If your marketing has become a little lacking, this episode is for you. Drum roll…I’m diving into a powerful yet often overlooked tool that can transform your marketing and boost your business growth: Curiosity. In this episode of The Hayley Osborne Show, learn how to spark interest, engagement, and trust with your audience by using curiosity-driven marketing strategies.
I can’t wait for you to listen to the 8 practical ways to create a marketing experience keeping your audience coming back for more. I talk about forms of “teasing content”, posing intriguing questions, ways to build mystery and leveraging one of the best, least often forms of marketing in your business.
A great way to market that has been used for years and if you’re ready to take your marketing to the next level and create a business that intrigues and excites, this episode is for you.
Tune in and discover how curiosity can be the key to growing your brand and connecting with your dream clients.
Listen in here and start using curiosity as your secret weapon today!
SUMMARY
0:00:01 – Introduction and podcast show purpose
0:02:30 – Explanation of curiosity in marketing
0:05:00 – First strategy: Teasing content without giving it all away
0:08:36 – Importance of repeated messaging
0:10:00 – Second strategy: Using the power of “What if” questions
0:12:30 – Third strategy: Creating mystery around new offers
0:14:00 – Fourth strategy: Using open loops in content
0:16:00 – Fifth strategy: Behind-the-scenes content
0:18:38 – Sixth strategy: Making people curious about your secret sauce
0:22:00 – Seventh strategy: Challenges
0:24:00 – Eighth strategy: Social proof
0:26:30 – Conclusion and call to action
0:28:00 – Podcast outro
Hayley Osborne
Hello and welcome back to another episode of my podcast, the Hayley Osborne show. I’m really glad that you are here today, listening with me, whatever you’re doing with me in your ears to learn something about how to obviously grow your business and market your business and show up as the most superheroic, awesome version of yourself. So thank you for taking the time out to listen to me today. I wanted to talk to you about something that you’ve probably seen the way people market their business, and you don’t know how to put a label on it, and it comes up often, time and time again, and you think, gee, that’s good.
That’s clever. How do you do that? How does that person do that? Well, a lot of people, a lot of businesses and bigger businesses, too, use curiosity in the way that they market their business, and that’s what it is, and when done well, it can work really amazingly. So I wanted to come to you today to talk about eight ways that you could use curiosity in your marketing to be able to grow your business, because there’s definitely a craft to be able to market this way. And the more that you know about this type of marketing, knowledge is power.
So you can start to think, well, am I using curiosity in and around some of the ways I market my business, or is this something that I’ve not really heard of, but I guess subconsciously, witness it the way that businesses show up and they market, and you probably have when I start to talk about the eight different things that I’ve put together that use the form of Curiosity, type of marketing. And so I found this so interesting, and I find it really interesting when business owners and bigger business owners use curiosity as a marketing tactic.
And so I wanted to share it with you. And so here we are, so eight ways to use curiosity to grow your business. Thanks for listening. So I’m here. It’s actually night time when I’m recording this. Because, you know, usually you’re like, oh, there she is again, recording a podcast at night. That’s true, because it is the one time that I can actually think with my full brain and my whole heart of what I want to teach or talk about or just have a so much nicer flow when everything is quiet in my house and it feels really nice that it feels really aligned to me, and I’m here to help you to show up more confidently the way that you market your Business and with more strategy.
And I think that if I can communicate those things the best to you, I’ve done my job, and I need to do that when my house is quiet, so it’s very beautiful anyway. So I wanted to talk about curiosity as a form of marketing to elevate your business, because quite often it’s so overlooked, and it’s a sneaky little tactic in marketing, but I think you’re probably thinking curiosity, but how does that apply to business? Hayley, well, I’m about to take you through that, and I think it’s one of the most potent, strongest, strongest drivers of growth, okay, ultimately, connection, engagement, and then obviously growth.
And so when you think about it, and you’re going to be like, oh, this is so I’m going to sneeze in a minute. Oh my gosh, I did move away from the microphone, but I’m not, I’m not going to edit any of this, because that takes time, and I don’t have that and I don’t want to, because obviously this podcast, a lot goes into it already, and so I’m just not going to edit it, because it’s my podcast, and I’m the boss, and I do what I want anyway. So. So when we talk about curiosity, we’re talking about people being curious, right? And what happens when you’re curious? You want to know more, okay? So you ask questions. But how? But why? How do we do that? You dig deeper, and then ultimately you make decisions. So if we can somehow incorporate that into marketing our business right, which, on the other side of that, you’ve got your customers asking those questions, okay, so you know, I want to know more about what they’re offering.
