Physics & Digital Marketing: Part 1. Path of Least Resistance


Physics has been one of my favourite subject since school days. Thanks to an uncle of mine who gifted me couple of Russian books (english translated) called Physics for Entertainment by Y. Perelman.
Digital marketing is a passion that I’ve been pursuing in my professional life. We all know that the underlying aspect of any digital marketing is a combination of technology and principles of marketing. I see many instances where the laws of physics are very much in play when it comes to digital marketing
User Experience (UX), as popularly defined, is improvement of accessibility, usability, and satisfaction of any design. In digital space, it is mostly defined by the designs of website or an application (including widgets, apps, games, etc)
Path of least resistance, according to physics, is termed as the perceived pathway a forward motion object will take from a set of alternatives. The principle behind it is that the object will always take the path that has least resistance, all other external influences remaining constant. This is exactly what User Experience is all about. It is to understand & anticipate the normal user behaviour and remove all unnecessary ‘resistance’ (or distractions) and lead them to the final destination.
Even when it comes to technology, it is path of least resistance that the user will gravitate to. If there is client side bandwidth issues, load time of pages, server connectivity, etc then there is every possibility that the user will stop proceeding and explore other options to find the way to their destination. This might mean, they might do a different search to identify other options/websites, maybe a telephone call, etc
In a search behaviour, the user looks for the most convenient search engine option, the search field on browsers, and keys in the most convenient phrases/keywords they can think about, without too much mental stress and once they find the minimum expected result, they stop their search
This is also prominent in the user’s social media behaviour. Generally, they look for acceptance in groups that is a source of their interest or a medium to reach their destination. However, their participation in the group, is based on least resistance. Similar to the platforms they use. Say, if a person joins 2 different platforms - Twitter & Facebook; the level of his participation is directly related to the acceptance and reactions from the people in that particular platform. If his tweets are getting more popularity and his follower base increasing, he will gravitate towards twitter; if it is vice-versa, then towards Facebook
From Digital Marketing execution point of view, the above points could translate into:
  1. Selection of keywords that are easily thought of as part of search marketing… No specialist keywords
  2. If the website has too much of content and a deeper Information Architecture… Search option to be enabled
  3. Removing resistance/distraction of less important content, if the website is mostly browsed
  4. Technical improvements to speed up the website access and page load time
  5. Make the social group participative… tagging the user, in a post once in a while asking for inputs

Physics is truly entertaining, and making it work on digital marketing is doubly entertaining

Comments

vibrantindiatours said…
I appreciate your thinking it is a good idea to share useful knowledge like this it is quite helpful for the fresh blogger!
Digital Marketing
5:23 PM
Ruchika Gupta said…
Hi@Admin
In a hunt conduct, the client searches for the most advantageous web index alternative, the pursuit field on programs, and keys in the most helpful expressions/watchwords they can consider, without a lot of mental pressure and once they locate the base anticipated outcome, they stop their inquiry
Regards
Digital Technology Institute
12:58 PM
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