How To Use BSC Psychology Marketing To Triple Your Sales

There are so many thing that psychology marketing can teach us, in-fact many we don’t really aware of, but using every day.
We’re using complementary colors for products in our home page (blue and orange) without even thinking why it’s good.
BSC stands for Brain, Social and Color which are important parts of marketing psychology, even so it’s a huge subject, this article is enough to open you a door into this wonderful part of marketing.

Using Brain Psychology

The human brain is fascinating machine that do so many, yet we know so little about.
The idea to bias and trigger users minds is not new and used heavily in marketing.

Big brands are using psychological and emotional triggers to generate sales and to get leads.
They are stimulating areas of the brain belongs to human relationships to become associated with their products.
It’s that part of the reptilian brain ,the oldest part responsible for instinct and survival, but also what makes our decisions.
Activating this part can lead to better chance of conversion users for your goals.

Next time you’ll see these big brands logos, the same good feeling will rise and will cause you to love what you see.
This may seem scary, but it actually happens all the time in different doses and exposure.

There is a whole discipline that deals with Neuromarketing utilizing the brain way of work for engaging users.

The brain can processes images faster than text
You probably know that sometimes it’s more easy to explain things using visuals aids than to write about them.
But, not only because you feel it’s easy, the brain also like visuals and can process them much faster comparing to text.
Acutely, visuals are 60,000 times faster than text!
Images and infographics can be powerful way to deliver your message.

That’s why in social media networks where the space and time are limited,images are playing a big rule.
And it’s not ends only in still images, video and live graphic are also strong aids to pass your ideas.
I wrote more than once, how successful YouTube and Pinterest are, and one major reason for that is this.

Think about cooperating images and short videos into your product pages and making your posts more interesting.

Image source: ernestoolivares

Taking advantage of the anchoring effect
Studies shows, that people can take buy decision reeling on the first piece of information they see.
This is know as the anchoring effect.
If someone see first an item that cost 500$ and later he see the same item cost only 350$ , he feel like he’s about to make a good deal.
This is because the mind anchored the 500$ to the item in the first time.

Use this on your customers to early expose them to high prices and than to lower the price later.
A similar technique is used in some landing pages , where you get some high price , let’s say 99$ for the product
And after scrolling a while you see the price to be lower, like only 48$.

The brain is apt to make impulsive decisions and purchases
Knowing that most people make impulse purchases and every one can make unplanned purchase,
You can use these facts for getting more sales.
Some words can trigger the brain to make these impulsive and rush action.
The strongest one is the word Now, like
• buy now
• try it now
• shop now
• get it now
• subscribe now

Now you’re probably not surprised to find out why you see these words on so many websites sale pages.
8 Psychological Insights Into the Brain That Will Improve Your Marketing.

Use of pain points
Because the reptilian brain is survival in nature, it looks to protect us and to avoid pain.
By rising a pain point, you can get this brain part attention for what you want to promote.
Since you don’t really want to cause pain, show how you can solve this pain point and relief the pain.
Many examples exist for this use.

In this facebook ad,
the pain point is you don’t know who’s the caller, the application promise to solve this for you (the relief).

The second example is saying You don’t need to pay too much for your landlord.
Again, the use of one pain and one relief point.

The same principle, can be applied with Contrast.
The reptilian brain consider contrast as extremely easily, therefore the messages will pass more easily and
The decision making process should also become faster.
You need to show the pain and how to relief from the pain by demonstrating your solution is superior than others.
Use words like “we”, “only” and “best”.

This one showing that Digitalday is much more powerful it is than its competitors.

7 Ways to Engage Your Customer’s Reptilian Brain

Focus On Beginning And End
Do you remember a part of a lecture you been attended lately ?
Where was the most powerful messages that left an impression on you?
Many will say ,the beginning or end is what makes something successful or not.

Since the brain main focus is survival, you’ll get most of the attention on the beginning and the end of your story.
Therefore, the most important information should be at the start and best to repeat it at the end.
The middle portion has much less chances to draw people attention.
If you have product, video, lecture, web page, landing page, presentation- focus on putting the CTA at the beginning and end of it.

Using Social Psychology

More Exposure Theory

In a study carried by the two researchers William Raft Kunst-Wilson and R. B. Zajonc, Animal and human showed strong preferences for objects that have become familiar through repeated exposures.
The participants exposed to an octagon object for a short period of time, later these people showed bigger attractiveness to the object even without remembering they saw it!
The lesson for marketing, repeat your message many times for both increasing his popularity and exposure time.
The more we’re exposed to something, the greater the chances we like it.
It can go well with the idea of having one main clear message and repeating it in different shapes and places on your website.

Reciprocity　Principle

This is one of the basic laws of social psychology, It says that in many social situations we pay back for what we received from others.
If someone does you a favor, you’re likely want to return him a favor.
There are few interesting researches about this principle, one of them is called The Use of Candy to Increase Restaurant Tipping
It showed how tips went up by 20% when waiters gave customers candy mints after dinner.
After the first mint, the waiter delivered a second one while looking at customer eyes and telling him this mint is especially for him.
The idea to give something in order to get something , is easy to use.
For instance, when you give an e-book on your landing page, people register in return.
It’s the same idea of Reciprocity.

You can take it further, giving away free things: T shirts, plugins, icons, etc and utilizing this to increase sales.
Here is one from me to you!
More reading: 10 Examples of Reciprocity in Marketing

Using Social Proof
You probably know the situation when you’re in a karaoke evening when someone calls in the name of other person saying something like:
”now Jina’s turn” and it happens that Jina is shay person who don’t want to sing.
When the evening goes on and other are participating, Jina persuade and start singing.
This time it happened without any need to cheer her up.
It’s the social proof that did the work.
In psychology, Social Proof is when people assume the actions of others reflects correct behavior for a given situation.

