The Psychology of Persuasive Video Content — WistiaFest 2016

Web psychologist, international speaker, and author of the best-selling book Webs of Influence: The Psychology of Online Persuasion, Nathalie Nahai helps businesses apply scientific rigor to their design, marketing, and products. She loves to explore how the internet influences our behaviors and how businesses can harness persuasive technologies for good. In her WistiaFest talk, she covers the psychology behind persuasive videos and what businesses can do to make their content more engaging.

We psychologically engage with videos in three ways: primally, emotionally, and rationally. Video is an effective medium for engaging the primal system. You can do so by incorporating deliberate motion, engaging people in a more visceral way with physiological things, and silently compelling people to watch.

To reach people’s emotional level, we have to understand decision-making. Take people on a universally emotional journey as well as a more personalized route. You can also research and segment your audience by personality trait, based on linguistic patterns.

For rational systems, one way to engage this level is to disrupt people’s expectations. When we grow up, we absorb information and create a schema, an idea about the world’s structure. By disrupting that schema, curiosity is formed. Additionally, you can write shareable, clickable titles.

Watch Nahai’s presentation to learn more about how to use psychological persuasian principles to engage the brain.