Why Valuable Content is So Valuable: the Psychology of Marketing

We’ve had a student with us over the summer who is working towards a degree in psychology with the aim of working in marketing when he graduates. It’s been great to see his passion and enthusiasm for the field and also to hear his ideas and see his work, we’re sure he’ll go far. 

Here is his guest post for us:
WHY VALUABLE CONTENT IS SO VALUABLE: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MARKETING
​The endgame of a marketing strategy is for as many potential customers as possible to be aware of a business’s product or service, putting them in a position to make the call on whether they should spend their money on it. In order to achieve this, your business must be visible and your content should provide value. The importance of visibility and providing value comes from a number of psychological factors.

The reason why it’s important to be visible in a variety of different formats – including social media, email, print or audio – lies in a psychological phenomenon known as the frequency illusion (or the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon). There’s no doubt that at some point in your life you will have experienced this. For example: a friend tells you about their new shoes, you’ve never seen or heard of them before, you don’t think much of it at the time but soon you start to notice them on every other person and in every shop window. This is due to selective attention: once you’ve seen these shoes, although unaware of what you’re doing, you look out for those shoes and ignore all other shoes. This is a dream position for the business – the customer is not only seeing their product regularly but is also ignoring the competition. A second psychological factor then comes into play: confirmation bias. With every new sighting of the product, it further cements the consumer’s perception that it has gained popularity overnight, and with each viewing, they begin to perceive its increased importance.

As you can see, visibility is crucial but just as crucial is providing content that’s valuable. Providing valuable content works in the same way as giving out freebies – it gets your brand noticed, and that initial brand awareness is crucial. Whether writing blog posts, press articles or social media posts, creating adverts, generating PR or recording videos or podcasts, a business can reach a broad audience and generate many new leads. If this content is all full of useful information that provides value to the consumer it calls into action the social norm of reciprocity: the business has provided value in terms of information and/or entertainment, and the consumer is more likely to provide value in return in terms of engagement, brand loyalty and of course, sales.

So keep providing valuable content, getting your business in front of the consumer in as many ways as possible and remember to always focus on the endgame: what is your goal and how are you going to achieve it?

Thanks to Max Didcote for the post and we wish you well on your course and in your future career!

Articles, Marketing