7 Marketing Psychology Tactics to Influence Your Customers (With Examples)

The brain. It is the control center for every process in your body, and with so much to do every day (like keeping you alive), it has to rely on shortcuts—for remembering, problem-solving, and—what we’re talking about today—decision making.

So in terms of consumers making purchasing decisions, being aware of these shortcuts can help you to understand, predict, and leverage their behaviors in your favor. No, you’re not looking to maliciously manipulate your prospects and customers. But yes, there are ways to influence their actions—actions they will be glad they took.

In this article, you’ll learn seven psychological principles you can leverage in your marketing and influence the buying decisions of your prospects.

Table of contents

• What is marketing psychology?

• How to use marketing psychology responsibly

• The commitment and consistency bias

• The anchoring bias

• The paradox of choice

• The mere exposure effect

• The reciprocity effect

• Social proof

• The Pygmalion effect

What is marketing psychology?

Marketing psychology is the practice of aligning your content, communication, and strategies with the many predictable, often subconscious, human behavioral patterns that have been identified through experimentation and research. These common behaviors originate from heuristics—a fancy word for shortcuts the brain takes for tasks it carries out thousands of times a day, like comprehending information, making decisions, and solving problems.

There are several ways to use marketing psychology, including:

• Resonating with your audience by using emotional trigger words.

• Applying psychology principles to copywriting.

• Choosing website colors based on how they are perceived.

Regardless, the idea is not to change the way your audience thinks. These patterns are hard-wired in our brains! It’s to change your content and approaches to align with the way they think.

How to use marketing psychology responsibly

I’m not trying to sugarcoat things. These “shortcuts” are also referred to as cognitive biases, thinking traps, or cognitive distortions. Which leads me to a crucial point: the idea behind marketing psychology is not to exploit, manipulate, or deceive. So if you want to use consumer psychology to win over more customers, remember these points:

• DO make sure that their decision to choose you is truly the best one for them. Winning over customers that aren’t a good fit for your business is a lose-lose.

• DON’T use these tactics to make promises you can’t keep or to represent more capabilities than you have.

• DO align your business goals with the goals of your prospective buyers to make it a win-win. And use data to measure the effectiveness of your marketing psychology strategies.

• DON’T forget that you’re a human and consumer too. Beware of other businesses practicing manipulative marketing psychology.

7 marketing psychology strategies & examples to influence purchasing decisions

For each of these seven tactics, I’ll explain what each one is, offer some simple examples, and then provide specific ways you can apply them in your marketing strategies—whether for your website, product pages, landing pages, and more.

1. The commitment & consistency bias

The commitment and consistency bias says that we have the tendency to act in line with our previous behaviors and expressions.

This phenomenon has a few manifestations that can work to your advantage in marketing.

Create a lead nurture funnel

Once we heed a small request, we are more likely to comply with similar ones that follow. This is the concept behind the marketing funnel! At the top of the funnel are small requests for your audience, which gradually get bigger as the prospect moves downward to the bottom.

For example, you ask readers to read your content, then you ask them to give their email in exchange for a free guide, then you ask them to attend an event or webinar, and then you invite them to a free trial or consult.

Since your audience is subconsciously inclined to keep their behaviors consistent, they are more likely to continue pursuing and engaging with the content and offers from the business they first started with. Plus, compared to their first action (reading a blog post), a free trial is a big jump, but compared to the previous action (attending a webinar), it’s not as drastic.

Have progress markers for tasks

Another form of the commitment bias is the sunk cost fallacy—the need to follow through with something once we’ve invested time and/or money into it. For example, Yelp lets you draft reviews without creating an account. When you begin writing, Yelp uses fun cues like “Don’t leave us hanging – what else you got?” to encourage you to complete the review.

Then, once you finish the review, they ask you to create an account—without which you can’t post your review.

Now you don’t have to create an account and post the review, but more likely than not, you’ve put in the effort to write it, so you want to make the time you spent worth it. You’re not going to abandon the process now, are you?

Break your content up into digestible tidbits

You can also leverage the commitment and consistency bias to increase engagement with your content—particularly long-form content over 5,000 words. Instead of just asking your audience to commit to reading an article that they don’t yet know is worth their time, present it in bite-snack-meal form.

