5 Neuromarketing Tricks For Your Visual Content

The article shares interesting insights into neuromarketing that can help designers find effective approaches to visual content.

An average human being makes a large number of decisions every day, including their choice of clothing, food, beverage, which road they will take on their way to work, and so on. Also, as customers, they make decisions regarding their purchases on a daily basis. Their choice of products depends on their free will, sure, but it’s also true that their decisions are affected by a lot of different factors, including price, packaging, advertising, brand reputation, or special offers and discounts.

Interesting Experiment

Thanks to science, it is possible to identify a reason for a particular decision, which means that companies and brands can affect the behavior of their customers. This is where neuromarketing comes in. which uses the knowledge of the human neural system for marketing purposes. According to a study done by G. Zaltman, 95% of human behaviors and preferences come from the subconscious.

There are also plenty of particular examples that solidify the effectiveness of neuromarketing, such as the study done by Read Montague involving Pepsi and Coke. He hooked up consumers to an MRI machine in order to record their brain activities when drinking either drink. At first, the consumers weren’t told what they were drinking, so the split between Pepsi and Coke was about 50/50. When they were told which drink they would be drinking, the ratio shifted to 3:1 in favor of Coke.

During the first tasting, the brain part associated with seeking reward was active. During the second, a different part of the brain, the one associated with higher thinking, was active. All of a sudden, they prefer Coke because they were able to recall all the visuals and emotions Coke is usually associated with its marketing campaigns, such as happiness, or Santa Claus.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at how you can apply some of the neuromarketing tips and tricks to make your visual content more effective.

1. Make Sure Your Content Is Branded on All Platforms

According to research, our brains process online marketing even unconsciously, which means that you should start branding your content right from the get-go before it even catches on. All of the biggest brands are aware of this, and they work hard at building momentum for their campaigns, as well as new products, before delivering their message at the right moment. Great, but how does that apply to you? Well, start by branding your blog. Include your logo not just in the header of the page, but also in all of the customer images you are using in your posts.

Do the same for all the visual content on social media and inside your emails and newsletters. Also, include your logo inside your email signature, and use the same image across all social media platforms. This is what Nike does perfectly. Nike’s famous “Swoosh”, for example, is in just about every Nike visual out there, whether as a logo or on the apparel of the model wearing it.

2. Show Other Customers’ Behaviour

You can never underestimate one’s desire to do the same things or have the same stuff as all the other people. This is why all the Coca Cola ads are so effective, as well as their visual content. They usually involve imagery of happy, active young people living their lives to the fullest. Naturally, their customers want to belong to the same group, so they go out and buy their favorite soft drink.

The same principle is utilized by companies such as Booking.com and Airbnb, when they show many times a particular hotel room or apartment has been viewed of a particular time period, indicating its popularity. But, they also rely on creating scarcity, stating something like “only 1 place like this left”. In other words, what you can do is show the desired behavior in your visual content in order to get your customers to react in the same way.

3. Use Right Colors

One of the marketing elements that impact consumer behavior the most is color. Color psychology studies how certain colors make us feel and act, and it has been been used by brands and marketing companies for a long time. For instance, blue is the color most people associate with security, safety, peace, integrity, cleanliness, and trust, which is why it has found its way onto the logos, branding, and typeface of so many airlines around the world.

For example, airline companies, such as jetBlue, Blue Jet, Lufthansa, KLM, LOT, Aeroflot, and United Airlines, are all using blue in their logos, company names, or airplane branding. Because fear of flying is so common among people, they incorporate blue in order to soothe their flyers and inspire trust and safety. Also, blue also represents clear skies, which also works on a conscious level.

4. Use Fonts as Design Element

If you want your message to reach your customers as opposed to your design, maybe you should look into using a font as a design element which will help the reader focus on the message itself. Since most readers/customers tend to prefer an option that puts them at ease and provides a more pleasant experience, you should incorporate simple fonts that are easy to read. That means that the Brush font, as cool as it is, is probably not the best option if you are trying to convey a clear message or provide instructions to your customers using smaller font sizes, such as 12pt.

In that aspect, fonts like Arial, Avenir, or Calibri, would be a lot more effective. However, more complex fonts still have their place in your ad copy, especially if you are trying to catch your customers’ attention. For example, you can them sparsely to make them stand out against simpler fonts.

5. Make Your Content Easy to Scan

Even though your written content doesn’t belong in the visual category, you still need to treat it as a visual element. Why? Well, because your customers are doing so. Nowadays, they skim the content, as opposed to reading it, in order to see if the information they need can be found inside the article or blog post. If your posts contain nothing but huge blocks of text, they aren’t going to read it, regardless of how useful the actual content it. There are plenty of ways in which you can break up your content.

You can use subheadings, bullet points, and/or numbered lists in order to break up huge chunks of text and make your content more scannable. That’s one of the reasons why listicles are still so popular. They are easy to digest since they deliver information in small chunks. You should also break up text with custom images, as opposed to using none or relying solely on generic stock images. Nowadays, tools like Canva, Lunacy, or Vector Creator enable you to create eye-catching custom graphics, even if you don’t have any previous design experience, and you can use all of the tips and tricks we have laid out in previous paragraphs for maximum impact of your visual content.

As you can see, there are plenty of effective of neuromarketing tricks you can use in your visual content, as well as your marketing campaigns, without having to hook your customers up to an MRI machine. By implementing these tips, you will not only be able to capture your customers’ attention, but you will also have an easier time converting them, which is your ultimate goal. Good luck!

Author Bio: Tobias Foster is a professional journalist and editor with 5 years of experience in the industry. Apart from providing assignment writing help and editing, he enjoys niches such as philosophy, marketing, and business. 

Title image from Flame pack on Ouch vector library