"He grabs an empty bucket, a sponge and dish soap. What he does next will blow your mind!”. This is clickbait.
"He grabs an empty bucket, a sponge and dish soap. What he does next will blow your mind!”. This is clickbait. Clickbait exists to increase website hits by luring the reader to click and read an article with a headline that sounds fascinating, or by keeping the conclusion of an article hidden unless you share the article on your social media channels.
The negati
ves pile up furiously. The headline is often found to be misleading and the content of the article is lacking in quality. Images, or the content as a whole, has been lifted from another website or websites.
The clickbait generator wants to get you to visit their “sticky” website, which is populated with content designed to get you to stick around and raise their advertising revenue.
Sounds a bit devious, right? Traditionalists view this tactic as desperate and dishonest advertising strategy, but the canyon separating the nay- and yaysayers is closing because statistics have shown that clickbait WORKS. People are gullible (sorry people), need to be constantly entertained (thanks wifi), and are looking for reasons to procrastinate working on their never-ending To Do list (cheers social media). They’ll even click on it knowing its clickbait!
Hold on to your clickbait condemnation, because your marketing heart could really get into this.
Clickbait is designed using social, psychological, analytical, and creative marketing techniques. Although they’re throwing some marketing convention to the wind (no concise, clever headlines in clickbait!) clickbait generators are paying all of their attention to what types of content their website visitors actively pursue. Once a post hits social media, the analytics are monitored to see the success or failure and use those results to generate something new. It’s not unusual for one article to have 2 social media posts floating around with different headlines and images. Since these companies have access to thousands of social media users that readily share their posts, the “winning” post takes over as the singular advertisement within hours of release bringing the article closer to the ultimate goal of viral status.
In short, clickbait generators are successfully engaging with a staggering amount of customers.
If you don’t have access to a department of marketing personnel or thousands of social media users who constantly share your posts, you can still pick up some tips from clickbait strategists.
Take a good hard look at your own analytics and note what campaigns or posts are the most successful, then start to figure out why. Look for patterns and concentrate on recreating that success. Consider your engagement strategy from another angle. Maybe your next campaign goal is to get your blog post shared rather than reach 10 news sales. Appeal to the customers already loyal to your brand and work to provide unique content worth clicking on and sharing with the people they care about.
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