5 Tips from Cognitive Psychology that Will Draw Attention to Your Content

Using psychology to write effective sales and email marketing has become a popular technique that most marketers prefer nowadays. They count on cognitive psychology to influence the way their customers think about a product and influencing their buying behaviors. Moreover, when you are building a website or preparing a marketing campaign, knowing as much as possible about cognitive psychology is gold.

For example, getting deeper into your customers’ psychology will help you choose the right colors to draw attention on your posts, or it will show you which words to choose and how to build your phrases to maintain your target audience’s interest. The more you know about how your customers’ mind works and reacts, the easier it will become for you to make smart decisions and ensure the success of your marketing efforts. So, if you wonder how you can use cognitive psychology to draw attention to your content, keep reading this article and learn about the most popular tips.

What is cognitive psychology?

Cognitive psychology studies various mental processes. For example, perception, memory, attention, learning, or problem solving are part of cognitive psychological processes. Furthermore, even though it is not an old psychology branch, it quickly became one of the most popular areas of research. Understanding how people think and understand information has become a priority for many researchers who are curious about how the human brain works. Each insight that they discover helps psychologists develop new methods to help people cope and overcome psychological difficulties. 

On the other hand, cognitive psychology helps business owners and marketers improve and understand how to create a successful marketing campaign or business. Using cognitive psychology when developing their content has become a successful trick applied by professionals in any domain. Moreover, cognitive psychology is very efficient in improving the customer experience and improve the engagement rate. When you produce content which meets your customers’ needs, it will become easier to convert your target audience and increase your sales.

5 Tips from Cognitive Psychology that Will Draw Attention to Your Content

1. Persuasion

One of the most successful models of cognitive psychology is BJ Fogg’s behavior model. BJ Fogg comes from Stanford University, being the leader of Persuasive Technology Lab. He has studied various methods on how to achieve desired business goals and develop a successful strategy which relies on cognitive psychology. Fogg reached to the conclusion that if you want a behavior to happen you will need three key elements: motivation, ability, and trigger. When one of these misses, this means that something happened along the way and it is more likely that the behavior won’t happen. Therefore, an effective piece of content needs to express motivation and ability in order to make buyers push the “purchase now” button. 

If you want to motivate your target audience, you will need to build your content with strong and relevant messages. In addition, if you want your customers to have a positive reaction, your messages should be easy to understand and fluent. However, you will not get the behavior you want unless you also provide a trigger in your messages. This means that you should do detailed research and understand what your audience wants. Once you know what they need and expect from your side, you can increase your customers’ motivation by building relevant information. Moreover, you can include a clear and targeted CTA to encourage your audience to take action immediately. Leading your audience to the fear of missing out your products or winning social proof once they buy them are two of the most efficient techniques which you can combine with persuasion. 

2. Colors

It is perfectly true that it is practically impossible to choose a universal color which will be the favorite one for all your target audience. However, this doesn’t mean you cannot use color to successfully develop your marketing techniques. Research shows that people need just 90 seconds to make an impression over a product. Moreover, in 90% of the cases, they are influenced by the product’s color. What is more, color is an important element to consider when building web pages, create promotional banners, or film videos to present your products. Each color transmits a different message. So, you should be careful when selecting the right combination for your target audience. For example, if you use blue, it will help you win the trust and loyalty of your customers. Red, on the other hand, fills your audience with energy and passion. If you count on yellow, then the message you transmit to them is optimism and warning. 

Furthermore, when your main focus is the respect of nature and environmental protection, then the right color to use is green. Orange is also very meaningful, giving the impression of fun, urgency, or excitement. How can this be translated for content marketing? You should choose the colors which best represent the emotion you want to transmit in your content. What is more, you shouldn’t forget about your brand’s colors and include them in your content. Finally, whenever you add CTA buttons in your content, you should use colors like yellow, orange, or red. Thus, you will create a sense of urgency and make your CTA buttons stand out on any design. 

3. Cognitive fluency

People are extremely busy nowadays. There are a lot of distracting factors around them, making concentration extremely difficult. Thus, your audience will spend less than 1 second to make a decision when they reach your website. Moreover, your customers will feel attracted by simplistic content as it is easier to consume. All this process is called cognitive fluency and you should use if you want to draw attention to your content. Staying away from complicated information is essential if you want to increase your number of customers. This explains people’s attraction to emojis. It becomes easier for them to communicate and express their emotions in a simple and fast way. This is a general rule which works for anything, from tweets to blog content. Whenever you complicate the way you express yourself and make your content too difficult, then your target audience will leave your website immediately. 

