Getting the attention and interest of your ideal clients comes down to one thing. Curiosity. Curiosity is the itch that propels us to engage, investigate, grow and engage. Curiosity needs an answer. Curiosity is a powerful force in our lives.

At its core, curiosity is the desire to learn or discover. This might seem like a small thing, but it has a powerful pull on us. Even when we're hungry, thirsty, or tired, we'll go to great lengths to quench our curiosity.

Curiosity has been leveraged for centuries to market and sell products and services. When a topic is of interest to us, our curiosity kicks in and compels us to find the answers. Humans cannot resist the need to know.

We often think that information will convince people to buy, in reality it’s curiosity that convinces people to buy. The truth is, for you to get the attention and interest of an ideal client, you need to pique their interest, that's how you get them to read your post, download your lead magnet, sign up for your webinar, or message you asking for your help.

If you want to build your brand, win clients and make it easier to make money, you need to know how to leverage curiosity.

5 Principles of curiosity

Standing out and captivating your audience's attention is both an art and a science, hinging significantly on understanding and applying the five principles of curiosity: Novelty, Partial Exposure, Complexity, Uncertainty, and Conflict. These principles are not just theoretical concepts; they are practical tools that, when skilfully integrated into your marketing strategies, can significantly enhance your brand's online presence and engagement. 

Novelty 

Curiosity is sparked by encountering something new or unusual that stands out from our everyday experiences, prompting us to explore and learn more about it. We love new things. We love to embrace trends, fads and novelty. 

One way to do this, which I’m doing right now, is to take well known people and correlate your subject matter into their world. With a general election pending in the UK. I’m doing a series on my podcast about personal branding and political leaders.

Novelty is simply tying your subject into something topical or trending, so you can benefit from something new and popular. The key to making this successful is to ensure that the novelty you create still links to how you help people.

Here is my example:

Partial Exposure

Revealing just a fragment of information can intrigue us enough to pursue the full story, as our curiosity drives us to fill in the gaps and uncover the rest.

I’ve used this in my own content, but this also works to get signups for lead magnets, webinars and newsletter signups.

Very often you’ll see people sharing their success and giving 4 or 5 tips of how they achieved it. The tips themselves often have no practical value, they are just headlines. This is what is called partial exposure, they give you a summary, but if you want the real substance of how they really did it, you need to either follow them or sign up for something.

Very often, this type of curiosity is seen as bait. The detail of how is always missing or in summary form, which, if you want more, you either have to sign up, download or follow. 

Here is an example of me using curiosity to get more people to ready my post

I tell people that point 9 is the most important, but the audience hasn’t read the points yet, so the audience wants to know what point 9 is.

There is nothing wrong with partial exposure. Influencers and gurus use this in almost every piece of content they share. It’s how they amass their engagement and following. However, if you want to build your brand as a go-to expert, you need to be careful how often you use partial exposure, as if you are only ever sharing surface level information, it could undermine your credibility too.

Complexity

When something challenges our understanding but seems understandable, it engages our curiosity, motivating us to dissect and understand its intricacies.

One of the best examples of curiosity driven by complexity is through the use of infographics. They break information down into visual and easy to understand elements. On LinkedIn, dense infographics work the best. A detailed, complex looking infographic can grab attention in the feed and retain their attention as they consume the detail of the infographic.

Uncertainty

The presence of unknown elements or outcomes can heighten our curiosity, as we are naturally inclined to seek answers and resolve our doubts. Humans crave certainty, so using uncertainty to draw interest and attention is powerful.

Uncertainty comes in many forms. It’s why many watch the news and study stories intensely. We want certainty and as a result we give more attention to things which help us close the uncertainty gap.

How do we create leverage uncertainty?

Uncertainty is always rooted in how we see the future. Prompting people to think about their future will encourage people to pay attention.

I like to use polls to get people thinking about the future. I like to ask questions to prompt people to think about what they want to achieve.

Here is an example:

Most of the time, we aren’t thinking, we’re scrolling. Asking questions which force people to think about the big things in their lives sparks their curiosity. It gets them out of autopilot and starting to ask themselves the questions you’ve posed.

Conflict

Encountering information that contradicts our existing beliefs or expectations can trigger curiosity, pushing us to investigate further and reconcile these disparities.

A simple way to think about this is to share your opinions which differ from conventional wisdom. If the world thinks blue, what ideas do you have which are to the red. This is how you can build a following who buy into your ideas. It’s not about creating a dispute, but taking a stand for ideas you believe which are in direct conflict with conventional wisdom. What do you believe about your subject area which is different from the conventional wisdom? Be bold and share it.

Write down your ideas and how they differ from the group think in your industry.

Use that in your content, messaging and social selling process to create curiosity about how your way works and is different from others.

I think I’ve demonstrated how curiosity can unlock more attention and interest in you and what you offer. You want to create that curiosity in your profile, content, webinars, lead magnets and outreach  -without it you are just sharing information.

Curiosity is what gets people to take action.

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