• Bite: Small piece of information without details.

• Snack: Combination of bites. Audience wants more information but not detail.

• Meal: Large piece of information, filled with details and thorough explanations.

Take, for instance, Elite Content Marketer’s extensive review of Grammarly. Instead of asking readers to commit to reading the whole piece, it start with the bite and the snack upfront. The bite is the overall verdict. The snack is a visual of the pros and cons of the product. And then the meal is the detailed review.

If the reader has engaged with the smaller, more digestible pieces of information at the beginning, they will be more likely to perform the larger request: to read the full piece. Should they choose not to read it, they can at least get the key takeaways at the top and obtain value from the content.

Speak to your audience’s self-perception

I highly doubt this was done intentionally, but the call to action button below is a great example of the C&C bias in copywriting. If someone is on this website, it’s because they care about their pet. According to this pop-up, not signing up is inconsistent with this self-perception.

2. The anchoring bias

The anchoring bias is the tendency of an individual to use the first piece of information presented to them as a benchmark (or anchor) for making a subsequent decision. As you can imagine, this tactic is particularly useful for pricing.

Here are some types and examples of anchoring:

Indicate mark-downs

Not only does the buyer see this as a bargain, but also, a higher starting price tends to send the message that the item is of higher value. Notice how I said “tends.” Every business has a unique audience with unique perceptions on price. Make sure you understand how pricing changes affect the perceived quality of your products in the eyes of your customers.

Show the amount saved

Many SaaS and subscription companies offer a cheaper annual plan over their monthly subscriptions, as with Zoom in the example below. Another way to display this would be to show the monthly rate for the month-to-month plan, and then the reduced monthly rate for the yearly plan. However, if the difference is not all that significant, it may be more worth your while to show the total savings from the year.

3. The paradox of choice

Let’s say you’re at the supermarket and you want to buy some tea. As you approach the aisle, the rainbow of packaging looks great. But as you start browsing, you start feeling not-so-great. There’s black tea. Green tea. White. Red. Regular tea, decaf, or herbal. Fruit tea. Zingers. Loose leaf. Probiotic. Sleep-enhancing. Memory boosting. And that’s just for one brand. Overwhelmed, you abort the mission altogether.

That’s the paradox of choice!

The paradox of choice says that as the number of options to choose from increases, the more stressed we feel about making a decision and the more likely we are to not make one at all. We also are more likely to have doubts about whether the decision we made was the right one. Here are some ways to remove analysis paralysis for your audience.

Keep varieties and options to a minimum

In an experiment by Sheena Iyengar, when a supermarket made six types of jam available for tasting, it attracted 40% of shoppers, 30% of whom bought jam. But when this was repeated with 24 types of jam, it attracted 60% of shoppers and resulted in only 3% of purchases. If you want to increase your conversion rates, consider decreasing the options available to your audience. Perhaps offer a sale on a select number of products, or reduce your five pricing packages down to three.

Limit the number of items in your main navigation menu

While a big part of marketing is to go against the norm so you can stand out, there are still many areas where this could work against you. For example, you might see that a competitor has just five items in their website’s navigation bar. So maybe you think to have 10 in yours so prospects can see that you have more to offer. The truth is, websites should only have 3-6 items in their navigation bar.

Too many options to choose from, and the visitor becomes confused on what to do or where to go. By narrowing down those menu options (and even the other click options on the home page), you spare them from these unnecessary decisions so they have the mental energy to make the more important ones as they get deeper into your site.

This site could benefit from consolidating the menu in its website header with drop-downs.

Have only one CTA per landing page

You’ve heard this a thousand times, but it’s worth repeating. You should have one unique landing page for each product or offering, with one clear call to action per landing page. Multiple options will distract your prospects from the desired action you want them to take, can make for a less cohesive user experience, and can lead to a loss of conversions. And when you’re running paid ads, you can’t afford to waste your ad spend.

Remove navigation, social buttons, and footers too

So maybe you’ve removed the email signup button from the page where you want users to buy now. But are there other options to click on the page that are less prominent? Is there a link-heavy footer on the bottom? What about social media icons that link to your profiles or allow the visitor to share? In a case study by VWO, they were able to increase conversion rate by 100%, simply by eliminating the navigation menu.

