Clickbait for Marketing

By Adam  |  19 Aug 2015 08:00:00

When you're doing content marketing, you want to be sure that your content is interesting because, if it's not, nobody will read it. One important part of your content is the title: most people are likely to see the title of your post before they see the post itself and so it is the title which needs to be used in order to hook people in. You might, therefore, start to think that it could be a good idea to make titles sound really exciting and dramatic "The One Invention Which Will Change Society FOREVER!" for example, when, actually, it's about a special kind of hat. This strategy is known as clickbaiting and I want to talk about its strengths and its weaknesses in this blog post.

First, the upsides of clickbait: it does actually tend to increase clicks, that is, when it's done well. At the end of the day, if you're doing content marketing, your ultimate goal is to get a lot of people to click through to your website. If you can pull off clickbait well, it will draw in more clicks, but it's a fine line to tread. If a clickbait title is believable, then people will click on it, if it is unbelievable they will identify it as clickbait and have no interest in reading it. In fact, they may even lose respect for your business for resorting to clickbait. On the other hand, if a clickbait title is believable, then you stand to risk making it not exciting enough and therefore not encouraging enough clicks. It's tough to pull off, but if you get it just right, then you might just reap the rewards.

But then there are the downsides of clickbait; as I mentioned before, if you have a post which is very clearly an example of clickbait, then people are unlikely to read it. You see, if you are using clickbait, then that kind of suggests that you are unable to produce content of much real value and have to resort to cheap tricks in order to hook people in. Furthermore, to use a clickbait title is, generally, to misrepresent the truth; this stands the risk of shining an untrustworthy light on you. If people think you're untrustworthy because of your content, might they also begin to doubt that you run a reliable eCommerce business? Indeed they might!

So these are just some things to keep in mind when it comes to content marketing. Clickbait is becoming more and more common across the internet and whether you want to implement that strategy for yourself is for you to decide, though personally I would advise against it. But if you haven't even started your eCommerce website yet and marketing is still in the future for you, why not sign up for Sellr now? It is completely free!