82% of consumers with high emotional engagement would always buy the brand they are loyal to when making purchasing decisions, according to a Capgemini report on consumer loyalty
Chasing vanity KPIs by producing an endless amount of content is not only inefficient and unsustainable, it also erodes customer trust and, therefore, engagement with your brand.
Finding content golden eggs that capture customers and prospects, lead to meaningful, connected outcomes, is vital for turning doomscrolling into boomscrolling.
Experience doesn't start at the climax - it's a CX-y build up
It's like going on multiple dates with low-value people you're not compatible with and don't add any value to you or your life. Then, when you do find the one, you have dating fatigue and have become cynical and apathetic. Your experience of relationships is a fractured one, so you're closed off to other possibilities.
This is where we are with branded content on websites and social media.
We've seen so much empty, cringy, frustrating, inauthentic slop, we scroll past or click through only to be disappointed when we get there.
Separating branded content from the rest of the user experience is like calling a random number and asking the person who picks up to marry you.
Engaging content is articles, social posts, product pages, emails and videos organisations create to increase:
Likes, shares and followers
- Increase Click-Through Rate (CTR), dwell time
- Increase open rates
- The science of storytelling tells us it's the best way to bring complex and boring concepts to life and keeps the people wanting more.
Everything has a story to tell, from insurance policies and monkey wrenches to sporting events and a sexy new outfit.
The key is to appeal to the emotional amygdala so it overrides the logical hippocampus. Creating desire, revenue and repeat business.
The way to capture anyone's attention is through emotion.
That arresting moment when a billboard catches your eye or an intriguing headline on a TikTok or webpage.
You stop because you feel something. It appeals to something nestled in your amygdala. It's something you want to know or appeals to who you want to be.
You need to say something new in a different way so the reader can see themselves in it by:
- Leading with the benefit
- Showing, not telling
- Finding the emotional hook and using real lifestyle examples to bring it to life
Content golden eggs need to become omelettes
This is normally led by marketing teams to support Above-The-Line (ATL) or Out Of Home (OOH) activity.
But again, you need it to go somewhere, as the expectation has been set with a sexy billboard or celebrity-packed TV ad.
This doesn't mean they're completely fresh to your brand or what you offer.
It may trigger a thought to solve a known problem or cause them to go back to an abandoned basket.
They may be so impressed, they'll look you up on social media or sign up to a mailing list.
There are times when they'll go from here to Conversation, over to Choice, back to Capture, and hopefully end in a Conversation journey to convert into customers.
This is also an opportunity to cross-sell and up-sell to existing customers.
Building a great widget that makes form-filling easier is useless if only the people who are there via Conversation content see it. So the journey needs to be looked at end-to-end, not in fragments.
Doing content deep dives to see what people want to know that no one is telling them is the Golden Egg everyone should be chasing.
Develop suites of content based on what you do best, and pointing to it, is being authentic to your brand's purpose and building a relationship with an audience who values it.
Become the thought-leader and disruptor by finding that niche and becoming famous for it.
But filming funny TikToks, pumping out sponsored articles and partnering with influencers isn't enough.
It needs to lead to a positive outcome and not just be floating around, achieving nothing other than being gang-clicked.
A Content Architect could help you
The ownership of the end-to-end journey with a holistic content strategy designed to grab attention, build desire, and create positive outcomes and experiences.
Building a great calculator that works out the value of your home insurance is useless if no one knows it's there, so the journey needs to be looked at end-to-end, not in fragments. Here's an example:
You've found out people don't know how much the contents of their home is worth so you build a calculator, with a "get a quote" next-best-action, lots of supporting articles about the benefits of this type of insurance, other types of home related insurance products and tips on how to protect your home, plus a video on how insurance is worked out. Once it's built, you need to get people onto your website or app, so you optimise the pages for search and find a good story to tell on social media about stats on break-ins or funny home accident stories.
A Content Architect will write and create the different types of content that need to work with the fulfilment journey to get people to their desired outcome. Whether they're proactively trying to solve a problem or by creating a desire to increase market share.
