We are surrounded by all kinds of marketing these days: various blog posts, banners, product videos, and pictures on Instagram, podcasts, and webinars – you choose.
The amount is so huge that companies struggle more and more with standing out of the crowd and being seen. But even so, some good old-fashioned strategies still work pretty well. For example, the so-called ‘curiosity marketing.’
Our attention raises because of curiosity, and this is often what media uses to keep us engaged: ending the last episode with a cliffhanger, creating expectations before commercial breaks, leaking some information to the fans before the product release, and so on.
And you know what? It always works! And this is why digital marketers from any niche should also try using customer curiosity in their marketing strategies.
And don’t worry if your product or service is not creative enough – anyone can benefit from curiosity, even a writing help provider like this or an accounting firm.
Curiosity as a source of interaction
Curiosity, in fact, can be helpful for both brainstorming and marketing needs. It can help marketers find new approaches and solutions while brainstorming and sometimes even spark creativity within the team. And by playing with our future customers’ curiosity, we can drive them toward a particular brand. Curiosity marketing can be the basis of a successful marketing strategy.
Curiosity marketing aims to convince customers that they want to know more about a product or service. It involves slowly distributing information in smaller parts or using teasers and ‘leaks’ to keep the audience interested in the brand and its content.
The key term in curiosity marketing is called a “curiosity gap.” It indicates a difference between the potential customer’s current knowledge and the amount of information about our brand they really need or are eager to know.
The marketer needs to fill this gap with enough information to grab the user’s attention and take them to the next sales funnel step without making them tired.
There are many ways to use curiosity in digital marketing strategies: clickbait or just well-worded article titles and email subjects, provocative CTAs, etc.
The key is to make the audience feel that they are missing out on something exciting or valuable and motivate them to research more about your brand and be hyped for your upcoming release.
The 4 Principles Of Curiosity Marketing:
1) Ethics
The main problem with curiosity marketing is its potential for abuse. Users often click on a potentially interesting headline only to find themselves on some spam, scam, or even malware site.
This makes brands care about how much clickbait and curiosity play they use. Modern consumers are no strangers to online and offline bad experiences, so they know how to identify dodgy CTAs. Therefore, using curiosity marketing tricks requires a solid reputation for honesty, or else there is a high risk of ruining the brand’s image.
Therefore, curiosity marketing must always base on transparency and ethics. Don’t abuse clickbait headlines or any other spammy techniques. Instead, gain consumers’ trust by offering them something closer to your skills and possibilities.
2) Authenticity
Authenticity always pays off in marketing. Why copy other businesses’ advertising features or campaigns when you can come up with your own one?
Instead of just going for the mass attraction (the days of mass marketing are slowly ending anyway), try to build a genuine one-on-one conversation with every customer to make them curious about your brand for more personal reasons. And this genuine curiosity will fuel your followers’ interest in your upcoming content, service, or product.
3) Consistency
Another critical factor of curiosity marketing is consistency. It includes both your brand’s visual aspects like the design of its assets and your behavior towards content publishing and consumer interaction. The way you build the conversation with the public matters a lot, so be consistent in it.
A common mistake is engaging the audience through quality content and attractive slogans, making them loyal to your brand, and then just spamming them with overly promotional messages with little or no creativity.
This leads to a loss of both your profits and brand reputation. Instead, maintain a consistent and reliable voice for your brand over time and try not to set high expectations if you cannot support them all the time.
4) Building relationships
Curiosity marketing works best when you use it to build customer relationships not only with a brand but also with other stakeholders. For example, using curiosity-based strategies in social media groups or public forums does not usually translate directly into sales but builds relationships.
In the end, we are all a bit gossipy. We love to know about other people’s lives, which products they trust and use, or how celebrities discover the brands they like. This trait of our society made Instagram one of the best platforms to use in marketing strategies.
Relationships can be multi-faceted and include elements such as your employees, user-generated content, and your customers’ opinions. And curiosity marketing should serve to strengthen these relationships in the first place.
How to use curiosity marketing for your brand?
To realize the full potential of curiosity marketing, you first need to surround yourself with curious people. Hire the most curious people to your marketing team, so they can constantly question and modify the strategy and find creative ways to boost your customer’s engagement.
Therefore, the first step in a curiosity marketing strategy should be to hire the right people. Your best candidates are naturally inquisitive people who go beyond their assigned tasks and propose solutions before problems arise.
Then, to attract new leads and customers with curiosity marketing, apply these recommendations:
- Build trust. Before using curiosity marketing to get your audience’s attention, you have to earn their trust. And to achieve this, in addition to being crystally honest, you should build a personal connection. Show your brand’s human side, and remember it’s not about you but your customers.
- Do A/B tests. A/B or multivariate tests are one of the best tools in digital marketing. Use them for your experiments, for example, for testing different call-to-action placements or headline wordings. This way, you can easily see which elements are the most attractive to your audience.
- Show your value proposition. Make your message clear. Explain why your customers should read on, why this topic is relevant, and what they will get from spending some of their time on your message.
- Use concise headlines. Email subject lines and article titles are two classic places for placing attention-grabbing headlines. Still, your headlines need to be concise yet informative in both cases. Remember that the Internet is already full of stimuli in all its parts, so your time to capture the attention of your potential customers is very limited.
- Manage the information output. Never spill all the secrets and updates out in the first post. Instead, divide the updates into smaller pieces of valuable content and finish each by prompting the user to learn more with time (e.g., by following your social media or subscribing to your newsletter).
Let’s learn from Uber
In November 2017, Uber teamed up with BBH Singapore to launch a campaign aimed at getting the audience to question whether it was necessary to own a car in a big city.
The campaign consisted of placing giant packs of tissues in car parks around Singapore. The fun is that locals often use this object to indicate that a table or a chair is occupied, especially in restaurants. The slogan of the campaign was “XL Tissues for Parking Issues.”
The agency collaborated with numerous influencers to post the pictures of the tissue packs, which sparked an online debate about parking issues in the city, in line with Uber’s strategy to reduce the number of privately owned cars in cities.
This action managed to arouse people’s curiosity thanks to its eccentricity. The images quickly spread on social media and got users thinking and talking about the company.
Part of the success was due to the excellent use of curiosity marketing, as the information about the “parked” tissues and their meaning was gradually revealed. In this way, they managed to awaken the interest and expectation of users to find out more.
Read Also:
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