Creating Engaging Content That Inspires Change
Posted by Marketing & PR on 14 Aug 2024
The goal of behaviour change marketing is to inspire and facilitate positive lifestyle changes.
This goes beyond traditional marketing, which often focuses on product consumption. Instead, behaviour change marketing seeks to benefit the community and individual behaviours.
Crafting content that engages and motivates people to alter their lifestyles requires a deep understanding of the audience’s needs, aspirations, and barriers to change.
Understanding Your Audience
The first step in creating content that inspires change is to understand who your audience is at a fundamental level. This involves:
• Going beyond just knowing demographic details like age and location
• Gaining insight into their daily challenges
• Understanding their values
• Recognising the social context in which they make decisions
• Identifying the pressures they face
• Discovering what aspirations they hold dear
This knowledge allows you to tailor your message so that it resonates on a personal level.
Crafting a Compelling Narrative
Stories have a unique way of capturing our hearts. They’re not just tales but reflections of our own lives. When your content tells a story, it should feel like a mirror to your audience, reflecting their own journey towards change.
Think about the kinds of stories that resonate. Tales of overcoming adversity, finding redemption, or embarking on a journey of discovery. These narratives need to be relatable, showing not just the benefits of change but also recognising the struggles and how to overcome them.
Take, for example, a busy mum striving to improve her family’s diet. She’s juggling time constraints, a tight budget and picky eaters. By really getting to know her challenges and what she values, you can craft content that provides practical, doable solutions.
Emotional Appeal
Emotions drive action. Content that connects on an emotional level can be more effective in motivating behaviour change than purely informational content. It’s about striking the right balance between rational argument and emotional appeal.
Use real-life testimonials, impactful imagery and emotive language to stir feelings of hope, excitement or concern, which can spur people into action.
Visual and Interactive Elements
In our increasingly digital world, people engage with content that isn’t just static text or images. Interactive content like quizzes, polls, videos and infographics can increase engagement by involving the audience directly in the narrative. These elements make the experience more personal and memorable, increasing the likelihood of the message sticking and the behaviour being adopted.
Consistency and Relevance
The journey to changing behaviours is often long and fraught with setbacks. Consistently delivering content that supports the audience’s change process is crucial. This involves:
• Regular posts, updates, and messages to keep the audience engaged and motivated
• Reinforcing the positive behaviours you want to promote through inspiring stories and practical tips
• Ensuring each piece of content builds on the last, creating a cohesive and supportive narrative
• Providing ongoing support and encouragement to help the audience overcome challenges
• Offering fresh, relevant information that addresses the audience’s current needs and progress
• Directly addressing setbacks with empathy and actionable advice
Call to Action
Finally, effective content should always include a clear, compelling call to action. What do you want your audience to do after they engage with your content? Whether it’s visiting a website for more information, joining a community group, or taking a small step towards a healthier lifestyle, the call to action should be clear and easy to follow. It should feel like a natural next step on the journey you’ve invited them on.
Creating content that genuinely inspires behavioural change is no small feat. It demands a deep connection with your audience and a strategic blend of storytelling, emotional engagement, and interactive design. By focusing on these elements, you can create content that not only captures attention but also fosters real and lasting change in people’s lives.
Our Expertise
We’ve been creating highly successful social marketing campaigns for our customers for over two decades. We love our work and use the latest marketing communication tools and most current segmentation and customer insight techniques.
This allows us to develop and integrate marketing concepts with other approaches to influence behaviour that benefits individuals and whole communities – for the social good.
Within our team, we have leading nationally recognised academic professionals within Psychology, Mental Health and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy that advise what messages and mediums will deliver the best response when we scope out a communications campaign or deliver any targeted communications.
This provides our clients with the reassurance and confidence of knowing that their communication objectives are underpinned by recognised academic behavioural theory, executed with award-winning creative design and using the latest Marketing Automation communication tools, whether it’s on a local, regional or national project.
Perfect Circle has delivered social change for clients like schools, local government, not-for-profit organisations, the health sector and niche commercial businesses, and we’re really proud of what we’ve done so far.
If you’d like our help on your next Behaviour Change Marketing or Social Marketing campaign, we’d love to hear from you. Please visit our contact page and get in touch.
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