The whole idea of the marketing and sales is to play with the psychology of the consumers. In any campaign, efforts should be made it make it so influential that the decision making of the customer is totally in the favor of the company.

There are some tricks to manipulate the mind of the consumers, which can be utilized by not only ordinary sales person, but can be used by larger firms. Although they are used unknowingly, there is no set list.

Mutual exchanging is the first and powerful trick. The company can start with giving something for free to the customer. He will take it for the first time, but from next time he will feel obliged and will try to return the favor. Offering the product for free initially can do this. And if the customer is satisfied with the product, he will buy it for himself from next time. Some salespersons get confused with this principle.  For example, it is ineffective and wrong according to this principle, to quote ‘Spend over $25 and get a free t-shirt’. The offer is not free; the customer has to spend something to get the free product. The product being given should be totally free without any condition to be fulfilled. For example, the line ‘Get the latest lipstick shade absolutely free’ will do the trick. If the shade is really good, they will buy it the next time and might even think of buying other shades of lipstick.

The next trick is to present something as of high value, but the company should incur only small or no amount in producing it, like information. It can tempt the customer by saying that the information provided to them is a big time secret and is not known to anyone at all. But some mess it up, by saying that they are providing very valuable information, but it turns out to be another advertisement.

Another example is giving out free sample to the targeted customers. Again the mistake made here is that companies distribute samples of poor quality or rejected products. This certainly lowers the customers liking towards the product and he will assume that’s the way the product is actually and won’t go ahead to buy it.

Use words, which initiate immediate action, like ‘Limited time offer’, ‘Offer ending soon’, and ‘Offer till stocks lasts’ are really motivating. The customer gets the impression that the offer will end really soon as the products are limited edition and he should go out and buy it at the very first chance. This works well specially with customers who have an interest in collecting antiques, collectibles and anything which are not easily available.

Tricking the customer in making a commitment is another next good method to increase sales. The trick is to make the customer to take small steps toward the goal, without realizing about it. Like when the customer requests for some information, provide them with the relevant information for free and make them fill a form and take contact information from them. This is like committing to get offers and information about products in future. Do not advertise in this step. In the next step advertisements about products and services can be sent to the customer to the address provided by them. Conducting surveys is another example.

Lottery is another good method. When a person buys a lottery ticket, he fills his address on the ticket. This information can be used to contact the customer in future. In the above practices it’s very vital to not to advertise in the first step. Only after getting the customer contact information, should promotional mails be mailed to him. Long advertisements that are featured in the newspaper are a small twist to this trick. If the customer invests time to read the whole advertisement, he has committed and will surely respond to the ad.  
 

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can essentially be broken down into two categories of activity. These are “on page” (work done to the pages of the site) and “off page” (work done outside the pages of the site).

Everything begins with the user. Their thoughts and desires determine the search phrase that they enter into a search engine such as Google. This single phrase or keyword (KW) is the only thing that the search engines use to return results.

Search engines like Google expend huge resources to try and ensure that users get the results that they are looking for so that they will continue to use the same search engine again.

Search engines look at websites and use complex algorithms to determine an order of importance to display back to the user. This is called ranking. The ranking of a website can be improved by working on various characteristics that are used by search engines in their algorithms.

On Page Factors

(i) Coding used to build the site and content of page. Do the contents of the page relate to the KW? Is the page coded so that the KW phrase appears more important to search engines?

(ii) The age of the domain. The older the site, the better in Google’s eyes. Recent reported experiences suggest that while changing content and hosting is unlikely to affect your ranking, changing your domain registrar can negatively affect ranking.

(iii) The speed with which the page loads. From a Google standpoint, the faster a website displays, the better the user experience. Slow loading sites are penalised with lower rankings by Google.

Off Page Factors

Off page work is done to influence pages on sites outside the target page. The most important aspect of this is to get “links” back to the page that is being optimized. Key criteria to improve search engine ranking are:

(i) The number of links

(ii) Their importance (as indicated by Google page Rank)

(iii) Their relevance

Additionally if more sites have links to pages within the target site then these links register with the search engine bots creating greater importance for the site. In Google this is reflected by a score known as Google Page Rank. Google Page Rank applies to the page – not the domain of the site.

It should also be noted that if a website is subject to frequent change or new additional content (especially if this becomes linked to other content on the web) then the frequency of search engine visits is also likely to increase and the rate at which the ranking of the website is reviewed will also increase.