For content marketers, just like educators, connecting with audiences is a constant key challenge. How do you get and keep people’s attention, make messages stick, and inspire action? To mark National Online Learning Day on Sept. 15, we asked five teachers and marketing pros on the Imprint team for tips to boost three key items: engagement, retention, and action. The answers revealed plenty of overlap between the two fields — so in addition to smart responses, here’s an Imprint pop quiz.
As you read each tip, see if you can guess whether it’s from a teacher or a marketing pro. (Answers are at the end of your exam.)
1. “The more personal you can make the content, or a lecture, the more likely it is the audience will take action and go to the next level. If the experience becomes relatable, that will drive action. An audience needs to feel that there’s something in it that’s in some way valuable and relevant to them.”
2. “Visuals boost retention. When you show words to an audience and three weeks later ask them to recall them, about 11% of the (audience) will remember those words. If you pair the same words with a picture, that retention ratio rises to almost 70%. It works in education and in marketing.”
3. “Interactivity is key to engagement — initiating it and holding it. The idea and the goal is to create an experience that asks the audience to lean into it. Encouraging the audience to get involved — click on a visual, pull up a profile, explore new terms — gives the option to drill deeper into a subject.”
4. “Know your audience. If you have your audience in mind all of the time then you know what you want that audience to do — for instance, read these two stories, or download this information. Knowing who your audience is at the beginning actually enables you to get them to take action in the end.”
5. “Getting people to click on the button — it’s the call to action. Giving people a reason to participate is important when it comes to taking action. Making it simple to take action — whether it’s downloading something or pulling up a graphic — is, too. The easier and more frictionless you can make taking that action the more successful it’s going to be.”
6. “Without confusing the pursuit of knowledge with completing activities, teachers and marketers often both use different flavors of loss aversion to their advantage. Teachers are good at this — for example, ‘You lose half a grade for every day your paper is late.’ For marketers, it more often takes the form of FOMO (fear of missing out) — for example, ‘You miss out on free money if you don’t save at least to the company match in your 401k.’”
7. “In a class there’s nothing easier for students to do than to stop paying attention. And there’s nothing easier for an audience to do than to stop reading an article. So be sure to entertain your audience. Communicate humor and a sense of passion. Humor is an effective tool to connect and stay connected, whether it’s in a class, with an article, or in a relationship.”
8. “It helps to deliver the same essential message in more than one way — through words, a spreadsheet, charts and visuals. Repetition can be an asset for retaining information.”
9. “A passive audience can tune out. Making a lecture or an article a connected and interactive experience, like a back-and-forth conversation, keeps people engaged.”
10) “People, especially millennials, want to know that they’re seen. The more you can communicate that you know and understand your audience, the more they’re apt to be engaged. Make the customer the hero of your marketing campaign in the same way the student has to be the hero of your class.”
Answer Key:
- Marketing Pro: Andy Seibert, Imprint Managing Partner @Imprint_AndyS
- Teacher: Angela Lee, Professor of Practice and Faculty Director, Lang Center for Entrepreneurship Columbia Business School @angelawlee @Columbia_Biz
- Marketing Pro: Ken Williams, Imprint Managing Director @Imprint_KenW
- Marketing Pro: Ashley Logan Brenner, Imprint Creative Director @Imprint_AshleyB
- Teacher: Kristen Sosulski, Clinical Associate Professor of Technology, Operations, and Statistics at NYU Stern School of Business @sosulski @NYUStern
- Marketing Pro: Meg Sullivan Staknis, Imprint Managing Director
- Teacher: Christopher Moore, Adjunct Writing Professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and Baruch College @cmoorenyc @JohnJayCollege @BaruchCollege
- Teacher: Price Fishback, Professor of Economics at University of Arizona
- Teacher: Zebulon Miletsky, Associate Professor of Africana Studies and History at Stony Brook University @ZebulonMiletsky @stonybrooku
- Teacher: Angela Lee, Professor of Practice and Faculty Director, Lang Center for Entrepreneurship Columbia Business School @angelawlee @Columbia_Biz