4. Social proof

Coined by the author Robert Cialdini in his book Influence, social proof says that we tend to follow others in new situations where “appropriate” behavior is unknown to us. It’s our way of ensuring we feel safe, liked, and/or accepted.

What does that mean in marketing? Testimonials. Reviews. And more. Here are a few ways you can use social proof to influence buyer behavior.

Have an organized testimonials page

Create a dedicated testimonial page so prospective clients can see others just like them, benefiting from your solution. For example, below is the testimonial page on the LOCALiQ website. Notice that you can filter by industry or service provided—which is ideal.

Adorn your website with testimonials…

Don’t just reserve these for your testimonials page. Include them in your landing pages and homepage, too—ideally with headshots to add more credibility.

…and your ads

Testimonials and reviews make for compelling ad copy as well. In the ad below, the copy is the creative for the ad.

You can use our testimonial advertising examples for inspiration and ideas.

Highlight endorsements from popular brands

You may also want to include the logos, or in the example below, faces, of any big names or brands that use your product (with their permission, of course).

Another similar option would be to list major media outlets that have featured your product. Seeing these familiar faces and names endorsing your business helps potential customers to feel confident and secure that you deliver results.

Include stamps of approval

If you have partnerships, awards, or other trust signals that speak to your credibility, add those too!

Use the numbers to get more subscribers

You don’t always need a prominent name to build trust and get signups for your offers. There’s also the “wisdom of the crowd” approach, where you can boast that a large group of people is using your products or resources.

5. The reciprocity effect

Two wrongs don’t make a right, but it certainly feels right… am I right? Reciprocity is our human tendency to respond to a gesture with one of similar nature, which of course goes for positive behaviors too.

Here’s what positive reciprocity looks like in marketing.

Offer exceptional customer service

Yes, it’s important to proactively ask for reviews, but if you focus on providing an awesome experience for your customers, you can bet that you’ll organically collect them. Even though it’s “your job” to serve them and their job to pay you, the extra effort you make to meet their needs inspires the extra effort they’ll make to write you a review—or even through a little something extra in their cart or to their order.

Provide free (valuable) information and education

This is content marketing and SEO in a nutshell. No, your readers aren’t going to reciprocate by providing free education back to you, but let’s say they’re deciding between your company and a competitor, and you both have great reviews. Which company do you think they’ll feel more inclined to choose? The one that has been generously providing resources all along…or the one with only social proof?

LOCALiQ’s Marketing Lab is a free learning hub for local business owners and marketers. And let’s not forget that Google reciprocates quality content which higher rankings.

Offer free tools and trials

In the B2B SaaS industry, a great example of reciprocity would be offering a free trial of your software or a free tool. WordStream, of course, has their Free Google Ads Performance Grader, which performs over 40 hours of audit work for you in a matter of minutes. Again, if it comes down to deciding between one agency and another, the buyer may be more inclined to reciprocate your free and valuable offerings with their business.

Related: 26 Brilliant Ways to Use Psychology in Your Copywriting

6. The mere exposure effect

Social psychologist Robert Zajonc performed several experiments in the 1960s and found that “mere repeated exposure of an individual to a stimulus is a sufficient condition for the enhancement of his attitude toward it.”

In other words, familiarity leads to preference, even on the subconscious level.<

Display ads are often dismissed as an ineffective ad type because their click-through rates are so low, but that’s not their point. Display ads give your business exposure. Mere exposure!

The more exposure to your business, the more familiar your audience becomes with it, and the more familiar it becomes with it, the more they will trust, engage with, and prefer it over competitors. Combine this with the commitment and consistency effect you’ve got yourself some loyal customers.

This is why brand awareness is so important. Indeed, display ads can improve click-through and conversion rates on all your other ads and campaigns. Hence the view-through conversion metric.

Use retargeting ads to increase CTR

But click-through rates aren’t low for all display ads. In fact, retargeting ads can have click-through rates 2-3 times higher than regular display ads. Just watch your ad frequency so you.

