Is your social media and email marketing content as exciting as watching an HGTV documentary on Watching Oil-Based Paint Dry? You don’t have to content yourself with generating content that inadvertently acts as an insomnia cure when you can use it as a tool to awaken engagement in your audience. A recent infographic by Scott Aughtmon entitled The 21 Types of Content We All Crave provided valuable conceptual tips that any online marketer can benefit from. Here are some of the salient points:

  1. Content that reminds us that we matter – In a world with over seven billion people, most of your customers feel like a branded number held in a pen for the sole purpose of being regularly milked for money. It’s not emulating a hippie throwback to the Sixties to show your customers that they are individually important and that they can make a difference, not only in their own lives but in the world at large.
  2. Content that inspires us to action – As in the point above, once you’ve empowered your audience the online marketer within you might expect that the only action you want to see them pursue at this point is incorporated in your Call To Action, but that’s not necessarily the end-all in social media marketing. Inspire your audience to do something that will positively impact their surroundings, their social circle, or even their entire community to stand out from the conventional content crowd.
  3. Content where David defeats Goliath – Again in the same area of individual empowerment, nearly every single one of your customers has some element of the downtrodden within their psyche. In the presence of omnipresent autocratic tyranny, whether it be from their government, their bosses, or just in the restrictions placed by society on their preferred way of life they dream of taking down the powers that be and triumph over inequity and indignity. If you can capture this almost universal desire in your online content you will be engaging your customers on a most profound basis.
  4. Content that surprises us through unexpected twists – “This antiperspirant works, buy it.” That might be the essence of your sales pitch but you have to admit that it doesn’t really capture an audience’s interest by riveting them to the values of your product. Old Spice has done a great job of keeping their audience guessing what’s happening next through their Isaiah Mustafa commercials and you can emulate that fresh and offbeat approach to inject the extraordinary element in your content.
  5. Content that educates while entertaining us – A prerequisite to crafting effective online content is to create a balance between education and entertainment where you are providing your audience with a clear and unequivocal take-away where you have informed them of something that they might not have been previously aware of, while at the same time leaving them utterly satisfied that they have spent a bit of time with your brand that was evidently and unmistakably enjoyable.…and last but most assuredly not least:
  6. Content that makes us laugh or cry – Provoking an emotional response in your audience is by far the most crucial and consequential goal of any social media content and the ultimate effect you want to provoke is tears, whether they be trickling down your customers’ faces through laughter or because you’ve actually touched them to the point where they cry. As long as you can keep from self-deprecating parody on the laughter side and cheap shots where you’re employing unrelated references to provoke sorrow on the crying side, tears are the online marketer’s utmost aspiration.

Abandoning Ambien is not only a good idea from a pharmacological perspective but also from the standpoint of the online marketer. The content creator who can trigger the desired strong response in their social media and email marketing is going to be the one who establishes the brand identity in the mind of the consumer in the most influential way possible. So… wake up and engage your audience today!