Getting Down the Basics of Marketing Psychology (With Reveal)

In today’s highly digitized world, interactive content is the name of the game. If you’re anything like me, you’ve taken an online quiz for fun or used an online calculator to help you do your taxes, or maybe you’ve even taken part in fantasy football and used an online tournament to compete with your friends. All of these examples are types of interactive content that have been around for years, but their current trending moment can be aligned with the rise of touchscreen technology.

If interactive content is so ubiquitous, how do you stand out in the sea of marketing messages? This is where reveal marketing comes into play. Reveal marketing requires recipients to perform an interactive action in order to receive your message. By asking customers to interact through mobile motion or touch, or by playing a game or solving a problem, you are able to increase customer engagement and strengthen their relationship with your brand. But why is it so successful?

Reveal marketing gets its power from marketing psychology. The basics of reveal marketing are founded on 6 key psychological principles that are proven to boost engagement, encourage memory retention of your messages, and grow click-through-rate. While all 6 psychological principles are important, today we’re going to talk about two of them and examine why they’re so effective. Let’s take a look at curiosity and Effort Justification and see how they come into play when crafting a strong marketing campaign.

The first of two important psychological aspects in play reveal marketing is curiosity. It’s been proven that piquing someone’s curiosity ignites the regions of their brain linked with arousal, and satiating that interest is strongly associated with areas related to memory creation. Much like how you’re likely to remember aspects of your day that stimulated your inquisitiveness, like the news story you read that answered a burning question you’ve been chewing on, instigating a customer’s curiosity by utilizing rich interactive content strengthens their memory of your message.

The second aspect relates to the idea of a recipient’s perceived value of your communication. Psychologically, humans are prone to an effect known as Effort Justification, which states that we attribute higher value to something once we’ve put forth effort to acquire it. Similar to that uneasy feeling we get when someone we don’t know sits down and lays their most intimate details on the table, marketing campaigns that are too easily accessible can feel as though they have no value and are written off by the consumer as spam. Encouraging clients to interact with your message allows them to invest effort, thereby giving your communication more perceived value to them.

In today’s marketing world, consumer attention spans are shorter than ever before. A deluge of similarly worded and designed campaigns has led to a lack of content diversity. This lack of variety leads many consumers to feel a sort of content fatigue that translates to lower engagement across a variety of platforms. The average customer today has an attention span of only 8 seconds (lower than that of a goldfish) and click through ratios for email campaigns are as low as 2%, while banner ads fare even worse with ratios as low as 0.13%.

Evoking the important psychological aspects of curiosity and perceived value through reveal marketing campaigns has proven to increase customer engagement by up to five times and grow click through ratios by 200% or more. Now that you know rich interactive content campaigns allow customers to build a lasting relationship with your company by utilizing key psychological factors that increase memory retention of your message, emotional connection to your brand, and perceived value of your communication, you’re ready to get started with your first reveal marketing campaign today!