Design Your Way to More Effective Marketing With Psychology

Design and science. In many schools of thought, these are competing ideas: One subjective, the other objective. But when it comes to optimizing your marketing efforts, design can be a science in its own right.

Here, we’ll discuss how you can leverage key psychological concepts in marketing design to attract and close leads.

1. The Hick-Hyman Law

Hick-Hyman Law—named after William Edmund Hick and Ray Hyman—is a psychological concept that evaluates the relationship between the amount of choices a person has available to them to the time it takes to make a decision.

Hick and Hyman found that, “...the time it takes to make a decision increases proportionally to the number and complexity of choices.”

How does this impact your marketing design?

Consider the Hick-Hyman law when strategizing your call-to-actions. Given the logic presented by Hick and Hyman, if you have more than one CTA visible at a time, users will take longer to complete an action.

Pro Tip: Choose the CTA that is most relevant to a user landing on that page. Would you rather that person “sign up” for a newsletter or “download” your latest offer?

Learn more about how to optimize CTAs for targeted performance.

2. The Follower’s Gaze

In a 2012 published study, psychologists found that, “...orienting of attention mediated by gaze and arrows can be considered as strongly automatic.” Simply put, as humans, we are biologically compelled to follow the gazing path of others (or a pointing arrow). 

This works when looking at other humans or animals—it can even work with inanimate objects that take the shape of a face (Pareidolia).

The idea of the follower’s gaze is often used in marketing design to lead a user’s attention toward a product, CTA button, or important text.

Learn more about how to choose powerful imagery for marketing efforts.

3. Cognitive Overload

With endless amounts of resources at our fingertips at all times, users are feeling more overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information available.

Information overload occurs when more information is presented than the brain can break down to digest.

Think about your website. Are there pages with endless amounts of text, pages that are paragraphs deep with little breathing room? Sites like these can be overwhelming to view and can be the root cause of a high bounce rate.

Simplify your user’s experience by formatting your web pages with easy to digest content and a reasonable amount of information. Break it up even further with visual aids like infographics and supporting images.

What do you think about using psychology in marketing design? Share your thoughts in the comments below.