When it comes to engaging with people on social media and through the company website, businesses need to go much deeper than just posting generic content and hoping it does the job. There is a real psychology behind all marketing, no matter what the platform, and that psychology can help to create a dynamic strategy and guide your efforts. It’s a way to ensure that the steps you’re taking garner the results you’re after. However, when it comes to psychology and marketing, every little step, every decision you make, and every feature you include will have an impact. This is exactly why it requires such careful and critical thinking.
If you’ve set forth a goal to improve engagement on your website and social media platforms, and you recognize just how important psychology is in the marketing realm, then these tips can certainly help you to achieve your goals.
What are Your Goals?
Before laying out the tips to improve engagement, it’s really important to discuss the importance of setting goals. If you don’t know what you’re working towards, what improvements you want to make, what kind of reach or results you want, then it’s very hard to figure out what steps are necessary. Not only that, but you need to be tracking your efforts along the way so you know what’s working and what isn’t. If you don’t have a clearly defined starting point, how will you track results?
As for your goals, there are no right or wrong answers here; it all comes down to what you want to achieve with your company and your digital platforms, in both the short and long term. They can be basic and standard goals, or something that’s a little more involved. Be as specific as possible with your goals, as this will help you to create a more effective strategy.
Limit the Number of Choices on the Website
Increasing engagement on your website is something that many companies strive to do. It’s one of the most common goals there are. Get more people to the site and the hope is that you create more brand awareness, and make more sales. Now, you may be under the impression that giving visitors lots of choices will help the navigation experience, and create a more positive experience overall. Unfortunately, this could be your first mistake. Did you know that giving people too many choices on a website can actually lead to negative results? It comes across as busy, confusing, cluttered, and just too much, and customers may end up clicking off your site in record time.
There is such a thing as too much of a good thing. There have been a number of studies which show that reducing the number of choices given to customers will actually have a very positive effect. This follows Hick’s Law which focused on experiments of choice reaction. The more choices that were offered, the longer it took people to actually make a decision. A good tip is to go ahead and remove some of those choices and see what it does for engagement, site visits, click throughs, and yes – even sales. You want to focus on a streamlined and simple approach.
Color and Font Play a Huge Part
Then we have the psychology behind color and font. Again, it may sound overly-simplified, but the colors and font you use can have a positive or negative effect on overall engagement according to the many studies done on the subject.
Color is able to create an emotional response in people, so the trick is to first decide what emotional response you want to invoke, and then determine the colors that will make that happen. And while it would be great to lay out a chart that states what each color will do to a person’s mindset, the fact is that it can change by location, gender, and other demographics. In general, there are some basics that tend to be true in terms of color psychology:
- Blue: amazement, surprise
- Green: admiration, acceptance, trust
- Orange: anticipation, interest
- Yellow: ecstasy, joy, serenity
Keep in mind that this isn’t set in stone, so it’s not to be followed to the letter. Instead, it can start to give you an idea of just how consequential your color choices are. There’s a good chance that when you first created your company logo, you thought about color choice. You can apply that same theory to your website and social network platforms.
And just as color is important, so too is the font you choose. The top priority always needs to be that you choose a font that is easy to read – that is just basic knowledge. But outside of that, fonts will also work to create an emotional response in visitors. You can choose a font that seems modern and progressive, one that seems clean and organized, one that is approachable fun and friendly, one that comes across as more traditional, or even a font that conveys a sense of luxury and elegance.
Choosing the right font comes down to the company branding and image, and what the picture is that you want to create. Of course, you’ll also need to stay consistent across all digital platforms – you don’t want to be using one font in one place, and then switch it up entirely. Consistency is essential.
Give Photos the Credit They Deserve
Then there are photos, or images. These deserve their fair share of credit and attention as well, as a perfectly chosen image can have an extremely strong emotional response. That response can be so strong in fact, that it creates engagement with that visitor and calls a person to action. When choosing images, make sure they have lots of color, they match up with the branding, and that they are sharp and clear. You also want them to cause a double-take.
If you’re ready to boast the engagement levels of your website and social network platforms, it’s important to embrace just how big of a role psychology and marketing plays.