure to customers because the strategy aligns with how search engine ranks web pages. Some people use blackhat techniques to drive more traffic, but that will inflict pain because most of the time, the techniques highlight irrelevant contents, and people won't get that pleasure feeling of seeing them having a high position in SERPs.
If you earn people's trust and have your website ranked higher on search engine, remember to never abuse trust. Trust is hard to gain, but very easy to lose.