What is clickbait?
Clickbait refers to sensationalized or misleading headlines that entice viewers to click on a particular piece of content. Many types of content can be considered clickbait, including news stories, articles, blog posts, videos, interviews, and social media captions. These headlines often overpromise, misrepresent, or underdeliver information throughout the rest of the content.
Content creation software lets businesses create content for their marketing campaigns, including clickbait-style. With content creation software, marketers and other professionals make, edit, and collaborate on visual and written material.
How does clickbait work?
It’s no secret that clickbait attracts attention. From a psychological perspective, dopamine, a hormone involved in feelings of pleasure, incentivizes behavior. Clickbait works because the promise of fascinating, dramatic news activates people’s dopamine-reward system.
Basic characteristics of clickbait
Regardless of the type of content, content marketers should consider a few characteristics when leveraging clickbait tactics for success. Typically, clickbait has several of the elements below:
- A punchy, eye-catching headline. Content marketers use vague headlines that appeal to feelings to slow scrolling behavior and encourage readers to click. Headlines must be strong and short to avoid boring readers. It may make claims that seem too good to be true or promise secret information that readers want to know more about.
- Appeal to emotion or curiosity. For clickbait to be effective, it must appeal to the reader’s emotions or interests in some way. Clickbait tempts readers directly and explicitly by playing to their feelings, whether happy, sad, angry, annoyed, shocked, or curious. Emotional responses drive readers to take action or click the content for more information.
- Unrelated images and visual elements. In some cases, marketers use pictures and other visuals, such as thumbnail images of videos unrelated to the rest of the content, to attract viewers.
- Social sharing elements. Clickbait content needs readers to share and spread it around to encourage others to open the content. In general, sites that use clickbait content make it easy to share on social network platforms so that it reaches a broad audience.
Examples of clickbait
It’s relatively easy to spot clickbait. Some common examples of headlines that qualify as potential clickbait content are:
- “This Time Management Strategy Helped Me Achieve 5x More Than I Usually Do At Work!”
- “10 Things To Know About Decorating For Christmas Before Thanksgiving!”
- “7 Meal Prepping Secrets To Lose Weight In No Time!”
Benefits of clickbait
Clickbait tends to get a bad rap, but that doesn’t mean brands don’t experience benefits from leveraging this technique in their strategies. Some of the undeniable benefits of clickbait content include the following:
- Increased page views. Most companies want to drive more traffic to their website, and clickbait increases page views by encouraging readers to click.
- More social shares. Brands use clickbait techniques to boost social shares across channels, which also has the potential to drive page views. Some people may even share content without actually reading or watching it themselves first, which brands can easily lean into when striving to bring their content to social media more broadly.
- Brand awareness and recognition potential. Brands may want to increase awareness regardless of the quality of the content or the reputation they build for themselves. Clickbait is an easy way to do this as more clicks, traffic, and social shares circulate the brand's name, creating and publishing the content.
Clickbait best practices
Not all clickbait is bad; in some cases, marketers can use this technique effectively within a broader content marketing strategy. For the highest likelihood of success, marketers should:
- Avoid misleading or over-promising audience members. Marketers need to prioritize consistency and remain truthful when creating content. For example, irrelevant headlines completely different from the content that follows create distrust for readers and viewers. Marketers can still use eye-catching headlines to protect brand reputation without leading audience members to low or poor-quality information.
- Paint the whole picture in the headline. Marketers should craft headlines with hooks followed by content supporting the headline. Rather than leaving headlines too vague to pique interest, marketers can prioritize being transparent in the headline so readers know what to expect and then determine if they want more information.
- Be mindful of search intent. When brands create content that their audience is searching for, visitors are more likely to engage with the content and click on it regardless. This targeted approach results in genuine interest and is more beneficial to businesses than trying to appeal to all.
- Use unique and relevant imagery. Images and videos quickly capture the audience’s attention. Instead of using stock imagery, brands should attract readers with enticing visuals that stand out from other images.
Take a look at the bigger picture! Learn about social media marketing strategies and determine where clickbait fits best.
Alyssa Towns
Alyssa Towns works in communications and change management and is a freelance writer for G2. She mainly writes SaaS, productivity, and career-adjacent content. In her spare time, Alyssa is either enjoying a new restaurant with her husband, playing with her Bengal cats Yeti and Yowie, adventuring outdoors, or reading a book from her TBR list.
