How to trigger your users’ behavior: the psychology behind content

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How to trigger your users’ behavior is crucial in marketing. This may sound counterintuitive but success in marketing strategy does not start with strategy.

a deep understanding of your business objectives and your audience.

There are no tactics without a strategy. And there is no strategy without a clear understanding of your audience.

Here is where psychology — better, comprehension of basic psychology principles — can help.

Psychology and Persuasion
Psychology is the study of mental processes that lead to human behavior. It affects everything we do.

As a content marketer or designer, it’s helpful to understand psychological brazil cell phone number list principles, whether you’re working to make an existing website more intuitive or building a digital experience aligned with how users make decisions.


Via Google
Psychology can help us answer questions like: “Why do users behave the way they do?”, “Which elements of design will facilitate the behaviors I want users to engage in?”.

Yet, psychological principles mostly reside in the realm of academic research and literature, which are often inaccessible for marketers.

Before we start, a note on persuasion. This post covers a few principles focused on persuading users.

Although persuasion has a bad reputation — and I understand why — it isn’t an inherently negative action. It is just a way to influence, for better or worse.

Victor S. Yocco, author of “Design for the Mind: Seven Psychological Principles of Persuasive Design,” put it well:

“Utilising dark patterns or tricking a user into doing something they wouldn’t otherwise do is not persuasion. It’s being an asshole.”

That’s exactly the point. This post is not about that kind of persuasion.

What I’ll present here is a collection of principles, examples, and best practices that will make your content and design more persuasive, in order to trigger behaviors users were already considering.

In other words, you’ll learn how to increase conversions by understanding psychology, engaging readers in specific behaviors, and creating calls to action at the right time.