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Psychology and online marketing
Today’s post on psychology applied to the online world won’t have any tactics and tricks for building your lists, getting better optin rates, or increasing conversion rates.
Rather, they’re good simple ways to both float above the online landscape below and a way to be firmly grounded in the deep aspects of who we all are as human beings first — before being marketers and potential revenue-producing customers and prospects in an online world . . .
So take each of these short sections as food for thought and jumping-off points to think about your products and customers and what you’re doing . . .
Sharing and connection:
It’s only by sharing and connecting can anything have any meaning — including these words in front of you. Words are symbols and symbols build up meaning through sharing and repetition. For example, tweets are Twitter posts. They used to be what cute fluffy birds sang in the spring.
And sharing and connecting only happen with community and culture. The broad sharing or connecting of your product or service is essential to it having meaning to as many people as possible.
That poses the questions:
- How do you share and connect your product or service more broadly?
- What are the broader trends and directions of your community and culture?
- How far into the future can you see and how much can you bring back to the present to share with others in your community?
Invisibility:
The ring in the massively successful Lord of the Rings movie trilogy (based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s massively successful books) is based on a moral story 2400 years ago in ancient Greece. In the movie and books, there’s a quest to destroy a golden ring with magical powers and restore peace to the Earth.
In The Republic from 380 BC, ancient Greek philosopher Plato writes about the ring of Gyges which grants its owner the power to become invisible at will:
In a cave with a tomb, Gyges discovers the ring on a large man’s corpse which gives Gyges power to become invisible by adjusting it. He arranges to go to the palace. There he uses his new power of invisibility to seduce the queen, murder the king, and become king himself.
Through the story of the ring, The Republic discusses whether a typical person would be moral if he did not have to fear the consequences of his actions.
That poses the simple question for you that focuses on being authentic or real:
- In an online world where you can assume and project any identity and make your real self invisible, how do you conduct yourself?
Altruism:
Each of these psychological ideas is easy to understand and overlap, so let’s jump in. Just read them to get your juices flowing on how to use them:
- Social exchange theory: we do what we do for others with the understanding that something will come our way. Giving away quality free online content is a big example
- Reciprocity principle: we feel indebted when others do things for us — even if it’s something we don’t want (like the gift of a hideous men’s necktie). This is also known as building “psychological debt.”
Back in my real estate days while negotiating deals, I saw others do this well by buying a coffee for a prospect. And I saw others screw it up by buying the coffee, so to speak, then turning to the prospect and say: “I did something for you. Now you can do something for me. Buy this property.” Go and build the psychological debt. But don’t call attention to it by asking for something to come back to you in negotiation fashion
- Bystander Effect: People take action depending on what others are doing. The larger the group, the more people will not do anything, thus the more likely any one person won’t do anything.
This is known as “diffusion of responsibility” and is a challenge in getting the first sale after presenting to a live group or a great challenge in societies where the majority of people want change but wait for authorities to take action rather than organize themselves effectively. You gotta break the ice.
Live presentations get around this by having people give testimonials to demonstrate there already is a history of buyers, then having confederates come up and make their first purchase to get the ball rolling. Once others see the first buyers step forward, they stand up and join the crowd, which then becomes self-reinforcing. (I saw this tactic work like a charm when I was roped into attending multilevel marketing presentations in the 1990s.)
Political protest marches have the same effect
- Ambiguous situations: the more ambiguous a situation, the less likely we’ll act. Since most of life is not black or white, most situations are ambiguous. Adding to this is the increasing confusion of too many choices online and too little information to evaluate those choices in the short time given to a buyer (“Sale Ends Tomorrow. Act Now!”). Thus, most people will NOT act.
How to get around this?
Help them see clearly: You step forward and create order and harmony and pattern and then point out the pattern so your prospects will see it clearly, like we did in previous posts about optical illusions, remember?
Put your prospect into the scene where they own and are using your product. Let’s take copy for this nutrition supplement as an example:
Just imagine what this could mean for you in one week, when your first supply of REVV reaches you.
Within minutes of eating your first REVV wafer, you’ll literally feel the super-energy surging throughout your entire body!
While quietly in the background, its 100% all-natural ingredients are detoxifying, cleansing, and nutrifying every cell, organ, and system in your entire body …
Remove the ambiguous what-ifs of unknown risks:
Think through like you’re embarking on an unknown venture involving your entire net worth and ask yourself in worst-case scenario disaster planning fashion:
What can possibly go wrong?
Then go through and address those what-ifs. Here are a few:
- Lose money? Provide 100% money-back guarantee.
- Potential physical, mental, psychological, financial, or social harm to me or my family? Show how it cannot harm you.
- Not enough time to use it before money-back expiration? Extend the period.
- And the greatest fear: Looking like a gold-plated jackass: Make sure your customer isn’t merely paddling in their canoe out to your ship, trading their beads in good faith for your goodies, then paddling back into isolation feeling deeply embarrased for being fooled while you sail off into the sunset laughing about the suckers being born every minute. Instead: be there for them: provide support, service, answers to questions.
Sharing and connecting, altruism, invisibility or aritificial personalities, and ambiguity are all humongous factors in the world online.
Technology will change.
Ways in which people share and connect and project themselves will change.
But human beings themselves will not.
WHAT’S NEXT? We focus on psychology in the form of “memes” or what are called “viruses of the mind” and get an extensive downloadable guide listing dozens of psychological hot buttons ordered by levels from primal to sophisticated.
Find out next time as we continue to chart the underlying currents of psychology, sociology, and economics that flow together as marketing.
In DEEP MARKETING.
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2. Send them to me privately if you prefer privacy (bill@rippermarketing.com)
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