But watch your frequency because if your ad keeps aggressively following a prospect on the internet, you can quickly become that annoying brand that doesn’t care about privacy. An appropriate delay between exposures gives them time to settle in so the repetitions are more effective.

Send the same message across all channels

You can also repeat your messaging and unique value proposition (USP) across your brand assets, including your website, blog posts, newsletters, ads, and other touchpoints. As a prospect becomes more and more familiar with your USP, the more appealing it becomes. And this is why including an array of channels and mediums in your content marketing strategy is so important.

Ahrefs CMO Tim Soulo recently mentioned how their blog, receiving close to 400k monthly visitors (as per their own tool), facilitates the mere exposure effect.

Promote your content

The mere exposure effect also makes a strong case for promoting your content on social media (and encouraging others to promote it too), especially your guides and blog posts. You can share the same content more than once—just make sure you allow enough time in between postings.

Have a brand style

While brand awareness measures how many people know about your brand, brand recognition measures how quickly a person can associate a piece of content they see or hear with your brand. To build brand recognition, you should have an appealing, eye-catching logo as well as a brand style guide. Choose just a few colors and fonts to use consistently in your content so people can build automatic associations between that look and feel and your business.

7. The Pygmalion effect

This last psychological tactic can be used both on your customers and your own team.

The Pygmalion effect, also known as the Rosenthal effect, says that if you, or others, believe something to be true of yourself, it will eventually become so. So if a teacher holds his or her students to high standards with the belief that they are capable of meeting them, the students are highly likely to perform better. Similarly, setting high standards for your employees with enthusiasm can have the same effect.

Unify your team and improve the customer experience

This is why identifying the core values for your brand—and keeping those top-of-mind with your team—is so important. This gives individuals a clear set of expectations and qualities to strive for and incorporate into everything they do. The more positive feedback they receive, the more and more they will truly exemplify those values. This not only makes for a unified team, but also makes for a consistent and extraordinary customer experience.

Indeed, expectations can shape reality.

Create a positive feedback loop with your customers

You can also apply this tactic directly to your audience. By conveying that a higher level of performance is attainable, a better version of themselves is on the horizon, or that they can become the best in their field, you encourage them to act in a way that aligns with those beliefs.

These actions might start out by downloading your content or following you on social media. The more confidence they have that they can achieve their goal with your help, and that they’re already on the way to doing it, the more likely they are to be a customer. Even better, as they achieve their goals over time, they can become loyal customers.

Hold your team to high standards and show your customers that they are capable of achieving their goals, and success will flow from there.

Psychology and marketing: use them together!

At the end of the day, psychology and marketing go hand-in-hand naturally, but there are ways to use psychology intentionally to improve your marketing results. Just remember, focus on building great products and earning the trust of your audience through responsible marketing strategies. It’s a combination proven to work better in the long term.

To recap, here are the marketing psychology strategies to influence buyer decisions:

1. Create a funnel

2. Indicate progress

3. Break your content up into digestible tidbits

4. Speak to your audience’s self-perception

5. Indicate mark-downs

6. Show the amount saved

7. Keep varieties and options to a minimum

8. Limit the number of items in your main navigation menu

9. Have only one CTA per landing page

10. Remove navigation, social buttons, and footers too

11. Have an organized testimonials page

12. Adorn your website with testimonials…

13. …and your ads

14. Highlight endorsements from popular brands

15. Include stamps of approval

16. Use the numbers to get more subscribers

17. Offer exceptional customer service

18. Provide free (valuable) information and education

19. Offer free tools and trials

20. Run display ads for brand awareness

21. Use retargeting ads to increase CTR

22. Send the same message across all channels

23. Have a brand style

24. Promote your content

25. Unify your team and improve the customer experience

26. Create a positive feedback loop with your customers

Marketing Psychology: 10 Revealing Principles of Human Behaviour

One key part of being a great marketer is understanding how (and why) people think and act the way they do. It's much harder to create compelling content marketing, for example, if you don’t know why it would be compelling to your audience in the first place.

Before you jump into the tactical nitty-gritty of marketing, it’s really helpful to understand how people operate … which is essentially what the entire field of psychology attempts to explain. Understanding some key principles of psychology can take your marketing from good to amazing, all because the right audience is reading and identifying with it (and most likely converting on it, too).

