Use marketing psychology with the halo effect

and how I learned about psychology

Hello, welcome to this edition! 👋

Understand marketing psychology: the halo effect

While everyone else is trying to find new hacks, the best marketers are learning foundational knowledge. Pyschology is an area of expertise that you can reuse over and over.

And one of my favorite psychology concept is the halo effect.

So here’s what you’ll learn in this edition:

1. How I discovered that marketing is all about psychology

2. The halo effect will completely transform the way you see marketing

3. How content leverages the halo effect to drive sales

---

420+ students are growing their authority with content in my course

---

How I discovered that marketing is all about psychology

---

As you can read in this note that I posted this week, I learned marketing by running Facebook ads. Well, I learned marketing in university (as I have a master degree in marketing) but I truly understood how to do great marketing with Facebook ads.

Why? Because I was testing messages, angles, copy, images, and other creative options. But one thing stood out for me. I noticed that the most performing ads were not always the prettiest or coolest. It was something different.

This is me in 2019 when I was a freelancer (before building my agency), running facebook ads for my clients, traveling in the islands.

That’s how I discovered that psychology has the highest impact on performance.

What I mean exactly is that you need to understand deeply your target audience in order to talk to them. I extensively researched the pains, motivations, preoccupations, and objectives of my target audience before writing the copy and designing the ads.

If you want to sell more, you need to understand why your customers buy.

Apart from this, I also got fascinated along the years by what I call “psychology concepts’ in the graph below. It’s a list of psychological mechanisms that you need to be aware of if you’re doing marketing (or selling an offer).

So here are the 9 psychology concepts for marketing:

I posted this multiple times on LinkedIn, it got millions of views and it was shared by people everywhere in the world.

---

---

And Morgan J Ingram commented this infographic with an interesting fact about social proof and authority. They are connected. I 100% agree with him and that’s the power of content.

---

The halo effect will completely transform the way you see marketing

---

I’m always talking about the halo effect in my newsletters and guides. But I’ve never properly defined all its ins and outs. So in this newsletter, you will understand why it matters so much to me.

As you can see, the halo effect is a recurring topic in my newsletters.

So here’s a proper definition:

Cognitive mechanism where a positive perception of one aspect of a brand, product, or person influences opinions about the entire entity.

And this is how I illustrate it with a graph:

Now you might wondering why this concept is important for marketing. Well, it’s a powerful tool to influence the perception of your audience about your brand.

Think about it, if you had to convince your prospects that every aspects of your business are legit and great, it would take ages. You would need a very long website, emails, and sales speech.

But here’s the thing; your prospective customers have limited time. And they don’t want to take this time to listen to you explaing how good you are.

That’s why applying the mechanism of the halo effect is the fastest way to get a positive perception, without spending hours pitching your solution.

AND THIS simple fact should totally transform the way you see marketing. You need to identify crucial points that your customers care about and polish them. This way, you’ll be able to leverage the halo effect.

Here are 6 simple examples to understand the halo effect in action:

The easiest example is definitely this one:

This hotel lobby is spotless and elegant… the rooms must be luxurious and comfortable.

Technically speaking, you are not 100% sure that the rooms are that good. But you can extrapolate based on the hotel lobby you’ve seen. And it’s not only about cosmetics; if someone opens the door and welcome you, you’ll probably think that the guest management is the good too.

---

How content leverages the halo effect to drive sales

---

By now you understand the concept of halo effect and you could apply it to anything. But let’s zoom on the role of content in the halo effect. Let’s make it clear first:

In 2025, content is the forefront of your B2B business because buyers educate themselves on social media, content platforms, and communities.

You need to have a great strategy and creation skills to make your content standout. So when your audience sees your content, they feel “wow, if the free content is so good, their service must be good too”.

Here are 4 types of content that work well to rely on the halo effect:

• Podcasts: share your expertise in lengthy formats and explain your point of view on the market.

• Case study: this is the most obvious, your prospects will think “if this works for others, it will work for me”

• Comparison and frameworks: they are a great way to show your expertise by sharing the tools you’ve crafted to deliver your offer

Let’s take an example;

Example (Fletch): Wow their messaging frameworks are so good… their homepage messaging service must be great too.

---

In my course, ‘Authority-First Content’ I teach you how to create content that attracts your buyers

I give you the exact frameworks, templates, and processes that I used to create content and bootstrap my business from $0 to $1m in just 14 months, and build an audience of over 130,000 people.

On top of that, every week I spend 1 hour reviewing posts on a live call — many of my students say this is their favourite part of the course. Swing by once a week and get all your posts reviewed personally by me.

Alright that’s the end of this newsletter. I hope it helped you! Thanks for reading :)