Everyone loves a good hack. Admit it, you know you do. But some love a good hack more than most: us marketers. Our constant pursuit of eyeballs, engagement and that all-important ROI for our clients keeps us on high alert for the next trick to make our message stick. 

But, as Lumme head of marketing Jane Killingsworth shows, hacking is for hacks. Freud was onto something we’d all do well to remember: humans might have complex inner worlds, but at our core, we’re driven by ego and our subconscious. Read on to discover how Killingworth uses psychology to go viral. 

Recently, I went viral on TikTok for being a tight ass.

It was part of a campaign Lumme created for KttiPay – the group-spending app that ends the frustration of being out of pocket and awkwardly chasing mates for money for things like group trips, events and roommate expenses. 

To stand out in the noisy fintech space, we didn’t want just to explain the problem KttiPay solved, so we became it instead.

@nic.doff (a TikTok personality played by me) was created from scratch to trigger the real-life frustration of shared expenses: not being paid back. She posted outrageous (and infuriating) tips to save money by ‘forgetting’ to pay back friends, all building up to her central role in an acquisition campaign: an in-real-life (IRL) scavenger hunt to pay back what she owes.

Pitching a new social account as the central engagement piece for the campaign was bold, but we believed wholeheartedly it would work, while also quietly freaking out. “What if the account flops?” “What if the algorithm doesn’t deliver?”

The truth about the algorithm

Marketers love to obsess over algorithm “hacks” – myself included. We had a long list of them to ensure Nic gained traction. 

• Post three to four times a day
• Engage from the bottom up
• Post between 8pm and 10pm
• Scroll for 15 minutes after posting

But we didn’t do any of that. And still, Nic went viral on her second video and the @nic.doff account hit 1.1 million views in a month, with consistent views between 2000 and 200,000 for each video.

Early into Nic’s success, it was becoming clear the algorithm wasn’t getting in the way. And TikTok has been telling us this all along – its only job is to keep people watching. So if your content doesn’t hold attention, I’m sorry to say, no algorithm hack will save it. 

It’s time to focus instead on what we should be hacking: Psychology.

Five hacks based on psychology to get your content noticed

Hack one: Start with an insight

For this campaign, our market research confirmed what everyone knows: people HATE not being paid back, and everyone knows that one person who disappears when the bill comes. These insights became solid foundations for Nic’s content to hit a nerve (AKA rage bait).

But insights don’t need to come from a big piece of consumer research like ours. They could be reactions to your existing content, comments or online conversations. Anchoring your strategy in human insight will allow you to dig deep into the emotions behind it and support hacks two and three below very nicely.

Hack two: Post consistently good content

“Post three times a day” advice is BS. For Nic’s content, volume wasn’t the goal – resonance was.

Instead of churning out posts, time was spent tapping into a shared human experience and real-life stories from friends about the awkward, petty and ridiculous times they weren’t paid back. 

The stories were then layered with a checklist of psychological triggers with the purpose of giving TikTok exactly what it wants: attention and engagement.

• Curiosity – to keep people watching 
• Relatability – to generate shares 
• Rage/humour (depending on how the content was interpreted) – to stir up comments

And here’s what really backed up this hack: when Nic hadn’t posted in a few days, her best content spiked by the thousands. She wasn’t being punished for going quiet, it felt like TikTok was trying to draw her back in with positive reinforcement (and we all like a bit of that!)

Hack three: Create for a feeling, not a message

When you create content, instead of asking “What’s the message we want to communicate?”, ask “What do we want people to feel?”

Try to imagine the audience’s desired reaction in the words and tone they’d use, then work backwards from there. For Nic, these were:

• “WTF, is this chick serious?”
• “OMG I’d be livid if that happened to me!”
• “Bloody hell Sally, check this out. We know someone like her, don’t we?”

If it didn’t feel like a piece of Nic’s content would spark that reaction, it went in the bin. Then, as her content gained traction, we read every comment, mirrored their language and let the audience guide the next idea.

Hack four: Lighten the cognitive load 

Cognitive fluency, or how easy something is for our brains to process, is a principle marketers should apply to everything we create, including social content. 

Social audiences consume huge amounts of content, so the less thinking they need to do to derive value from it, the better (it’s not called mindless scrolling for nothing).

This means you should: 

• Create content like it’s the first time it will be seen. No one’s stopping mid-scroll to search for context.
• Get to the point. I’d record Nic’s videos at least five times to get to the shortest, sharpest version of the script.
• Borrow familiar content formats. Repetition is a key ingredient of cognitive fluency, so with Nic, we didn’t reinvent the wheel. We used the popular ‘notes list + green screen’ combo so the audience knew what to expect, but with Nic’s unique POV to make it stand out.

And I’ve heard the same thing from others: a simple format takes off, then they overcomplicate their content and it flops. Simplicity wins.

Hack five: Kill boredom before it even has a chance

You’ve heard it before: the first three seconds matter more than anything to capture our very short attention spans. So for Nic’s content, we tripled down on hooks. 

Written: something punchy to spark curiosity
Verbal: a provocative line or question to stop the scroll
Visual: hand movements, dropping into frame, playing with my hair – anything to disrupt the feed

The theory? If one hook didn’t work, it would be saved by the others.

Once the audience is hooked, keep them watching. Boredom can happen in a split second, so remember that when you create and edit: 

• Talk like you’re on 1.5x speed 
• Edit out every pause, “umm”, or dead space 
• Rewatch and ruthlessly cut anything that doesn’t need to be there

But the biggest hack for marketers? We’ve got to stop blaming the algorithm

It’s time for some tough love: the TikTok algorithm isn’t as broken as we think it is. So instead of trying to outsmart the platform, let’s try to understand our audience.

What are they thinking?
What do they want to feel?
What’s making them laugh, rage, share, or comment?

The more time we spend hacking psychology, not algorithms, the better our results will be. I’m sure of it.

Jane Killingsworth is head of marketing at Lumme, helping to craft bold, consumer-first strategies that stand out and scale. She brings a blend of marketing expertise and psychological insight to her work, drawing on 20 years of experience building brand, content and marketing strategies across Australia and the UK.