You want to, you want to be able to, I want to dig deeper. I want to find out all the things humans buy from humans, so we’re super nosy. So I think curious marketing is definitely something that you’ve probably all been exposed to, but just don’t realize what people are doing. And so I think that these strategies that I talk about are going to just help you question how you show up in your marketing and how you are captivating your audience to be able to engage with you. And then, you know, picking their interest, and then keep them coming back for more, and then help them make decisions to work with you.
Okay, so let’s jump in. The first one is kind of like teasing content, but without giving it all away. So I’ve done this in my marketing as well, and I’m sure that we all have. It’s a fun one, because it works wonders when done, right? Okay, you don’t need to share everything up front, and that’s a strategy that a lot of podcast hosts use, because it gets people to click and want to know more, which means that they will be playing the podcast episode. Okay, so I think that teasing content without giving it all away, leaves people wanting more. So if you have a look at the way that I structure my podcast titles, it has to be that way. Otherwise, if you gave away the answer, no one would listen. But it’s not even about that. It’s about the question or the podcast title.
Let’s just say, is there for a reason, because you want to also know the back story, so you’ve got the hook, right, the tease content without giving it all away, but then you’ve got the background knowledge when you do press play, or when you do dig in, or you do buy that course to know more, to teach you how to do something, to get from A to B. And so I think that teasing content without giving it all away definitely leaves people wanting more, and it keeps people engaged. So whether it’s in the way that you show up in your emails, because not everyone has a podcast. I know that, but it could be the way that you show up on your social media.
It could be the way that you write your blogs. You are hinting on what’s to come but not giving it away all at once. That’s what teasing content is. So for example, let’s say you’re releasing a new product or a service, and instead of just telling your audience all about it in one post, you could be saying something like, big things are coming. Watch this space. Stay tuned. You could have a day countdown. Want to know more. Keep an eye out, because next week I’m doing this. Those things help to build anticipation and keep your audience curious, and it keeps them engaged.
And so I would never just come and say, hi, I’m doing this that are A, B, C, buy my shit. It’s just not how marketing works. And it’s also very
one, I’m gonna say boring, but two, I’m gonna say like, no one’s going to see that okay, because you posting once one it might be the wrong medium of content, that you’re shouting something out from the rooftops that’s coming new for you, or it could just be you don’t tell the story enough. And so I think definitely in this day and age, you need to be able to talk about something lots and lots and lots and lots before anyone realizes what you’re doing. Because people don’t forget to be busy, so busy living their own lives that they don’t care about what you’re doing.
And so you know, a few weeks out, before you actually launch something, you need to be teasing. You need to be massaging your audience that something new is coming and something big is coming. If this is the example that we’re looking at right, because people are doing their own thing, like, what if they’re on holidays, or what if they don’t open their emails for a week, I know that when I launch my membership superhero marketing, I would send out around 26 emails in seven days, and I shit you not, I still get people come to me after and say, I didn’t realize that doors were open.
Are you kidding me? Like so if I can send that many emails, and you know, talk about a launch over a. Seven-day period, and people still come and say, bummed, I missed out. Then that just proves me right that, you know, not everyone sees what you post, so having a few good weeks of teasing that something is coming is not a bad thing. Okay, number two is using the power of the question, what if okay. So I think that this is one of my definitely favorite curiosity triggers by posting a what if question, and it means that you’re inviting your audience to be curious about the possibility of something okay and something they might not have thought about before.
And that’s important, especially with me teaching you how to market or teaching you different things about marketing, is, what if you did this instead of that? What if you had all of your marketing foundations correct and done? Do you have all your marketing foundations set up? What if you plugged all of your holes in your leaky bucket and the people that came to your website left either through your shopping cart or by adding themselves to your email list? What if you could double your revenue with just one small change to your website, or what if there was a way to grow your business without burning out.
Like, how nice are these what if questions? And they’re kind of like, I don’t know, they’re very, very powerful and a really great form of sparking curiosity to grow your business. So the power of what it is huge. And so these questions really get the brain working, and people will naturally want to know, what, what, what if, what, how, how? It’s not about the answer right away, but it’s more about being and creating that intrigue that pulls people in. So the power of what if, as a form of marketing with a curiosity angle is huge. Third, one of eight is to create some mystery around new offers, okay?
And if you don’t have anything new in the pipeline, maybe you could say something that is older, and re-skin it and make it, you know, add some things that keep it up to date, and relaunch it with a new name, or create more mystery around it. Okay, so I think that whenever you’ve got something new, whether it’s a product, a service, a course, anything, don’t just, I think, shout it from the rooftops with all the details instead, build that curiosity. All right. So that mystery around what’s coming and what’s new is really beautiful, and people, you know, they’re like cliffhangers, almost.
