Could clickbait bring a halt to content marketing?

You see content marketing and clickbait every day and probably have never thought about it in depth, why would you? Content marketing and clickbait could be seen to go hand in hand at the moment, but will it continue to work?

Content marketing

Content marketing is the distribution of important online materials that can pull customers into your website from organic sources (like Google, Bing or Yahoo), or simply entice visitors to your website in order to find out more about you.
Content marketing is married to SEO as the two are critically linked together. In short, you can’t have one without the other. This means the customer doesn’t constantly keep getting “shouty” messages about the services or products you offer, rather it offers advice and tips that show what your business can do for them. It is a great way to get people talking and get customers to engage with you, creating a strong brand and loyalty.

What is Clickbait?

Clickbait is basically a way of enticing social media users into clicking the links in order to earn income from advertisers. That’s why they have catchy titles that are designed to intrigue, usually using the theme of celebrity to get you hooked, usually along the lines of “Celebrities: before and after surgery”. It’s something that you don’t really care about, but still interests a small part of you. Clickbait has become big business which is why it’s everywhere. There are specific websites that use clickbait to command a really high traffic rate and create what appears to be a really explosive audience (in terms of numbers anyway); and the more clicks they get, the bigger their profits.

How clickbait is hurting legitimate content

This is where you start to see a problem. There are companies writing legitimate blogs designed to build relationships with customers at the same time as positioning themselves as a trustworthy brand. Unfortunately, there are also many companies who write poorly researched, badly written articles designed just to get the click rate up. That means that many are deliberately spread across multiple pages, causing you to click through to continue the article – the more pages you open, the more ads you’re subjected to. It’s quick, easy money for companies who don’t care about reputation or building a good customer experience.

So could clickbait put a halt to content marketing? Potentially yes. Not only have people become annoyed by the constant ads, they’re also now questioning the accuracy of the information, especially with issues of fake news which have become a huge concern. We’ve all been fooled by what seems to be a serious subject turning out to just be a website looking for easy money. And this could lead to fewer people clicking on good materials and meaning businesses will need to try harder to ensure they are getting their content out there.

The best way to fight fake news and clickbait is to build trust. If you want your content marketing to reflect the integrity of your brand in order to build loyal and long-term relationships with your clients and customers, contact us to see how we can help.