Hi there. Or meow if you’re a curious, death-defying supercat.
Creating curiosity is a great way of improving the way you communicate. Whether your focus is content marketing, straight-up sales or employee engagement, it’s an amazing - and free - tool that gets results.
Let’s take a look at popular list-based news site BuzzFeed. Their most popular posts can pull in 10,000,000 hits. Posts with the most pulling power have included: 50 people you wish you knew in real life, 12 extremely disappointing facts about music, 45 most powerful images of 2011 and 13 simple steps to get you through your day.
Every one of these is designed to make readers curious. Why would you pass up the chance of seeing the world’s most powerful images or reading some sure-fire ways of making your day easier? What BuzzFeed does so well is it also backs up these titles with witty and engaging content.
Twix fiasco
Other purveyors of the curiosity formula, however, can over-promise and under-deliver. I really hate those Facebook posts that say: What happens next will leave you amazed/in tears/dead (if you’re a cat). Experience has taught me that more often than not, if I click on the link, I’ll be as underwhelmed as the day I bought a Twix and only found one finger in it. It’s highly unlikely I'll be amazed or in tears.
While I may shun these repetitive posts, a quick glimpse at their ‘like’ figures shows plenty of people disagree. A curious approach can get a huge number of readers onboard.
Here’s why it’s so important to make your audience curious:
1. By writing a curious title, or posing an intriguing question, you make your readers’ minds active. They immediately have an interest in finding out what you have to say. Your audience is ready to listen, learn and engage - pretty much the Holy Grail of good communication.
2. Once you’ve built this curiosity, it’s important you don’t let your audience down. At the heart of their curiosity will be a desire to learn something that will make their lives easier or help them do their job better. Building a loyal audience requires an authentic approach, so if you make a promise with a curious title, be sure to back it up with some thought-provoking, useful content.
3. It’s a great approach for engaging employees in otherwise complex business issues. If great things came out of a management meeting, strip out the words ‘management meeting’ that are likely to turn off frontline staff and instead create curiosity by presenting the information in a fresh way. Packaged as '10 tips to make your day easier’, employees will want to engage with it.
4. The same goes for communicating with customers or stakeholders. In terms of a business blog, you could focus on an interesting aspect of your product or offer that solves a clear problem for your customers. Present the problem, pique their interest in what you have to offer and leave it there. Make them curious to know more and offer them easy access to the channels which tell the full story.
If you’re curious about how you can communicate better, but not sure where to start, The Writing Lab can help. Drop us an email at info@thewritinglabcreative.com.
No cats were harmed in the writing of this post.