RIP Clickbait, your audience has grown smarter than you think. What now?
Everyone now knows that click-baits were intentionally misleading and in some cases, crassly provocative. The percentage of audience clicking on these articles have gone down from 68% in 2014 to 13% in 2018. But the clickbait was a very successful technique to get your content noticed, to increase your search performance, and they were cost effective and faster to generate new content. “13 reasons why” was always better than “Hannah committed suicide and left tapes for her friends”. You can try to fool someone once, twice maybe, but not thrice until you think your audience is a fool.
Content consumption is rising at a rate faster than ever especially in a country like India, where lakhs of new users are coming online every day. And they are being bombarded with a lot of existing and new content at the same time. An average user now spends more than 10 hours online every day reading blogs, checking social media, watching videos, listening music and also going through (promotional) emails. This exhaustive availability of content online has also reduced the attention span of a user.
So, let me ask you a question, how do you plan to get noticed in this crowd? How are you going to get registered in your audience’s mind?
I know it’s tougher than ever. And also easier than ever. Your audience is now looking for content that can add value, not just promise to do so. Your audience doesn’t want to know what they can do about their problems, but how they can solve their problems. Isn’t it the case with you? You are reading this article to find out how you can improve the content for your audience or to get more audience to consume your content. So, let me delve directly into how you can achieve the best possible results for the efforts you are putting into content marketing.
- If there is no real value offered in your content, then you have no value.
The value your content add-on to your user’s life is the value of your business to them. Plain and Simple. For a travel company, if you are not telling them how to enjoy their next trip, they are not coming back to your site. They have many options already, to plan for their future outing. They don’t need you to tell them where to travel or what to do while travelling, they want to know how to get the best out of their vacation or holidays. They want you to tell them what they should not miss, the experiences they can have.
2. Do not drag, get to the point quick.
Never write an extensive article if you can communicate the same thing in a line or two. Content marketers want to hit two eyes with an arrow. Increase search ranking and sell the product. And thus they end up writing verbose articles to include all the possible keywords and keyword phrases. Your content is of no use if your audience is not consuming it entirely. If your audience is leaving halfway, it results in increased bounce rate and thus, ends up being penalised by search engines.
3. Stop promoting (a lot), instead spend on quality.
If you are spending ‘x’ in promoting your content and ‘y’ in creating it, spend 0.8’x+y’ on creating content and rest in promoting it. And spend the extra amount on increasing the quality, not in quantity. Quality is addictive; quantity is not. A valuable piece of content is shared more, saved for later use, thus increasing the brand value. If I tell you what everyone else is telling you in this article, you are not going to come back again. I will lose you. But if this effort of mine helps you in any way, you are going to refer this to your friends and colleagues.
The paradigm of content marketing is shifting, and you can drive that shift. It is not just a requirement of your business; it is the business. Your content defines you. So, I will sign off with emphasising on something you already might know but ignore, BE ORIGINAL.
Let me know your views in the comments or to have a more detailed conversation write to me at yog@11d.co
