Is Your Content Binge-Worthy?

Take a look at any social media channel, and you’ll see people who are busier than ever. We fill our days (and our Facebook feeds) with frenetic activity, and 24 hours just doesn’t seem like enough time to fit it all in. Somehow, though, we manage to find the time to binge-watch favorite shows. A similar phenomenon happens online; we tend to consume content, including marketing content, in bursts of curiosity-fueled surfing. To capture your leads’ increasingly divided attention, you need to make your content binge-worthy enough to satisfy the urge to consume all of it – yet you also need to produce enough fresh content to keep them coming back for more.

Technology-Enabled Binge Reading

Just as binge-watching is a relatively new phenomenon enabled by DVR technology, binge-worthy marketing content is a product of marketing automation technology and the multi-channel digital realms that make it possible to go from platform to platform in search of knowledge. Your lead generation program needs to offer ways for prospects to interact with content in multiple ways and at multiple levels. Let’s say a lead finds you via an organic search; where will he or she go after touching down on the landing page? A well-designed content strategy leads to your social media presence, your blog, your videos, your webinars, your in-depth library of content – in other words, you need a deep pool of content if you want to invite leads to dive in.

Everything’s Personal

It isn’t enough to know your prospects’ names. You need to learn enough about them to understand what’s relevant to them. Personalized content is more than just addressing email correctly; with it, you must be able to create a customized environment through which your leads move. The goal here is to make authentic connections that go beyond a fill-in-the-blanks approach. You may have caught reaction videos on YouTube of people watching big reveals on “Game of Thrones” or seeing the Chicago Cubs make history. Whether they’re elated or deflated, the people in these videos care. Their engagement with what they’re seeing is off the charts.

Is a marketing message going to have the same impact as the “Red Wedding” or a World Series win that fans waited more than a century to see? No, probably not – but you can make a lasting impression with personalization that makes your audience feel more engaged.

Content on Demand

When your leads binge on your content, you have their undivided attention, or at least as close to it as marketers are likely to get. It’s imperative to capture their interest enough to spur action while you have their attention. They’re busy people, and once they move off to another subject, you could lose them for good. If your content strategy doles out single bites of content at a time, you’re setting the pace of consumption; that’s a mistake for your would-be binge-watchers. Instead, consider an on-demand format that lets your audience blast through gated content at the speed they prefer with auto-completing forms, a single sign-in that gives access to your entire content library, and social media tabs that are accessible from every relevant page. Capturing information is important too, and you’ll get to do that with progressive forms for more in-depth material, but avoid putting too many pauses in the torrent of content your audience is requesting of you.

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