So something exciting is coming soon, but I can’t talk about it just yet because I’m doing X, Y and Z, or getting ready for an exclusive offer. If you are a VIP client of mine, get ready for an exclusive offer if you’re part of my email list. These moments all help you to create a little bit of mystery which piques your audience’s curiosity, and they want to know what it is. They want to know why they should care. They want to know what you’re doing. Everyone’s nosy again. Don’t forget. So that creating mystery around new offers is a sense of curious marketing, and I love it. The fourth one is using open loops in your content.
And you’re probably thinking like, what’s this? It is a great one, though. So an open loop is when you start to tell a story and share a story, a part of you knows really important information, but you don’t finish. Okay? Instead, you leave your audience hanging and you keep your audience on the edge of their seats wanting to know what happens next? Now, open loops are used a lot in podcasts and podcast marketing, because, you know, you might say the number one way to grow your business, and then everyone’s like, I want to know what that number one way is. I’m going to press play. That’s an open loop.
And then when you press plan. You know that the podcast episode is, say, 15 minutes. You know that they’re not going to tell you straight away. Okay, I really don’t like to beat around the bush in my podcast, but that’s a really good example of an open loop. So, you know, keeps you wanting to know what happens next. So another good example could be in your weekly emails or blog posts, starting with a really compelling question or a smart teaser or a smart statement, a smart subject and preview text so you are forced to open the email because you do want to know, like, I’ll tell you the secret to growing your business in. Minute. But first, let me share something really interesting with you that happened on the weekend, so see how that keeps people engaged, but they’re waiting for a payoff.
Okay, so that’s what an open loop is. I find it really interesting. It is captivating, and it keeps your audience really curious about what you’re gonna say next, that’s cool. The fifth one is to play with behind-the-scenes content a little bit. So let’s talk about something that really taps into curiosity, which is behind the scenes content, right? And being curious. I just love this, because people are noisy, and I say this so much in my podcast. If you’ve been listening to me for a while, you’ll know that humans buy from humans.
Yes, Hayley, you say this all the time because we’re nosy and we want to know what’s happening in people’s lives. So people love feeling like they’re getting a sneak peek into your world. They’re getting a sneak peek into your brain, your process, your systems, how your business works, it makes them feel like they’re part of something special, and this is awesome. And you know, taking people behind the scenes or behind the creation of a product or a service behind your computer, so giving them a tour of your office, or even the way that you brainstorm sessions, for example. Here’s a sneak peek of my latest service.
It’s only for you. It’s for our VIP insiders. You’re not giving anything away if you’re not a VIP, for example, even if you are a VIP, here’s a sneak peek of what you’re going to get first access to. So you’re not giving everything away, but you’re showing just enough to keep them interested and just enough to keep them wanting more. So behind the scenes content can be done well if you have a plan and if you have a strategy. And so I’m going to say this with my heart of hearts, like I don’t share my children on my socials. You all know this, if you’ve been listening for a while, and if you are new here, welcome to my world. I have small children, but they don’t feature in my behind-the-scenes content. I’ve got other things that I talk about because they’re not, they’re not my porn, and I That’s my choice not to share them.
You do see that I do have children, if you follow my stories, but I don’t. I don’t share their faces. I don’t do anything like that because I don’t think it is appropriate, and I don’t love it. And so that’s a choice I made a long time ago, when I had kids, not to share them. And so there’s other ways that you can share behind the scenes content, and if that resonates with you, and you’ve been stuck thinking, oh my gosh, I love that.
I’m so stuck with sharing behind the scenes content when I don’t want to share all of my life, I don’t want to share my family, I’m your girl. So you know, everything can be done, and it can be done with a strategy. So I think behind the scenes content is amazing, and I do share it in my business, and I would love to help you to do that in yours, if that’s something that you are steering away from in terms of sharing like you don’t have to bear all that’s not the way to success. The way to success is showing up with laser focus in your zone of genius.
That’s what moves the needle. So, yes, behind the scenes content works well, when you have a strategy, the next one, number six, is to make people curious about what your secret sauce is. I’m going to drink secret sauce. I mean, like no one ever gives away some recipes, okay? So Nona doesn’t give away what she puts in her sauce, or how she makes her meatballs. I mean, you know, in my family, everyone shares recipes, so it’s not a thing. But you know what I mean, like secret sauce, right? So make people curious about your secret sauce. This is where you talk about what makes your business unique.
Okay, without giving all the details, what are your unique selling points? What’s your secret sauce? Don’t give away your secrets, obviously, but talk about your process, your strategy, or, you know, talk about what makes your offering service or product stand out from the crowd. What is so different about you? Okay, so we’re not talking about features here at all. We’re talking about benefits. For example, you might say we have a method that works wonders for our clients. Let us show you how it works. Or, for example, I use a framework inside of my business.
