In the rapidly evolving digital marketing sphere, getting in front of potential customers and readers, grabbing and keeping their attention is a continuous battle.
Understanding how people perceive and remember your content can be a useful tool in your arsenal to making content that leaves the right impression, gets shared, and gets remembered.
Making content that has direct business impact is required, but making content that delights and sticks should be indispensable. The importance for making content that sticks arises from the fact that consumers are constantly bombarded with marketing communication messages.
To be able to recall a marketing message is significant for a consumer who is further down the marketing funnel to distinguish and zero-in your message from a sea of messages
So what is Content Recall?
According to Dictionary.com, recall means to bring back from memory; to recollect.
So put simply, content recall refers to the idea that receivers of the message will be able to recall from memory the message put across to them from a piece of content, delivered in any format.
How should the message be delivered?
Our brains are comfortable and far more engaged by storytelling. To further drive your point home, visuals enhance storytelling where text cannot: speed.
According to research by 3M, the post-it company, visuals get processed 60,000 times faster. To further solidify the case, Dan Zarrella found that tweets with images are 94% more likely to be retweeted.
What marketers should pay attention to?
To make sense of what is happening, it is important to understand 2 levers that marketers pull to connect with potential customers:
- Channels through which the message is delivered
- Variations in message
Channels:
Marketers should choose communication channels and tools which create synergetic effects and work well with one another. Theoretically speaking, integration of multiple touchpoints have maximum impact however, marketing teams do not have unlimited budget so marketers have to prioritize some channels over the others.
Leveraging multiple tools has shown to provide better content recall than just promotions and advertising. Your approach should ensure not to use too diversified messages as it may confuse the information receiver.
Tip: Integrated communication and engagement tools are there to aid you when you are leveraging social media channels. Make sure to utilize them
Messaging Strategies:
The most important question to ask and answer is how frequently a marketing message should be repeated?
Research shows that newer messages perform better than repeating old ones. Further, the favorability of the new and different ads is attributed to the encoding variability theory, which states that when messages are in different contexts, they can be retrieved best.
Tip: Use video to send your message across as it is more engaging, holds the viewer attention longer and cost of conversation is lower with video
Techniques to make Content Stick
Utilize multiple formats to deliver your message: The manner and form in which individuals consume content can vary across individuals, but also, for the same individual, a particular message may resonate more in one particular format and than in the other. Some may prefer images to blogs or videos to images, some may simply may stick to old habits and prefer reading blogs.
Creating content tailored to multiple formats will maximize the opportunity to get in front of your audience and also ensure you are meeting your audience in their comfort space.
Appeal to emotions: Humans are emotional creatures and are driven to fulfill our emotional needs first. Appealing to emotional nuances can help your audience to connect and relate to the message you are trying to send across.
Leverage Associations: It is not enough to have a message. The message should have a context and a background story to it to enhance its appeal.
This subtext should mentally transport your audience to a place or position where they are taking desired action inspired from your message.
Repeat the message: When we read or watch something, we do not grasp and understand everything instantly. Repeating the message can make it stick and the audience is more likely to recall the message. The essential thing to note is that only the important bit of information should be repeated to ensure emphasis on the message being sent.
In Closing
Leveraging techniques to make content that sticks is the first step to making great content, but your work is not done there. Do some testing across multiple aspects of your message like design, writing style, message tone etc and see which combination gets a favorable response.
Blog Post inspired from Research paper
https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Content+Recall+in+Marketing+Communications%3a+A+Study+of+Communication...-a0525404552