Psychology and Marketing: 10 Important Principles of Psychology You Should Use

1) Priming

Have you ever played the game where one person says a word, and the other immediately responds with the first thing that comes to mind?

That's kind of how priming works. You're exposed to one stimulus, and it affects how you respond to another stimulus. Psychology Today gives the example of two groups of people reading the word "yellow" followed by either "sky" or "banana." Because people have a semantic association between the fruit and its color, the "yellow-banana" group will recognize the word "banana" faster than the "yellow-sky" group recognizes "sky."

What's this got to do with marketing? Lots. Using subtle priming techniques, you could help your website visitors remember key information about your brand -- and maybe even influence their buying behavior.

It's been tested before. In a study by Naomi Mandel and Eric J. Johnson, researchers manipulated the background design of a website to see if it'd affect consumers' product choices. Participants were asked to choose between two products in one category (like a Toyota vs. a Lexus). According to Psychology Today, "they found that visitors who had been primed on money (the website’s background was green with pennies on it) looked at price information longer than those who had been primed on safety. Similarly, consumers who had been primed on comfort looked at comfort information longer than those primed on money."

So if you're trying to make use of priming in your marketing, think about the small details. They could be the difference between someone buying your highest product price point and bouncing from your page.

2) Reciprocity

Introduced in Dr. Robert Cialdini’s book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, the concept of “reciprocity” is simple -- if someone does something for you, you naturally will want to do something for them.

If you've ever gotten a mint with your bill at a restaurant, you've been the victim of reciprocity. According to Cialdini, when servers bring a check to their patrons without a mint, the diners will tip according to their perceptions of the service given. With one mint, the tip jumps up 3.3%. Two mints? The tip jumps "through the roof" to roughly 20%.

In your marketing, there are a lot of ways to take advantage of reciprocity. You don’t have to be rolling in dough to give something away; it can be anything from a branded sweatshirt, to an exclusive ebook, to a free desktop background, to your expertise on a difficult subject matter. Even something as simple as a hand-written note can go a long way in establishing reciprocity. Just be sure you're giving away the free thing before you ask for something in return.

3) Social Proof

Most marketers are aware of this concept already, but it was too important to leave out from this list. If you're not familiar with it, social proof is the theory that people will adopt the beliefs or actions of a group of people they like or trust. In other words, it’s the “me too” effect. Think of this like an awkward middle school dance -- few people want to be the first one on the dance floor, but once a few people are there, everyone else wants to join in. (Keep in mind, this desire to conform doesn’t go away when you get older and less bashful about your dance moves.)

One easy way to make the most of social proof is on your blog. If you're not already, use social sharing and follow buttons that display the number of followers your accounts have or the number of shares a piece of content has. If those numbers are front and center and you already have a few people sharing your post, people who stumble on your post later will be much more likely to share.

4) Decoy Effect

You'll often see this effect in pricing models -- one price point is intentionally included to entice you to choose the most expensive option.

In Dan Airley's famous TED talk, "Are we in control of our own decisions?", he describes an ad from The Economist outlining their latest subscription packages. Here's what they offered:

• Online subscription: $59

• Print subscription: $125

• Online and print subscription: $125

Crazy, right? You could get the print only subscription and the online and print subscription for the same price. Why would they offer that?

That's what Airley thought, too. He reached out to the folks at The Economist, but he never got a straight answer from them.

So he decided to run his own study with 100 MIT students. He gave them the pricing packages outlined above and asked which one they'd want to buy. When all three options were there, students chose the combo subscription -- it was the best deal, right? But when he removed the "useless" option (the print subscription for $125), the students preferred the cheapest option.

Turns out that middle option wasn't that useless after all -- it gave students a frame of reference for how "good" the combo deal was and enticed them to pay more for that deal.

So if you're looking to increase conversions on a landing page with two options, you might want to add a third. It could help increase the conversion rate of the option you'd ultimately want people to take.

5) Scarcity

Ever gone to buy airline tickets and seen a tagline that says “Only 3 seats left at this price!” Yup, that’s scarcity (another Cialdini concept). This psychology principle goes back to the simple formula of supply and demand: The more rare the opportunity, content, or product is, the more valuable it is.

