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This blog is clickbait. Click here to find out why!

Design, Digital Marketing

Customers hate being misled. The clickbait practice (an attention grabbing headline that entices you to click it with the hopes that all your curiosity will be satisfied) often promises one thing, and delivers another.

In our office it’s extremely important that we walk in integrity every day and run our business ensuring that we are looking our for our client’s best interests, even though it might stretch them. Our modus operandi is to think and design for our clients customers, (their target audience) not to just make things our clients like. This results in delivering what our clients wanted all along, happy customers. With this in mind, what are we doing intentionally, or otherwise, that is misleading customers?

Most, if not all of us, have seen the standard clickbait headings, associated with a photo that we want to learn more about, and then the content doesn’t really line up with what we were promised. “At first glance these photos look normal, but at closer inspection my mind was blown! Click here to find out why.” The headline leads to believe that our minds will also be blown, but generally there’s not much more to it than a let down. This is a classic case of over-promise and under-deliver. 

Clickbait. It’s all psychology. It starts with an emotional grab, engages your curiosity and creates anticipation where you expect fulfilment in return. Studies have shown that this works as it engages the limbic system in our brains and releases a chemical that makes us feel good. It’s not just these articles and headlines that are using this. It’s all of us in our business dealing and marketing to customers. The big thing is, are you fulfilling the expectations you have now created in your customers and clients? If we’re honest, I think we’ve all over-promised. Maybe on purpose or by mistake, however the responsibility lies on you to make a decision moving forward now. 

We all need to ask ourselves the following, ‘Are we doing this in our businesses?’ When working with clients, are we promising big things, hyping up our clients and driving expectation up, but when it comes to execution it’s lacking? Are we promising a 3 week delivery, but it’s actually 8 weeks? Do we promise employees a wonderful work experience full of personal development, but then they come in and are not given proper direction and given an impossible workload?

Measure your clickbait. What are the hooks you’re throwing out in your marketing, recruiting, or in your face to face meetings? Do those hooks match up to your promises? Do you ACTUALLY offer an outstanding warranty on your product, or is there so much fine print that your end customer has little opportunity to actually protect their purchases against failures? Is your internal culture actually team oriented and collaborative, or is everyone just thrown into a pit and expected to do great work?

Maybe you feel that calling this an issue of integrity is a stretch. Maybe you’ll agree. At the end of the day, and in all things, how will you follow through on your promises?