Three Psychological Marketing Pitfalls CMOs should Avoid

A year in quarantine has drastically affected the psychology of the customers and effectively transformed the rules of engagement for brands. Therefore, CMOs should understand the psychological barriers that may prevent them from creating exceptional content and hamper their engagement with them.

The year 2020 and a better part of 2021 have had a tremendous impact on the current B2B marketing landscape. This has resulted in brands continuously tweaking and enhancing their martech stack. However, the uncertainty in today’s marketing landscape coupled with the constantly changing customer behavior has made it difficult for brands to engage with their customers. Therefore, it is time for CMOs to develop and adopt strategies that will enable them to ensure empathy and connection, remains the central part of their communication in today’s contactless world. To accomplish this, CMOs should avoid the following psychological marketing pitfalls:

Also Read: Three Ways B2B Marketing teams are Failing their Martech Solutions (And How to Fix Them)

Mistaking empathy for disingenuity

Most brands have tried to incite the criticality of the ongoing events by using pseudo-obligatory phrases. However, after such phrases what followed were and still are sales-driven messaging that these days have become white noise for customers. In fact, according to Acoustic’s analysis of email marketing from January to May 2020, even though open rates in the UK and Ireland increased by 19% in March as customers searched for information on how to safely buy essential supplies and their favorite businesses, click-through rates and click-to-open rates remained relatively flat. This shows that emails with ‘an important message from our CEO’ caught the attention of most customers but did not incite action or engagement. Hence, to root out the signs of disingenuity brands should find creative approaches to show they genuinely care about their customers through new ingenious ways to catch their attention.

Staying connected with the audience

In the aftermath of the pandemic, CMOs will need to realize that marketing is not a one-way street. Instead of only relying on traditional communication approaches, CMOs should look for ways to spark conversations with and amongst the target audience. The pandemic has created fewer opportunities for customers to engage in small talk and increased the dependency on social media platforms. Thus, CMOs should embrace new ways to foster conversations and community through social media, message boards and other means of communication to create normality for their customers.

Also Read: 3 ABM Mistakes that CMOs Should Avoid Making in 2021

Over personalizing

For brands to successfully engage and strengthen their relationships with their customers, they need to provide personalized customer experiences. But, leveraging the information for customer sentiment and personal data to make messages more personalized and relevant is one thing, creating experiences that are too granular is another thing altogether and can signal red flags to customers about the misuse of their data and their sense of trust.

To address this concern surrounding too much personalization, brands should create new ways that enable customers to grant permission to use their data on their terms. They should think about tailoring this approach to psychographic profiling, which will keep interactions empathetic and connected to their customer’s personal identity.