In 1975, Worchel, Lee, and Adewole conducted a study to see how scarcity affected people's perception. At the start of the study, they asked people to rate chocolate chip cookies. According to an article by my colleague Lanya Olmstead that describes the experiment, "[The researchers] put 10 cookies in one jar, and two of the same cookies in another jar. The cookies from the two-cookie jar received ratings twice as high as the 10 cookie jar even though the cookies were exactly the same."

But if you want to properly use this principle, you need to be careful how you word it. If you approach the scarcity concept as if there used to be a ton of a product or service, but due to popular demand there’s a few left, people will be very receptive. On the other hand, if you approach it from the angle that there are only a few products total, so get it now, the principle won’t be as effective. Check out this post from Nir and Far for a deeper explanation on why that distinction is important.

6) Anchoring

Ever wondered why it's so hard to resist a sale at your favorite clothing store?

Often, it has to do with anchoring -- people base decisions on the first piece of information they receive. So if my favorite store typically retails jeans for $50, but I find them on sale for $35, I'll be ecstatic. "I just got a crazy deal on these jeans," I'll think. I'll probably even buy them. But if my friend typically shops for jeans that are $20, she won't be nearly as impressed.

For marketers, anchoring is important to know -- especially if you're ever running a sale. You'll want to clearly state the initial price of the product (this is "setting" the anchor), and then display the sale price right next to it. You might even explain how much of a percentage off your customers will receive with the sale.

7) The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon

Ever heard about a product and then start seeing it everywhere you look? You can thank the The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon. It starts happening after you encounter something for the first time, and then you start noticing it cropping up in everyday life. Suddenly you see ads for the product every time you watch TV. And when you go to the grocery store, you happen to walk down the aisle and spot it. And alllllll of your friends all have the product.

It's weird right? Here's why you're suddenly seeing this new thing everywhere.

According to PS Mag, this phenomenon (also called "the frequency illusion") is caused by two processes. "The first, selective attention, kicks in when you’re struck by a new word, thing, or idea; after that, you unconsciously keep an eye out for it, and as a result find it surprisingly often. The second process, confirmation bias, reassures you that each sighting is further proof of your impression that the thing has gained overnight omnipresence."

For marketers, this phenomenon is precisely why nurturing is incredibly important. Once someone starts noticing your brand (aka clicking around on your website), you'll want to help them start seeing you "everywhere." Send them targeted nurturing emails and retargeting ads based on their behavior, and you could increase the possibility of them converting.

8) Verbatim Effect

According to a study by Poppenk, Joanisse, Danckert, and Köhler, people are more likely to remember the gist of what someone said, not the specific details. So when you attend a session on how to blog for your business, you're most likely going to remember details like "Have another person edit your work," not "Send a Google Doc three business days ahead of time to a peer so they can edit your work. Don't forget to use Track Changes so you know what you missed!"

They called this the "verbatim effect." And it can have a huge effect on how your content performs.

To begin with, people are spending less and less time actually reading online. According to data from Chartbeat, more than half of your visitors will spend less than 15 seconds on your site. So if people aren't reading your content and not likely to remember specific details, what's a marketer to do?

I'd recommend spending even more time than you already are on perfecting your headline. Not only should it be search- and sharing-friendly, but it should also accurately describe what's in your article. This way, when people are looking for more information on a given topic, they'll think of that one helpful article they read a while ago and Google the topic to find it again. If you've done the work, you should appear in the search results. If you need some help writing compelling headline copy, check out this post on our blog.

9) Clustering

People have a limited amount of space in their short-term memory. In fact, most people can only remember seven pieces of information (plus or minus two pieces in any given situation) at a time.

To cope, most people tend to cluster similar pieces of information together. For example, if you had a whole grocery list of random items, most people would tend to mentally group items into certain categories (dairy, grain, meat, etc.) to be able to better remember what exactly was on the list.

So when you're creating content, keep clustering in mind. How can you design and lay out your content to increase memory retention? One way to do it is by grouping similar topics together -- either under numbered bullet points or with different header sizes. Besides being much easier to scan, your writing will be much easier to remember and recall down the road -- especially if you’re creating long lists of content.

