Increase your reach, engagement, AND conversion with curiosity gaps
So like, what the hell are curiosity gaps?!
Listen, I'm about to blow your mind with this one.
It's such a game-changer.
It's such a powerful tool that I can actually promise you that if you really know your target audience and use curiosity gaps in your content you will see the results in your reach and engagement.
Basically, Curiosity Gaps are a marketing technique playing on basic human psychology. It's strategically withholding information or partially revealing information in a way that piques interest so the viewer wants to seek more information.
So yeah, curiosity gaps are basically the shit.
Why does it work?
There's actually research-based science backing this up. Think about it, curiosity is a fundamental human trait. It drives us to seek out new information, knowledge, and experiences. It motivates us to close that gap by actively engaging in information-seeking behaviors, like asking questions, exploring, and searching for answers. Or even liking, commenting, or buying to get the answers we want.
We're also hard-wired to want closure. It's a legit psychological need for humans. Curiosity gaps leverage that need for closure to get a specific outcome (whatever your CTA is). When we encounter a curiosity gap in social media marketing, like an intriguing headline or a partially revealed story, our brain seeks closure by attempting to fill in the missing information. This creates a cognitive itch that compels us to click, engage, or interact with the content to satisfy our curiosity and achieve closure.
Curiosity gaps use our innate need for closure by creating a sense of anticipation, excitement, and intrigue. They create a psychological tension that gets people to seek more information or engage further with the content because our brains crave the satisfaction of closure.
This makes curiosity gaps a HUGELY powerful tool in social media marketing.
Why does it matter in SMM?
Social media platforms are flooded with an overwhelming amount of content. From news updates and memes to advertisements and user-generated posts, social media feeds are constantly bombarding users with information. This has created a highly competitive landscape where businesses and marketers need to find innovative ways to capture the attention of their target audience.
Also, our attention spans are shorter than ever. To make an impact and stand out in this competitive landscape, businesses need to create content that immediately captures the attention of their audience.
This is where curiosity gaps play a vital role. Curiosity gaps create a sense of intrigue and interest that entices social media users to pause, engage, and seek more information. When users encounter a headline, caption, or visual that piques their curiosity by revealing partial information or creating a knowledge gap, they are motivated to fill in that gap by clicking, swiping, watching, and engaging with the content.
This is especially successful on social media for a few reasons:
Watch Time. Any social media algorithm is big on watch time, the more time a person spends watching or reading your content, the more the platform will push it to similar audiences. When users encounter a curiosity gap in a headline, caption, or visual, they are more likely to click through to the content or engage with it to seek more information and satisfy their curiosity.
Engagement. If you use curiosity gaps in your content and strategically use a CTA asking for a specific type of engagement to get the information you withheld in your content, that will prompt the social media's algorithm to push that content to more people.
Conversions. If the information you're withholding is in one of your offers and you're able to market it well, you're gonna more people in your target audience following through on that CTA to DM you about the offer or click to your sales page. Cha-ching!
Sounds great! So how do I do it?
You need to know a few things before you get started, but don't worry, I gotchu.
The purpose of the specific post. Are you looking for clicks to a sales page? More followers? Driving them to a piece of core content? Make sure the post is in-line with your overall strategy and goals.
Your target audience. What headline or questions can you ask that is going to make them stop scrolling and start reading or watching? What are their pain points? What are their desired outcomes?
Your brand values. This applies to any content, but it's especially important here to keep it ethical. Do not over-promise, do not post things that aren't in line with your brand messaging. Keep it authentic and reasonable.
Let's check out some examples.
Here's a carousel I made that uses my target audience's pain point (not enough time) and curiosity gaps to get viewers to read a blog. Notice how there's several slides, but none of them actually mention the specific tools the post leads up to? I explain the importance of them by speaking to the pain point, I qualify the post by showing how helpful it is with my life and workload, and then I give a super simple CTA to get the list of tools.
*Side note: If you check out that blog post it also uses curiosity gaps to get viewers to buy a guide with more helpful tools and tips and tricks. Curiosity gaps are great in core content and emails as well as social media marketing
Because I'm all about taking the guesswork out of social media in a fluff-free way to help more people, my all-time favorite is using carousels like this. You get to show your authority with some serious education on an important topic to your target audience so they get something out of that post. I ask questions at the end of each slide to get them to keep swiping to the next so that suspense and intrigue can build.
But curiosity gaps don't have to be that complicated or complex.
Check out this reel that uses a desired outcome for my target audience as a curiosity gap. By combining that known desired outcome followed by a quick "details in caption" I was able to increase the reel's watch time and therefore its reach, getting me more leads for the Personalized Strategy offer the caption talks about.
So yeah, you can easily see that curiosity gaps done right are an incredibly powerful tool in your social media marketing arsenal. Don't miss out on the opportunity to leverage this research-based psychological concept to capture attention and drive engagement and conversion.
If you've made it this far, first of all, congrats on being awesome and learning more about how to make your content more powerful and get more conversions.
Also, I have an exciting offer for you! If you found this post valuable I would love love LOVE if you could share to your stories with a link so that other business owners can get the same value. AND if you tag me in the story I will give you a free week of social media strategy coaching in DMs! Yeah. That's right. An entire week of coaching. FOR FREE. Excited to see those stories, friends!
