Nowadays, marketing surrounds us everywhere: banners, product videos, blog articles, Instagram images, podcasts and webinars… But even so, there are lifelong strategies that continue to work as well as ever. The curiosity marketing is one of them.
Curiosity is a classic remedy for desperate attention: leave the cliffhanger for the end of an episode, create anticipation before the commercial breaks, gradually reveal the information of a launch… Digital marketers can usually adapt to marketing from curiosity to the new media that do not stop surmer there is an audience accustomed to constant stimuli. We tell you the keys to current curiosity marketing.
Curiosity as a source of interaction
Within the team, curiosity can help marketers find new marketing approaches or solutions and spark creativity. And for customers, we can take advantage of everything the power of curiosity to drive consumers to a particular brand. Curiosity marketing will be the foundation of a successful marketing strategy.
The goal of curiosity marketing is to convince customers that they want know more about a product or service. Marketers dribble information or use teasers to maintain audience interest and encourage consumers to engage with brand content.
To better hear how curiosity marketing works, a very useful concept is that of “lagoon of curiosities“A curiosity gap is the difference between the potential customer’s current knowledge and what they really want or need to know. The role of the marketer is to fill this gap with just the right amount of information to attract the user’s attention and take them to the next step of the sales funnel.
There are many ways to implement the curiosity strategy in digital marketing: email subject lines that leave the user wanting to know more, compelling article titles, provocative calls to action… The key is to make the recipient of the content feel that you are missing something valuable, that is, causing the famous FOMO or “fear of miss out”. It is a mechanism similar to the sense of scarcity: the user reacts so as not to miss out on anything.
The 4 Principles of Curiosity Marketing
1) Ethics
The main problem with curiosity marketing is its potential for abuse. Many times, the user clicks on a potentially interesting headline only to find themselves on a spam website, or worse, a malware or scam site.
This makes brands very hesitant to enter the curiosity game. Consumers have had bad experiences and know how to spot unreliable calls to action. Therefore, using the tricks of curiosity marketing without having built a reputation for honesty can ruin a brand’s image.
Therefore, curiosity marketing must always be based on ethics and transparency. Earn the confidence of consumers by only promising what they can actually deliver, and don’t abuse flashy headlines or other techniques typically associated with spam.
2) Authenticity
Being authentic is a strategy that always pays off in marketing. Don’t just copy other brands’ campaigns or gimmicks. Instead, think about how you can use curiosity marketing to create and maintain a genuine conversation with your audience and engage with your customers one-on-one. Curiosity is one more resource to increase the interest of your followers in your content, your product or your service offer.
3) Consistency
Another very important factor of curiosity marketing is consistency. In this context, consistency refers to the design of your pages and other elements of your brand, but also to the steps you take to publish content and the path along which it guides consumers towards conversion.
A fairly common mistake is to create a loyal audience through quality content and then spam them with excessive promotional messages. This generates a loss of trust in the brand and the long-term results are never good. Instead, pretend to keep a voice consistent and reliable for your brand over time.
4) Relations
Lastly, keep in mind that curiosity marketing works best when used to creating relationships, not only between the brand and the customer but also between customers and other stakeholders. For example, using curiosity-based strategies in forums and Facebook groups does not usually translate directly into sales, but it does create relationships.
In the end, we are all a bit gossipy. Our people love to know what other people do, how they use a certain product or how celebrities discover the brands they like. The success of Instagram is largely due to this very human emotion.
Relationships can be multifaceted and include elements such as all employees, user-generated content, and most importantly, the opinions of all customers. And curiosity marketing should primarily serve to strengthen these relationships.
How to use curiosity marketing in your brand
To harness the full potential of curiosity marketing, the first thing you need to do is surround yourself with curious people. You marketing team You should be constantly planting new questions and questioning the way things are done.
Therefore, the first step in a marketing strategy should be to hire the right people. Busca has curious people by nature, who go beyond the exposed tasks and who propose solutions, even before the problem arises.
Then, to attract new leads and customers with curiosity marketing, apply these recommendations:
- Creates confidence. Before you can use curiosity marketing to pique your audience’s attention, you have to earn their trust. And the way to do that, aside from being scrupulously honest, is to make a personal connection. Show your most human side, and remember that the important thing is not you, it is your clients.
- Beam A/B testing. The A/B or multivariate test is one of the best digital marketing tools. Use them to do curiosity marketing experiments, for example by trying out different headlines or they will stick around for the call to action. This way you can easily see which elements work best to arouse the curiosity of your audience.
- You must value proposal. Make it very clear to your prospects why they shouldn’t read any further, what they can learn, and why this topic is relevant to them.
- use terse owners. Email subject lines and article titles are two classic places for curiosity marketing with attention-grabbing headlines. But in both cases, the saying must be applied: “what is good, if brief, is twice as good”. Remember that you are working in an environment full of emotions, so you have very little time to capture the attention of your potential clients.
- Manage information. Never reveal all the information at once in one piece of content. In addition, you will distribute “drop by drop” updates with multiple contents and one that encourages the user to take a specific action to save more (for example, subscribing to your newsletter).
Curiosity Marketing Exit Case: Uber
In November 2017, Uber joined forces with creative agency BBH Singapore to launch a campaign that will make the audience hang up if they really need to take a free check in town.
The campaign involved placing giant bundles of paper rolls in car parks around Singapore. The funny thing is that this is an object that the locals use a lot to indicate that a table or a chair is occupied, especially in restaurants. The slogan of the campaign was “XL Tissues for Parking Issues” (“giant tissues for parking problems”).
The agency collaborated with numbers. bloggers and influencers So they posted images of the tissue packs, sparking an online debate about parking problems in the ville, in line with Uber’s strategy of reducing 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 networks and led users to think and talk about the company.
Part of the success was due to the good use of curiosity marketing, as information about the ‘parked’ tissues and their meaning was gradually revealed. Thus they managed to arouse the interest and expectation of users to know more.