Modern consumers are more informed and more selective than ever before. They have a world of information, opinions and resources at their fingertips at all times, and traditional marketing techniques do not cut it anymore. Most Americans– particularly younger generations– do not trust traditional advertising, and this poses some obvious problems for marketers.
But while average consumers are not as trusting as they once were, modern consumers can be more loyal– and vocal about their loyalty– than any generation before, once your company makes a meaningful connection with them. So how do you advertise to those who reject advertising and gain the trust of those who are naturally suspicious? The key is to create conscious content.
Understanding Conscious Content
Conscious content is the kind of material that evokes an intended emotion from your target audience. Your marketing efforts should not be geared at making a customer think a certain way about your brand; it should always be intended to make them feel something specific about your product, service or company.
If you hope to sell software online , you would not write posts that simply tell readers: buy my software. While honesty and bluntness do have their virtues, this approach of telling potential customer what they should think or do is not going to have much success on a regular basis. You may be able to logically explain how your software is better than the competition, but it will be ineffective if the reader cannot relate it to a specific benefit the software will bring to his or her life.
Of course, some emotions are relatively easy to evoke from the general public. For instance, you could almost certainly think of hundreds of things off the top of your head that would evoke anger or disdain if you posted them. Negative emotions are always easier to elicit, and this is partly why so many lazy (and cheap) marketers utilize this concept with shock headlines and clickbait.
Positivity Trumps Negativity
The marketing department at Facebook teamed up with researchers at Cornell University to perform a study of how users related to the posts they read . The researchers altered the news feeds of over 500,000 subjects to include substantially more positive or negative emotional posts. Those who received more positivity in their news feed consistently posted more positive material. Not only that; they also posted more often.
A similar study by a team at the University of California San Diego found that something as simple as a positive emoticon could create substantially more positive reactions, and more reactions overall. Simply put, positive content creates positive reactions in readers. If you do not yet see how this could relate to your marketing efforts, you haven’t been paying attention.
Feeling Something?
Your goal in content marketing should be to evoke non-reactive awareness and curiosity in the minds of your customers through positive conscious content. To put it more simply, you want your customers to feel good about your brand– and understand why they feel it.
Let’s face it, in this era of blogs and user-generated content, anyone can create content that is interesting. A talented marketer can consistently create content that is interesting and intriguing, eventually evoking a reaction from the reader. While conscious content is still geared towards the eventual action of purchasing, it is more focused on the process and feelings involved in getting there. This type of marketing not only elicits a purchase– it creates loyal customers, long-term relationships and brand evangelists .
As consumers become more advanced and informed, marketers and business owners will always look for the latest innovations and trendy techniques to give them a leg up on the competition. But no matter how much things change, you will always have the most success by creating meaningful relationships with customers and making them feel happy.
Founder Dinis Guarda
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