One thing I see on many websites is using Social Proof to increase trust.
Below is a bar you can see in Fiverr.com,
What you think when you see all these respected names?
I believe a sense of trust.

Ooh..if this bigs guys are mentioning them, they probably important.
I see that as a twist of social proof.
The strongest kind of social proof are: Testimonials, Influencers and Celebrity ,Reviews ,Social Shares, Social connections.

Use positive emotion to promote sales
The conventional among sciences says there are six emotion humans can feel.
But a different study says there are only 4 basic emotion :happy, sad, afraid / surprised, angry / disgusted.
Happiness was found to be a major drive for people sharing.
Online Content is more likely to become viral the more positive it is.
Also posts with a higher emotional value get more shares with happy emotions gets the most.

Try to Connect to the emotional feeling of people coming to your site and make your customers feel happy about their purchase.
Most people make purchase from emotional decision and not logical, with 70% coming from emotional and only 30% is rational!
Use titles,images and message that can rise good feelings among your visitors. 🙂

Loss Aversion

In the decision theory, loss aversion refers to a state when someone gained something,and he’s very afraid of losing and prefer to keep it.
The pain of loss is twice as powerful compare to the feeling of gain.
You can use the fact that people are so afraid of losing what they have in two different ways.
One, to give trail version or offer full version that are time limited.
Before the end of time, remind your customer they are about to lose the specific feature if not becoming subscribers.
The second way is to remove the fear of loss from the beginning.
Offer a money back guarantees or trail version ,so that people can decide if they like to keep your product or not.

Use headlines with numbers to increase the click through rate
Outbrain, a content discovery platform, has analyzed data of 150,000 article headlines and titles that were served to people on to publisher sites. They find that headlines that had odd numbers got a 20% higher click through rate than headlines with even numbers.

For the brain, number is easier than a word and we are attracted to numbers because they help us organize information into a logical order.
As this post says they’re are a BRAIN CANDY.
Small numbers are more easy for to remember compare to big ones and the brain gives trust to odd numbers more than even numbers.

Activate the mind Autopilot
The psychology of words is powerful things as we saw, in activating those autopilot areas of our brain.
Ellen Langer of Harvard University, conduct one of the most famous studies on this autopilot behavior called Xerox Study.
The experiment want to see what will be the reaction of people waiting in line to make copies at Xerox machine when someone
Want to cut them in the line. The experiment used one of 3 explanation each time and measured the success in shorting the line.
The results showed that people respond in higher rates to the words “because” , it caused a trigger to mindless response
And more than 90% of people understood this comparing to 60% without the word.

How to make use of this ?
Start putting the word “because” ,right at the opening of your outreach emails.
You have only few seconds to grab the recipient attention before he decide to keep or delete your email.
The word “because” will work its magic on the brain and you might get better response rate for your outreach.
Also combine the word in your product pages, explaining more about what you sell.

Using Colors Psychology

Using High Contrast Colors
Contrast is the noticeable difference between two adjacent colors.
For example, red and green or blue and yellow.
The Contrast is what make it possible to notice object from it background.
If the colors have high contrast, they can easily be distinguished.

See how good you can read the white color over the blue background, the high contrast makes it easy to read.

Use low contrast for less important content and high contrast for what you want people to notice.

Using Complementary (Opposite) Colors
Complementary colors are the ones that are opposite to each other on the colors wheel.
You can spot that blue and orange or red and green are opposite colors.
One thing special about them is that human eye looks for balance and when it see a lot
From one color, it looks for the opposite one.
Therefore you can make things stand up when using complementary colors.
In marketing, a use for that would be button and CTA with one color using a complementary color as background.

Coschedule been able to generate six times more clicks using facebook ads with orange background.
This is most likely because, facebook is blue covered network , so the orange image stood out more than the blue image before.

Psychology Of Colors In Marketing
The color we see has impact on we think and therefore about the decision we make.
The emotional reaction for each color we see is can be different.

A survey conducted on color and words, showed what people associate most with each color:
• Blue was most associated with Trust,Security and Reliability
• Red was most associated with speed and courage
• Orange and yellow was most associated with Cheapness and Fun
• Black was most associated with High Quality and High Tech
On the negative side, red and black were associated with fear.

Depending on your page, you may want to use colors combination for triggering the desired emotion on your visitors.
Look at facebook and payapal , both are using a blue color scheme.
Is it accidentally blue? Surely no.
These big brands knows that blue transmit trust and reliability to people and that’s why they’re using it.

Men and women experience color differently
The kissmetrics key points for Color Preferences by Gender are:
• Blue is the most popular color for both men and women.
• The most unpopular color for men is brown.
• The most unpopular color for women is orange.

More points covered in kissmetrics infographic, women has more subtle view of colors than men and that men prefer bright colors while women prefer soft colors.
Use this information to adapt the colors you use, especially if you know that your audience is mostly from one gender.
Select colors that will make people feel comfortable and encourage pleasant feelings in them.

Did you know that most pinterest users are women ? so maybe use less orange colors in your infographics.

Source mashable

Finally know, that while all these evidence on color maybe true, still they may cause different effect on people from different cultures, locations, personality and depends on the context used.
If you like to know more on Color Psychology In Marketing, Coschedule wrote a great post on this.

Wrapping up

What did you find that was most interesting ?
Did you know about some of the things I wrote, maybe you already use them ?
Let me know about this in the comment section below.