What can a content marketer do in this case? Even though you sell a complex product, then the best thing you can do is use basic terms to help your audience understand it. It doesn’t matter the level of professional knowledge your customers have, they will appreciate better simple content than a complex one. In addition, you should build your social media posts as short and concise as possible. Keep the same trend for your calls to action and include only one topic in each blog post or video that you create. You can quickly communicate your message and catch your audience’s attention by using eye-catching graphics. Keywords will also help you increase your visibility. Furthermore, you shouldn’t forget about emoji’s popularity. If the tone and voice you want to use will allow it, you can use them in your content strategy. Sometimes, an emoji can speak more than an entire paragraph. Finally, hashtags will also help you highlight your topic on social media and will transmit your message to a wider audience. 

4. Familiarity

People use perception in the process of selection, interpretation, and interference. When your audience enters on your website, they have certain expectations. Therefore, they will start subconsciously to look for it. Their curiosity will keep them engaged and drive them to continue reading until they achieve the expected results.

This is the moment when they experience a perceptual set theory. Furthermore, people’s present expectations are influenced by what they experienced in the past. This means that your customers select to what type of content they pay attention to and use their past experiences to understand current circumstances and decide what to do next. 

When you build your content, you should think of how your target audience will perceive your post. Any marketer wants to think out of the box and be authentic. However, you shouldn’t go too far as your target audience might not understand what you want to transmit and your strategy will fail. In addition, you shouldn’t be afraid of adding strong CTAs at the end of your content.

When you don’t guide your customers at the end of your blog post, they will get confused and all your marketing efforts will be in vain. As a marketer, you should build your content with a logical flow and drive curiosity from beginning to the end. In addition, it is very important to include simple language and information and include obvious CTAs every time you can. Consider turning to professional writers like those at Trust My Paper or Grab My Essay to create unique and relevant content for your venture.

5. Social proof

Customers have different criteria when choosing a product. They use the information provided on the retailer’s website, ask their friends and family, or read online reviews and comments on social media. Why do they need all these sources of information? Customers need social proof which means that they trust what their friends and family recommend them. Sometimes, these recommendations count more than any information coming from the brand.

This is a psychological process which you can exploit and use it to draw attention over your content. Therefore, a strong presence on social media channels like Facebook, having a long list of positive reviews, will be extremely helpful to show your customers that others already tried your products. 

You can include testimonials in your content strategy. They will show your target customers why they should trust you and make them curious to learn more about your products. It is very important to gain the trust of your customers and make them feel comfortable talking about your products and recommend them. In addition, you can use real-life examples to show your customers how your products helped others and what they can do for your customers.

In addition, you should encourage your followers to leave reviews and show your appreciation for their time in writing something about your products. Displaying your number of followers and shares on each social media channel you are active is also a successful psychological strategy. Finally, you can collaborate with influencers who can talk about your products and help you enlarge your customer database. Moreover, in case you won any prize or special distinction for your products, then you shouldn’t keep it just for you. Any proof showing the high quality of your products is extremely helpful in your content strategy. 

Before you start building your content, you should ask yourself why would your customers listen to you. What are the benefits you offer them? Even though they seem complicated, your target audience is actually not sophisticated at all. Offer them simplicity and stay away from complicated expressions and phrases. Customers have short attention spans, and this has been proven in various studies and research.

Therefore, introducing short and concise phrases, as well as creating targeted posts for social media is the best thing you can do. In addition, your customers expect valid proofs on your products to convince them that they can trust you. This means that your content strategy should go around offering real and verified opinions on your product and encourage your followers to leave their reviews for your products. 

Finally, you should keep in mind that the human brain reacts very well to routine. Thus, you should offer them familiarity and offer them exactly what they expect to see. Familiarity can be built in different forms like CTA or purchasing buttons. What is more, you should ensure that your text has a logical flow. Furthermore, you shouldn’t underestimate the power of colors. Use the tips above and select those which transmit the emotions you want to express.

Each element is important in your content strategy and it helps your brand strengthen its position on the market, while also increasing its visibility. Even though it will take time until you will see the results of implementing all these tips, the effort will be worth it. What is more, once you start implementing them, you will see that they will come naturally in your content strategy and bring tremendous results.

About Guest Author:

Dorian Martin is a frequent blogger and an article contributor to a number of websites related to digital marketing, AI/ML, blockchain, data science and all things digital. He is a senior writer at Supreme Dissertations, runs a personal blog NotBusinessAsUsusal and provides training to other content writers.


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