Sticky Content: 5 Crucial Steps To Making It All Happen

By Alicia Honeycutt

Mar 30, 2017

Sticky Content

Anyone who works in the field of digital marketing or is interested in attracting a larger client base knows that content is one of the keys to success. Doing content marketing is 62 percent less expensive than carrying out a traditional outbound campaign, and at the same time, it generates over three times the leads.

To make your content highly effective, you need to focus on one critical component – its stickiness. Sticky content is a term referring to content that people spend sufficient time exploring or that they come back to. As a result, sticky content can lead to a high level of engagement, and it’s also characterised by an excellent viral potential.

Content stickiness is characterised by a few essentials. In order to carry out a successful content strategy, you’ll have to focus on the following tips.

1. Credibility and Authority

If you want to make people come back to your content time and time again, you have to focus on a niche that you’re confident about. A specialised website will usually perform much better than generic content.

Figure out what your niche is going to be – the more specific, the better. In addition to relying on your experience and knowledge, you should definitely look into partnerships with industry leaders or authorities.

Quoting the right sources, doing interviews and sharing specialised information will all establish an aura of credibility. If people feel like they can trust you, they will spend more time exploring your website.

Statistics, details and in-depth texts about topics that your audience is interested in are all important. They form the backbone of a sticky content strategy. All other strategies will fail when credibility and authority are missing.

2. Do Something Unexpected

The next thing you can attempt to do is surprise your audience.

People have access to tonnes of information, and they’ve seen just about everything. This is the main reason you should consider using your secret weapon. If you manage to accomplish something that the audience isn’t expecting from you, it will be quite easy to maximise the amount of time they spend on our site.

While the premise is easy to understand, creating surprising content is easier said than done.

You can offer a fresh look from a different perspective on a topic that’s generally spoken about in the same way. See what other websites in the same industry are doing and attempt the exact opposite. If they’re writing about the best strategies to accomplish something, you can write about the biggest mistakes to avoid.

When attempting to do something unexpected, refrain from using clickbait. Clickbait is a misleading grandiose title that isn’t backed up by the content itself. Thus, if you’re promising to reveal industry secrets, you better do that in the text. Clickbait may work once or twice, but you’ll lose the trust of the audience, and they’ll never come back to the website again. Nevertheless, in no way, this means you shouldn’t be focusing to create engaging & attractive titles.

3. Tell a Story

Even if you’re presenting an abstract concept, it will be a good idea to use a story format.

When telling someone’s story and presenting a real human being, you’ll get your audience to connect with the protagonist. People will want to know what’s going to happen by the end of the story. They will be emotionally engaged – a goal that you have to accomplish to ensure stickiness.

Being informative isn’t enough to elevate your texts to the next level. Even if you have a very profound knowledge and you’re sharing information that others don’t have, your audience may be turned off by the jargon and the complexity of the data.

Storytelling comes with many benefits. It presents the human face of your brand and attaches positive emotions to it. You can ensure return visitors to your website by telling a story. People will want to find out what happens next. Thus, you can easily create a series of texts that will come with a massive sticky potential.

Numbers and sources of information are great. Next, you’ll have to amp up the emotional quotient. These two elements will work together to tell the world that you have the knowledge and that you know how to present it in a user-friendly way.

4. Go Interactive

The text is great, and it gives your content strategy a solid foundation. Today’s audience, however, expects a lot more in order to commit.

Diversify the content formats that you’re relying on. Going interactive will help you produce an emotional response much faster than text ever would. Thus, you may want to consider adding images, infographics, videos and diagrams to your articles.

Interactive content keeps people exploring a page much longer. Adding some cartoon or even a game that gets visitors clicking is an excellent idea. You’ll probably have to invest some money in the creation of interactive content, but the return on investment will be particularly high.

When bringing together multiple content types, you’ll still have to keep relevance your main priority. The images, games and videos should add to the audience’s experience. If they have little to do with the topic being discussed, people will not pay attention to the additional content (even if it looks amazing).

5. Be Consistent

Sticky content should be published on a regular basis. You can’t just upload an article per month and expect people to come back for more.

A plethora of informative texts is needed to increase the amount of time that people spend exploring your website. Plus, you can use the different texts in your marketing strategy. Internal links from one article to another relevant text on the website will be great for increasing the amount of time that people spend on your website.

For best results, come up with a monthly content plan and stick to it. Get in the habit of producing new content every single week. Don’t overdo it – quality and quantity both matter. It’s much better to produce a few high-quality texts than to publish every single day without giving your audience something valuable.

The final thing to remember is that sticky content also requires intimate knowledge of your audience. If you know what these people respond to, you’ll find it much easier to keep them engaged. Analyse your website’s performance, figure out which kinds of content are doing better and focus on such texts to increase stickiness in the future.

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