When roaming social media we see lots of ads these days, whether they’re for your local clothes shops or massive companies. Everyone advertises. What these campaigns designed to do exactly and how do the companies achieve what they hope for?
Of course, when I ask “what are these campaigns designed to do”, obviously the first answer is to make you spend your money on their product or service, but it does actually go much deeper than that. That’s what we’re looking at today, and how to incorporate it into your social media campaigns.
Being a successful marketer or promoter these days is on some level doing the same work a psychologist would. Don’t worry, we won’t be delving into your subconscious and bringing up those weird dreams you keep having, we’ll just concentrate on the advertising for now.
Firstly, we’ll look at anthropomorphism. That’s just a fancy word for giving something non-human, human qualities. For example, M&M’s with their talking red and yellow M&M characters or the Michelin Man. This tactic is used to give the customer a chance to connect with the brand on a human level. This isn’t limited to putting faces on inanimate objects, some perfume companies even shape their bottles to look like a female body and a more subtle example would be Heineken, the beer loved by millions. They don’t use fancy shaped cans or put a face on the can, they simply slant the occurrences of “e” in the name so it looks like a smile.
Next up, Loss aversion. This is simply the advertiser making you feel like you have lost something, so you then need to buy the product to replace it. The most common way to practice this technique is through free trials. A company offers you the product for free for a certain amount of time then snatches it away from you in the hope of you feeling that sense of loss.
The main way advertisers bring in new customers is simply down to the words used in the ads. We buy with emotion, justify with logic. Meaning advertisers will try to get you feeling all sorts of different emotions to get you to buy.
These buzz words are used commonly to get the customer feeling a sense of “wow”. These words are carefully placed in headlines to grab your attention to get you to click through.
Each of the examples mentioned in this post aren’t some sort of subliminal messaging or tricks to try and deceive you, they are simple, yet effective ways to grab your attention, and then your brain does the rest. Anyone can use these techniques to their advantage, this post will hopefully make you aware that these things do exist and help you in using them yourself in the future.
