Marketeer.com says of working in the creative industry, “It’s our job to create content so good that it stops our audience mid-scroll and forces them to pay attention.” Sounds easy right? With over 500 million tweets and 95 million photos posted a day, it can be hard to make your brand stand out. Here’s how you can curate content that will make your audience stop mid-scroll!
Use Visuals
We believe in show don’t tell. Using visuals is a great way to break up long texts commonly found in blogs, and they stand out more when scrolling down a page. Utilizing images, infographics, charts, maps, videos or any other visual is a great way to not only compliment your text, but it can even enhance your point.
When choosing images, here are some tips:
- Don’t use stock photos. It’s unoriginal and boring. Instead, take your own. Your audience will appreciate the authenticity.
- Utilize filters.
- If there is text on the photo, make it short, easy to read, and catchy!
It’s hard to know what pictures will stand out, but sometimes the best ideas are the simplest. You may or may not have heard of Fyre Festival, one of the biggest music festivals that never happened. With the help of social media influencers, it garnered much publicity in a short period of time. How did they do it? By posting a photo of an orange box. According to convergeconsulting.com, “This picture of a bright box posted by influencers was all that the future attendees needed to stop them from scrolling through their feed and dive deeper into the festival. Not only did it cause them to stop, it created a desire to find out what was behind the picture.”
Video, in particular, is more time-intensive than images, but the payoff is worth it. American Marketing Association claims that “video, on average, converts and engages at 10 times the rate of written content.” Creating videos is the best way to bring a brand to life and show off who it is. There are a variety of ways to deliver video, such as live streaming and webinars.
Know Your Audience
To make scroll-stopping content, you have to learn what your audience deems as scroll-stopping. Research and understand what your audience likes to click on, share and repost. Compare yourself to your competitors to see if you are getting more engagement from your content. If your content is popular, see which types of content are the most popular and try to implement those more. If your competitor is getting more engagement per post, see what type of content the competitor is posting, see which ones are popular and try to adapt it to your brand.
Track What is Working
After you experiment with a few of the techniques stated above, you’ll need to track its success. How you track the data will depend on what you posted. Marketeer.com suggests that “For a graphic you made to promote your latest eBook, don’t track just social engagement for the post—also track the download rate from social. For video content, track how long viewers watch and engagement rates over the course of the video…If you’re adding images to your social posts that direct people to your recent blog posts, you can track the click rate, bounce rate, and time on page.”
There are many resources out there that can help you track your engagement, such as Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, and Sprout Social.
Don’t let your content get lost in the clutter anymore. With these tips, you’ll be creating stop-scrolling content in no time!
