Consumer Psychology Secrets for Business Owners

Psychology is a powerful tool to utilize in your business to expand, grow and develop your income, network and customer base. Understanding people's buying habits is a critical factor to learn as a business owner. However, this is often overlooked, and many entrepreneurs don’t take the time to understand what their ideal buyer is thinking, feeling and doing when it comes to making a purchase. If you run your business through social media, it is equally important to understand your client’s consumer behaviour to ultimately make more sales in your business.

When it comes to writing captions, emails, sales pages and direct messages, it can be very overwhelming, and frankly stressful, knowing how to communicate and effectively message your words in a way that will make your client want to buy your program or service.

Consumer psychology may sound intimidating, daunting or may have you saying, “Another thing to implement?!” but it truly isn’t difficult to implement, and you will find much more ease in selling once you understand a few basics.

Appeal to buyers' emotions

The most important facet to understand with consumer psychology is emotion. Emotion overrides reason every single time and is ultimately the basis of decisions and judgements. When buyers make snap judgements after half-reading a sales page and are already putting in their credit card information, it all comes down to how the information made them feel.

Creating positive emotions for your client increases the likelihood that they will purchase from you. How can you do this? Share a story that brings up feelings of warmth and happiness or provide a funny joke or meme. The last thing you want is dry content and a sales page that make your client feel nothing. 

Use self-disclosure to connect in the DM's

Secondly, sliding into the DM’s and forming connections on social media is something the majority of business owners are doing. Some gain new clients all the time from the DM’s while others' messages are left unread. Why is that? It comes down to the like, know and trust factor. If you are talking to someone for the first time in your DM’s you probably haven’t established this yet, and most likely don’t have months to swap information about each other.

So how can you build the like, know and trust factor quickly in one conversation? It’s called responsive self-disclosure. Self-disclosure is sharing information about yourself with another person; this could be how you felt when you first started your business or how you decided to change niches. It doesn’t have to be extremely personal, but it has to be genuine, authentic and resonate with the person you are having the conversation with.

If you’ve done this right, the other person will most likely respond with their own piece of self-disclosed information. Here is the most important part: after they have disclosed something to you, respond with interest, empathy and genuine questions. Do not try to sell in this “sweet spot.” Responsive self-disclosure is the fastest way to build the like, know and trust factor and it works.

Offer choices for consumers without overwhelming them

Next, is the paradox of choice. As service providers, we want to provide choices for our consumers and give them something that works for their business and budget. However, if you have multiple offers, at different prices, all with upsells and down sells, it’s going to overwhelm your client and scare them off. However, if you have two to four options, this gives your buyer a sense of control and choice.

They can then weigh the pros and cons of each program or service and make an informed decision freely. This comes back to positive emotion; people love having choice and freedom to make their own choice. So why not give them that? Too little choice or too much choice brings back up negative emotions. Stick to a few offers and go with it.

Tap into consumer prediction 

Lastly, how your client decides which program or service to purchase comes down to something called consumer prediction. This can be further subcategorized into two dimensions: the feeling they will get from the program or service and the likelihood of that feeling.

If someone is considering buying your service, they want to know if they will get more satisfaction, reward and result from your service or a competitor. Next, they will consider the likelihood of that satisfaction, reward and result coming from your service or the other. It’s like comparing the satisfaction you’ll get from a cookie v.s. a cucumber and how often the satisfaction will occur (every time the cookie!).

Understanding consumer behaviour and leveraging these consumer psychology secrets will help you build your like, know and trust factor and will help you convert more followers to paying clients. When we understand why consumers do what they do, we can use this information to design marketing plans and to create new products, services and offers.

About the Author

I’m Tanis from WomanUp Society. I'm a mindset coach and clinical psychology student helping female coaches and online service providers show up confidently and with authority in their businesses by leveraging their mindset for success!