Human Psychology Crucial to Understanding Your Customers

Have you ever watched an online video whose message you completely missed simply because you couldn’t read the text on the screen?

Author Nathalie Nahai says that’s one of the most common, and easiest to fix, mistakes that brands continually make when sharing content with their audience.

Errors like that are an example of a brand’s failure to understand their consumers’ needs, including simple things like being able to read that information that you’re trying to tell them about.

Nathalie, the author of “Webs of Influence: The Psychology of Online Persuasion”, wants brands to really understand people’s psychological context and be empathetic to their needs before trying to market to them.

Nathalie discussed this and more in Paris, where she was one of the featured speakers at Socialbakers Engage:

How important is it to apply human psychology to marketing tactics?

So I always suggest that it’s really important to be able to understand people’s psychological context and apply that to marketing tactics because if you understand why and how people behave the way that they do then you can create content which is more likely to be resonant and meaningful.

What’s the most common mistakes you see brands make?

One of the most simple, easy to rectify but common mistakes that brands make in marketing, especially when it comes to auto-playing videos, is that they don’t check that the text is legible against a changing colored background.

I know it sounds incredibly simple but if you can’t read the text there’s not really much point having it then so make sure it’s legible, it’s high enough contrast, and you’ll have fixed a really common problem.

What’s one piece of advice for brands?

If I could give brands one piece of advice it would be to understand their customers better and relate to them with integrity.

And that means using, from my perspective, psychological principles in a way that supports what their customers are already trying to do, so something in which there’s mutual benefit and respect.

To get more insights on the current state of content marketing and what’s coming in the future, check out our interviews with Socialbakers CEO Yuval Ben-Itzhak and author Ben M. Roberts.