Get Viewers Hooked: The Science of Making Customers Curious

What can we all be doing to keep our ideas on people’s minds?

How can we get our customers to think about us as much as we think about them?

What does the Empire State Building have in common with a Rubik’s cube?

There a few things you don’t know about curiosity, as you’re about to find out. Here are some ideas to capture the attention of your viewers.

Get In Front Of Your Audience

This is the easy part, believe it or not, but it can also be the expensive part. This stage gives you two main options:

Option A: Interrupt, as politely as possible, your customers Instagram scrolling, YouTube viewing, or Spotify listening with an advertisement.

Nowadays, you can do a damn good job of narrowing down the group of people that your advertisement will reach. E.g. people aged 25-30, living in Cardiff, married and interested in cats. Now, Facebook may tell you that your ad will reach a few thousand people but, still, don’t expect that many people coming to your site. “Interruption marketing”, as marketing guru Seth Godin labelled it, has a notoriously low conversion rate. Understandable when you’ve taken a small piece of somebody’s most precious resource, their time.

Making the ad as relevant to the person seeing it will increase conversion rate and make you seem like less of an a**hole for interrupting their web surfing.

Option B: Get other people to interrupt for you, by telling their friends about you. This is called going viral, sound familiar?

Achieving virality on the internet is no easy feat. In fact, the quest for the “viral formula” is a creator’s great search, The Holy Grail of content.

However, a good starting point would be, when making your content. to ask yourself “Is this something I would share with my friends?”, as well as concentrating on producing high-quality material. Also, providing some sort of actual value to your audience makes it more likely that they will share with friends.

Gap Theory

According to George Loewenstein, a behavioural economist, curiosity happens when we feel a gap in our knowledge. Meaning that you and I can spark curiosity in our audience by pointing out that there is something that they don’t know. It also helps if the knowledge gap is small, that way it niggles at the viewer that they don’t know it.

If you aim to fill too big a gap and the viewer may feel that they’re about to read a textbook. Now that doesn’t sound very fun, does it?

To use a personal example, I was never particularly interested in learning how to solve a Rubik’s cube, because it had never really crossed my mind. Then I saw a friend of mine solve one, telling me it only took him a short amount of time to learn. I realised that there was a gap in my knowledge, something out there which I didn’t know. I bought the next Rubik’s cube I saw in a shop and learnt how to solve it the same night. Now I've got a mild Rubik’s cube addiction.

Set the Scene

Construction of the 443-meter tall Empire State building was finished in 1931. The building was the tallest in the world for almost forty years. It cost just under $41 million dollars to build, equivalent to around $554 million as of 2018. It is currently only the 51st tallest building in the world.

Do you want to know how many stories it has?

I’ll tell you later.

Odds are, you’ve never cared how many stories the building had, and it’s unlikely that you’ll lose any sleep over it now. But, by giving you some background information about the subject, and then pointing out that you didn’t know one thing about it, I likely made you much more intrigued to know than you were before. That’s the basic principle of working with gap theory, making the gap small, but not filling it until the end.

Give Clues

The Empire State building has more than 100 floors.

Feeding your viewers or readers with bits of the puzzle, piece by piece, will only work to suck them in further. It’s teasing the audience, they may begin to predict what the answer is, in which case they’ll stay around for two questions “what’s the answer?” and “did I guess right?”.

The beauty of this is that the deeper the viewer goes, the more information they have and the smaller the knowledge gap becomes, the more they want the final answer.

Oh, and the Empire State Building has 102 stories.

Thanks for reading.