10) Loss Aversion

Loss aversion means pretty much exactly what it sounds like: Once someone has something, they realllllly don't like to lose it.

When Daniel Kahneman studied this concept, participants were given mugs, chocolate, or nothing. Then, they were asked to make a choice, they were give two options: If they were given an object, they could trade their objects, or if they were given nothing, they could choose one of the two items. The result? Roughly half of the participants who started with no items chose mugs, but 86% of those given mugs to begin with stuck with that item.

Moral of the story? People don't like to lose what they've already gained.

Though this could open up some semi-sketchy doors for certain types of marketers, loss aversion could have a significant factor in freemium products and increased product adoption. For example, you could ungate a feature for the free version of your product for a certain amount of time. After that time period is up, that feature could be removed unless you upgrade to becoming a paying customer. While you certainly have to be careful how you play to this psychological need, loss aversion is a very important concept for every marketer to know.

Should You Use Hashtags on LinkedIn?

Do you use hashtags on your LinkedIn posts? Should you?

Over the last week, we polled our audience on LinkedIn to get their perspective on whether they’ve added hashtags into their LinkedIn approach, and the overwhelming majority now have, according to the over 3,000 people that took part.

But still, 15% have not – so the question is should you bother using hashtags on your LinkedIn posts, and are hashtags actually helping to improve your content performance?

As a quick refresh, LinkedIn actually supported hashtags back in 2013, before deactivating them for several years due to lack of usage, the re-instating support again in 2016. Given the platform’s own shifts on such, it makes sense that questions remain as to whether people should or shouldn’t use them, but over the last couple of years, in particular, LinkedIn’s worked to put more emphasis on hashtags as a connective tool, in helping to show users more relevant content, and helping brands link-into niche interests.

For example, users can now manage their followed hashtags as a means to control their news feed, while company pages can also attach themselves to certain tags via the ‘Community Hashtags’ feature, which then enables you to post as your brand in related discussions.

We actually spoke with LinkedIn about hashtag use on the platform last year, and they recommended these key practices:

• Use them correctly - Be sure to include the # sign before any keyword or phrase. Avoid any spaces, punctuation, special symbols or emojis

• Don’t overdo it - We recommend using no more than three hashtags per post, and leveraging both broad and niche hashtags for increased exposure

• Do your research - Before including a hashtag, type it into the LinkedIn search bar to make sure it has strong usage in order to connect you to the most relevant audiences.

• Go niche - Try going as specific as possible for increased exposure (#TED2021 vs. #marketing)

So we have some insight here into optimal hashtag use on LinkedIn, direct from LinkedIn itself, as well as some helpful tips on how to find the right tags for your posts.

But do they actually help?

It’s hard to say. In our experience, posting to the SMT page, we haven’t seen a significant boost in traffic from LinkedIn as a result of using hashtags. We add two hashtags to every post, and in comparing our referral traffic numbers, the results are relatively steady over the past two years, if not lower last year than previous, while we’ve been adding tags.

Of course, it also depends on your focus – we’re generally focused on referral traffic, and we measure that over in-app performance, so it’s possible that while we may not be driving a heap more clicks, we could be generating more discussion on LinkedIn as a result of linking into certain tags. Certainly, our LinkedIn follower count has increased over time, and that can have its own benefits. But results will vary, and the only way to know for sure what the best hashtag approach is for your audience is to take baseline performance measurements, then test for 3-6 months, or more, to see if any changes you make impact those numbers.

If you’re looking for further LinkedIn hashtag insight, you can test out the tags that LinkedIn recommends below each of your posts in the composer, while you can also search for hashtags in the app to glean more insight into how many followers each has and other, related tags.

LinkedIn also recommends following LinkedIn Editor Dan Roth’s Creator Weekly newsletter, in which he regularly shares trending topics on the platform, which could highlight new hashtag opportunities.

The consensus, based on our poll, would suggest that you should be using hashtags, but our recommendation is to conduct a more conclusive test of your own to measure their effectiveness. And maybe, as the new year is shifting into gear, now is the right time to try them out and see what results you get.

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