Curiosity Marketing: A Better Way to Win Loyal Customers

Want your audience to ask about your products?

Wondering how to spark people's interest?

To explore how to use curiosity in your marketing, I interview Chalene Johnson.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It's designed to help busy marketers, business owners, and creators discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode, I interview Chalene Johnson. She's a marketer, speaker, and teacher. She's also the author of the book Push and founder of 131 Method, a site that helps people get healthy and lose weight in non-traditional ways.

Chalene explains how authentic connections and a little bit of mystery keep your audience interested in your content.

You'll also discover tips for creating cliffhanger content and answering people's questions.

Share your feedback, read the show notes, and get the links mentioned in this episode below.
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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Curiosity Marketing
Chalene's Story

Most people know Chalene from her work in health and fitness. She's appeared in many infomercials and exercise DVDs. However, she's been successful in fitness because she loves business and helping people solve problems. In fact, Chalene has spent a large part of her professional life teaching people about marketing, building an online business, and developing passive income.

Chalene finds that marketers often copy other people who are successful (or assumed to be successful). But when you do that, you lose authenticity and fail to listen to yourself. You do things that don't come naturally to you and don't tune into what you like, what would grab your attention, and how you would like to be talked to.

When Chalene finds herself thinking she should do what her competitors are doing, she reminds herself of her passion for her own message and desire to serve others.

Also, you don't know the ins and outs of someone else's method. For instance, you don't know how big their team is, how much experience they have, how much traffic they receive, or what they want their lifestyle to look like.

Listen to the show to hear my thoughts on the problems with following someone else's playbook.

Why Is Curiosity a Powerful Concept?

People want to connect the dots, and when they can't, their curiosity is powerful and motivating. For example, when a child can't see what's under the bed, they imagine something's under there. In business, your goal is to get people's attention, maintain it, and engage with them. Curiosity can help you accomplish those goals.

Nowhere is keeping people's attention more challenging than on TV, where you see shows like Storage Wars pique viewers' curiosity before cutting to a commercial. Storage Wars is a cable TV show where abandoned storage units are auctioned off. Sometimes they're filled with nothing; sometimes they're filled with amazing treasures.

To keep you engaged, just before the show cuts to commercial, the door on the storage unit slides up so you can glimpse inside. Then you're left wondering, "Was the unit a bust or was there something valuable in it?" Chalene thinks it's important to translate this tactic to marketing to keep people's attention. The longer you have someone's attention, the more likely you are to build trust.

Listen to the show to hear my thoughts on cliffhangers.

Chalene's Strategy

Chalene's strategy for curiosity marketing is built on authenticity, growing your community, and asking questions. To make these concepts easy to remember, she has a phrase for each part of her strategy.

Borrowed Words Are for the Birds: When the language in your copy or social media video uses someone else's language, your words don't feel authentic. Only the words that you use feel natural. When someone's being inauthentic or they're uncomfortable, it's so easy to identify.