How To Use 10 Psychological Theories To Persuade People

To understand persuasion and social media influence, to get at the heart of conversion and likes, it helps to understand how your audience thinks and feels. Understanding why someone clicks or why they retweet requires you to look at the way the person is wired, the way we are all wired.

The psychological theories of influence and persuasion

Amplification Hypothesis: When you express certainty a particular attitude, that attitude hardens

• Conversion Theory: The minority in a group can have a disproportionate effect on influencing those in the majority
• Information Manipulation Theory: A persuasive person deliberately breaks one of the four conversational maxims
• Relation: Information is relevant to the conversation
• Manner: The information is expressed in an easy-to-understand way
• Scarcity Principle: You want what is in short supply
• Yale Attitude Change Approach: We are influenced strongly by others based on how we perceive our relationship to the influencer
• Ultimate Terms: Certain words carry more power than others

How to write for what we all crave

The Hierarchy of Needs pyramid, proposed by Abraham Maslow in the 1940s, shows the advancing scale of how our needs lay out on the path to fulfillment, creativity, and the pursuit of what we love most

• Three steps in between the physiological needs and the fulfillment needs are where marketing most directly applies
• Safety Belonging Esteem
• Christine Comaford, an author and expert on the subject of persuasion, has found safety, belonging, and esteem to have incredible value for our everyday work and our creative lives

Hooks: Psychology in action in your copy and on your site

Disrupt routine thought processes by mixing around words and visuals that a user is used to seeing then reframing your pitch while they’re still figuring out the disruption.

• The key to good storytelling is making sure that you are telling the right story.

How to Win Friends and Influence Your Audience

Win people to your way of thinking

• Remove your ego
• Default to happiness and positivity
• Show respect for the other person’s opinions
• Begin in a friendly way
• Appeal to the nobler motives
• Throw down a challenge
• Save people money

Opportunities for persuasion

Almost anywhere that you have words or visuals you can turn into an opportunity for persuasion – e.g. your calls-to-action, tweets and updates, emails, product descriptions

• What places on your website and in your social media marketing have you used psychological persuasion

The persuasion slide: How an influential nudge leads to conversion

A fun way to look at persuasion: as a playground slide

• You give a customer a nudge (a tweet, a blog post, a phone call, an ad)
• Gravity, the customer’s internal motivations, help move the customer down the slide.
• Friction, seen here as the difficulty (real and perceived) in converting, causes the slide to slow down to varying degrees
• The nudge could be most anything persuasive
• Amplification could mean that the customer is further cementing his values and attitudes

Robert Cialdini’s 6 principles of persuasion

Reciprocation

• Consistency
• Amplification Hypothesis
• Social proof
• Liking
• Authority
• Yale Attitude Change Approach
• Scarcity Principle
• The principles of liking, authority, and social proof all deal with relationships with others
• We are persuaded by those we like, by those whom we deem to be authority figures, and by the general population

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