Think deeper and go psychological with your inbound marketing campaign

As an experienced inbound marketing agency, we’ve worked with brands from all backgrounds to deliver bespoke inbound strategies across a variety of channels to help them better identify and attract the people who matter most to their growth ambitions. Want more information check out our blog “Lessons from an inbound marketing agency”.

It’s easy to push the inbound marketing theory. More and more businesses are cottoning on to the fact it’s one of the fastest ways they can grow whilst building a stronger, more natural and transparent relationship with prospects, and attracting higher-quality leads.

Inbound organisations are four times as likely to rate their marketing strategy as effective according to data from our marketing platform of choice, HubSpot.

Inbound is also one of the most bespoke, creative and attractive forms of advertising out there, using a combination of great web design, search, social media, email and more to reach out to and nurture fresh leads in a totally organic way.

Except a lot of agencies focus so much on the theory of inbound marketing, tools and software that they can overlook – intentionally or not – the human elements of a campaign.

No matter how technological an inbound marketing campaign becomes, the end goal always must be to build strong personable relationships with people who you can serve better than anyone else and will help you grow.

That’s why, at Six & Flow, we put as much importance on ever-evolving human psychology trends to identify new methods of creative outreach for our clients, to increase their potential to attract new leads and connect in the right ways.

Bringing emotion to your inbound marketing campaign

Let’s talk about social media marketing. How many times have you heard something along the lines of ‘if you talk to people on social media they’re more likely to respond’.

It’s very sound advice, but it doesn’t really dig too much into how important targeted creative content and other interactions are to building and defining a social audience. For greater growth, it’s worth exploring the deep world of social media psychology and its emotional impact.

One of the largest studies of its kind, Detecting Emotional Contagion in Massive Social Networks looked at the emotional data of a billion Facebook posts over the course of two years and found that positive messages and statuses spread to more people than negative content (which was usually posted on rainy days).

Positive marketing may sound like a bit of a no-brainer, but having hard social media data about the spread of happier messages on a platform that allows in-depth targeting on the scale that Facebook does is extremely useful when looking to refine creative campaigns and reduce costs per lead when social marketing.

Inbound psychology isn’t only about reaching out to people to build relationships. You also have to research, plan for and A/B test other aspects of your campaign to catch people’s attention as soon as you possibly can and encourage them to explore your website.

Think about your visuals for inbound marketing

You may have heard that different colours elicit different emotional responses from people. For instance, red can represent excitement and boldness for brands, and is typically associated with businesses in the food and drink industries.

Aesthetic psychology goes beyond branding, though, and could play a vital part of your conversion strategy. 93% of people recently surveyed by Skilled.co said that a website’s visuals would influence their purchasing decisions, while 52% wouldn’t revisit a poorly-designed site.

Aesthetics can have an impact on a personal level too, even going as far as the quality of your profile picture on B2B and B2C social media sites. A study published by Psychological Science has found that people make a judgement about a person based on their photo within 40 milliseconds of seeing it.

The team used different lighting and facial expressions on a variety of headshots and asked people to rate those people based on how trustworthy they appeared, how intelligent, creative, mean, attractive, competent and more.

With even the slightest facial changes leading to radical changes of opinion, it’s not only worth your while having a large collection of photos to choose from to represent yourself on social media, but to – again – A/B test those images to get the best results possible when people discover and interact with you over B2B and B2C social networks.

Getting psychological with creative content marketing

Social media marketing is of course an incredibly easy way to get in touch with people and interact with them almost immediately. The right psychological approach will help to improve results, but if you really want to get under prospects’ skin then the best way to entice them is with emotional content that speaks to them on a higher level.

Creating news, articles, guides and blogs are only part of the story when it comes to reaching out to potential leads with content. Creating psychological points of emotion as well as using key data to entice with content is essential to the inbound process, but so is the kind of language you use to grab people’s attention.

It’s especially useful when creating calls to action on your website to encourage clickthroughs. It pays to be more direct; it may not be wise to start a blog with an interrogative sentence, for instance. If you do and the reader’s answer is ‘no’, it can instantly kill the incentive for them to read on and explore your content further.

The language you use in your content also needs to marry in with your social marketing psychology to benefit from one of its most important currencies: shares.

The right psychology helps you share and share alike

Though social marketing is constantly changing, shares are still a crucial way not only to measure a campaign’s success but to get the message out to a wider audience.

A study by Ipsos claims that 24% of social media users around the world share “everything” or “most things” they see online. That’s great, but real growth comes from having your content and overall message shared amongst the right people and higher-quality leads.

Social targeting helps refine that message, but it’s also an incredible bonus when that content’s shared organically. 87% of people under the age of 35 share something they see on social media, as do 72% of users over 50. It’s essential to research what your target market shares, how it shares content with other people and why.

Research from The University of Queensland’s School of Psychology has also discovered that people who actively participate on social media feel a greater sense of connectedness.

The best businesses on social media don’t view it as a one-way street. They also look to interact with their target market and its user-generated content to provide feedback, look beyond the brand and build strong relationships with people.

As an experienced inbound marketing agency, we’ve worked with brands from all backgrounds to deliver bespoke inbound strategies across a variety of channels to help them better identify and attract the people who matter most to their growth ambitions. Want more information check out our blog “Lessons from an inbound marketing agency”.