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Curiosity May Kill the Cat, But It’s Great for Content Marketing

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Blogs can be a valuable tool for business growth, Teri Ambrose observes in score.org. “By writing blog posts on topics that are relevant to their industry, businesses can show that they are knowledgeable and invested in the discussion”. But showing how knowledgeable the business owner or practitioner publishing the blog is  – that’s hardly enough. It’s the audience’s curiosity gap that creates a marketing win.

According to the academic George Lowenstein, humans become curious when there is a gap in their knowledge, stimulating them to “fix” this state by acquiring the missing knowledge. One way content marketers can captivate reader interest, therefore, is by including intriguing, little-known facts within their articles and posts.

“The curiosity gap captivates readers by emphasizing the gap between known and withheld information.” Copyhackers.com explains, which can be done by:

  • introducing something new that our existing knowledge can’t explain
  • starting a story, pausing at a climactic moment, and delaying the conclusion of it
  • withholding key information for a manageable period of time
  • introducing an idea, action or concept… and connecting it with an unexpected outcome or subject

    Unlike those who seek to use information tidbits as “clickbait”, at Say It For You we recommend using them as a “bonus”. Sure, visitors arrive at your post seeking information on specific topics.  But, once your opening lines have reassured those visitors that they’ve come to the right place, it’s a great idea to use some unlikely connections, even unrelated but fascinating tidbits of information to give readers a sense of being ahead of the crowd. They now have some unusual piece of “inside information” or amusing tidbit to jog their memory, expand their knowledge, and share with friends.Curiosity may kill the cat, but it’s great for content marketing!

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Huh?/Oh! Titles Revisited

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Browsing the shelves of the nearest Barnes & Noble, I was reminded once more of how fond book authors are of using titles that first grab attention, then have explanatory subtitles. Knowing the importance of titles in creating online posts and articles, I long ago dubbed these “Huh? Oh!” titles.

The “Huh?”s are there to startle and capture attention, while the “Oh!’”s are there to explain what the text is actually going to be about. Importantly, in online marketing, those “Ohs!” are there to match the content of the post or article with the terms users typed into the search bar.

My exploration of the shelves in the Health section yielded some “straight” titles, such as:

  • The New Menopause
  • Herb Care
  • Healing Back Pain

Several others were examples of the “Huh? Oh!” tactic. (Had these books been on a general display, my interest might have been engaged, but, without the explanatory subtitle,  I would never have guessed they had to do with health:

  • 5 Trips: An Investigative Journey into Mental Health
  • The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness
  • Radical: The Science, Culture, and History of Breast Cancer in America

There are a couple of things you can do to make sure your blog posts have good titles, medium.com suggests:

  • Use keywords in your titles, making it more likely that your posts will show up in search results.
  • Keep your titles short and sweet. People are more likely to click on a title that’s short and to the point. Aim for titles that are no more than 70 characters long.

Following my exploration of those “Health shelves”, I purchased the latest issue of Writer’s Digest, curious as to whether I’d find many Huh?/Oh’s there. I did:

  • Confounding Expectations: Start With the Villain for More Engaging Storytelling
  • Finding Light in the Darkness: How Comic Gary Gulman Effectively Blends Humor into His Story of Overcoming Major Depression
  • The Unexpected Sells: Why Agents Want Genre-Defying StoriesAt Say It For You, we know that, for either straightforward or “Huh?-Oh!” titles of posts and articles,, one way to engage readers is using the sound of the words themselves, repeating vowel sounds (assonance) or consonant sounds (alliteration), so that searchers use their sense of hearing along with the visual.

    Never forget, though – whether you choose to use “Huh?/Oh!s to engage reader curiosity, the most important goal is delivering, in the body of your post, on the promise in your headline.

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Don’t Let the Marketing Dose Make the Poison

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Earlier this week our Say It For You blog highlighted nuggets of marketing wisdom contained in well-known proverbs. A classic maxim in the field of toxicology is “The dose makes the poison.”, meaning that often, a substance is toxic to the body only if it is administered  in too high a dosage…

“If urgency becomes the sole focus of marketing efforts, it can overshadow the brand’s core values and identity,” shopcreatify.com points out. “While scarcity can be a motivator, the primary focus should be on the benefits and features that truly resonate with your target audience.”

What’s more, Timothy Hodges of HonorAging, says, “Marketing too much can send mixed messages to existing and potential clients. For potential clients, you can be perceived as desperate, struggling, and/or not sending a clear enough message regarding your product or services”.

Interesting…At Say It For You, I use the word “marketing” in a very specialized sense.  That’s because, in today’s world, whatever your business or profession, there’s almost no end to the information available to consumers on the Internet.  Our job then, as content writers, isn’t really to “sell” anything, but rather to help readers absorb, and put to use, all that information.

Marketing, I believe, is about differentiating what you think about what you do and why you think the way you do. Taking a stance on issues relevant to your business or profession puts you in the role of subject matter expert and opinion leader.

I remember reading a piece by Sophia Bernazzani Barron of Hubspot in which she discussed “after-the-fact” selling, accomplished by describing an “extra” benefit added to things online prospects have already demonstrated is important to them. Blog marketing is, in fact, a tool for that “extra benefit” type of selling; because blogs are relational and conversational, they can be persuasive in a low-key manner.

Content marketing, remember, is a positive – it’s only when offered in too high a dose, that the marketing has the potential to “poison” the selling process.

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Some Simple Truths About Blog Marketing

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“Proverbs are brief, well-known sayings that share life advice or beliefs that are common knowledge”, preply.com explains. “Proverbs can also provide a shortcut for explaining or imparting information, adds grammarly.

In terms of offering advice to our business and practice owner clients about their content marketing “habits”, two particular proverbs come to mind:

1. Rome wasn’t built in a day.
After years of being involved in all aspects of content creation for business owners and professional practitioners, one irony I’ve found is that consistency and frequency are rare phenomema. There’s a tremendous fall-off rate in posting content, with most efforts abandoned months or even weeks after they’re begun. The oh-so-important lesson here is that blog marketing is no sprint.  A long-term, drawn-out effort is required in order to “build equity” in keyword phrases, gather a following, and gain – and sustain – online rankings.

2. Out of sight, out of mind…
Adhering to a posting schedule is crucial. Whether it’s once a week or once a month, consistency helps build trust with your audience and improves a blog’s search engine ranking.
Sharing your blog posts on social media and through email helps keep you “top of mind”.

When marketing online – whether it’s a product, a service, or even a concept, several proverbs seem particularly apropos:

1. Birds of a feather flock together…
To be an effective marketing tool for your business, your blog must to be the result of a well-planned strategy aimed at a specific segment of the market.  Your business or practice can’t be all things to all people, so your content must focus on things you know about your target market – their needs, their preferences, their questions – and where they “flock” – what social media sites do they frequent? At which community events, rallies, and celebrations are they to be found?

2. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst…
One of the goals of content marketing is to “humanize” a business, creating feelings of empathy and admiration for the business owners or professional practitioners who overcame the odds and went on to succeed. But what about negative comments that readers make about a business or practice? When those concerns or complaints are recognized and dealt with “in front of other people” (in blog posts), it gives the “apology” more weight. Go ahead and “let the client tell his story,” which then gives you the chance to offer useful information to other readers and to explain any changes in policy that resulted from the situation.

The simple truth about blog marketing is that it brings owners and customers together through the sharing of wisdom.

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The 3-Step Approach to Helping Readers Solve a Problem

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“Precedents thinking”, involves innovating by combining old ideas, Stefanos Zenios and Ken Favaro write in the Harvard Business Review. In teaching Stanford University’s popular course on entrepreneurship, they suggest a three-step approach to problem-solving and innovation:

  1. Frame – through a series of interviews, define what challenges need to be tackled.
  2. Search – develop a deeper understanding of those challenges.
  3. Combine – Take pieces of past innovations and solutions, even those used in different industries, that may be pertinent to the elements of this challenge (a sort of old-wine-in-new-bottles approach).

This discussion brought to mind a 2017 fourdots.com blog post that made a case for textual content as a primary driver of online communication as compared with video:

  • Text gives you the option to stop exactly where you want to, wrapping your mind around a certain piece of information.
  • Text can be easily updated and upgraded.
  • B2B buyers consume informational pieces and case studies, looking for industry thought leadership.
  • Text stimulates the mind and is more focused.

In the process of creating content that helps readers solve problems, we use text to frame the challenge, demonstrating that our business owner or professional practitioner client has, indeed, developed a deep understanding of the challenges faced by the reader. In fact, it is only once these two steps have been accomplished that readers will be ready to appreciate – and hopefully implement – the course of action recommended by the “Subject matter Expert”.

“Great marketers don’t use consumers to solve their company’s problems; they use marketing to solve other people’s problems,” is the concept behind Seth Godin’s marketing philosophy. That is why, he tells us content writers, never start with the solution, but with the problem you seek to solve.

Use the 3-step approach in helping readers solve a problem!

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