This is for real. This is me that is called maps, and I use that to help you to build your marketing foundations. And I’ve built that framework myself, and that stands for market audience, problem and solution. Okay, so it piques your curiosity about what that method is. Is and how it can benefit you, but you don’t have to give everything away, but you can make people curious to find out more. And so that method, I built, that from scratch inside of my business, and I’m so proud. And, you know, I don’t share the how, but I share the what you need to do, and that’s the difference, okay, the how is the part that you get paid for.
Okay? So I think that the secret sauce is definitely something you can leave every single business can lean into, okay, but you’ve got to know a line that you don’t cross, because when you cross the line, that’s when you get paid. You cannot give away all your secrets. Otherwise, that’s just, you know, that’s your job. And, like, a lot of the time people come to me and, you know, those people that say, I just want to pick your brains. Hayley, I just want to do this. I just want to do that. Like, think about it. It’s okay. It’s okay to say no. And I have very strong boundaries around that now, but I never used to, and I kick myself, like when I think about some conversations, I used to have with people I used to get random calls on my phone with, you know, local business owners, mind you saying, oh, I found your number on the internet or whatever.
Like, there’s no way now, but, and I just want to ask you a question, and I just used to be so silly to pick up, and I just was so naive. This is when I first started my business, so we’re talking like seven to eight years ago. And I just think, Goodness me. So, you know, you learn a lot along the way, and you know, don’t give away all your secrets, because your secrets are what makes your business who you are and how you are different, and the benefits that you can share with people. And I definitely think that you know, especially since I’ve had children, is that’s what puts food on the table.
Your brain is your biggest asset, and all of the knowledge that you’ve built around that, so don’t share your secrets. Okay, that’s what you get paid for. There we go. Number seven, okay, challenges. Now, if you haven’t run one of these, I highly recommend it. I think it’s super awesome. It also gives you practice on public speaking and doing all the things, because you know, when you have a challenge, you know that you get lots of people signed up.
So I think you can introduce an element of curiosity three challenges, and they’re a great way to get people involved, get their curiosity flowing, something like a three-day challenge, which is what I do a quiz or a simple question, can get people curious, and can-do wonders for driving and great engagement and building a certain level of curiosity around what is next after that, okay? And that’s when you make the sale. Right? For example, can you crack the code? Take our challenge to find out, or take a quiz that gives them a customized result for a following action, right? Or join my marketing makeover challenge, or join my three-step process challenge.
Or the goal anyway, regardless of the name, is to get your audience really curious about themselves, their progress, what they know, what their gaps in their knowledge are, and how they can improve on where they are now to get them where they want to go. Okay, challenges are awesome, because a challenge will give an outcome. If the outcome is attainable and aspirational enough that’s enough for you to get so many runs on the board, and so many people sign up to your database, and so many people in your world to have a taste of what it’s like to work with you.
The eighth and final peak of curiosity is to this is a really obvious one, which is why I wanted to leave it to the end. But it’s social proof, all right, and so I think it’s definitely last, but it’s not the least. It’s the power of social proof to spark curiosity, because nothing says you’re amazing like somebody else saying it. You can talk about your services till the cows come home, except when somebody else says how good you are. I think social proof is everything, so people are naturally curious about what other people are doing, where they are gaining their success, especially when it comes to success stories.
And I think that Curiosity will drive them to engage with your content even more, and it also highlights your customers’ transformations that you’ve given them without giving away every detail, because this is about your customer, not about you. So for example, check out how Sarah went from X to Y in 30 days. If you want to know how, keep reading. For. People who want to know the process behind their success, and that Curiosity will drive them to engage with your content and therefore buy from you if you’ve done enough nurturing, if you’ve been consistent enough, right?
So all of these eight things rest on you being consistent and nurturing your audience and going through that know, like and trust to be able to build up into a sale, right? So curiosity drives people to engage with you, and that is number eight. So there you have eight ways to use curiosity to grow your business. It’s not just about being mysterious, guys, no, it’s about creating a bit of a journey right that invites your audience to engage with you, to take action, to explore more about who you are and what you do.
And if you’ve got your messaging right, if you’ve got your storytelling right across all your touch points, and then they get to your website to buy from you. They buy from you because you have been thorough in building your consistency with those things, and I think that you then build a much stronger connection with your audience and keep them coming back from more so I want to hear from you now. How are you going to start using a bit of curiosity in your marketing? Drop me a message or share your thoughts on social media. If you are on Instagram, follow me there and just keep the conversation going.
Are you using curiosity as a marketing tool inside of your business to keep people wanting more? And I just want to say, thanks so much for listening. And if you love this episode, don’t forget to leave me a review and subscribe and share it with someone that you think might benefit from this. Have a great week, guys, and I’ll catch you next week. See ya. I hope you’ve enjoyed listening to this episode. If you have hit subscribe, so you don’t miss any new episodes released every Tuesday, and while you’re there, leave me a review.
I would absolutely love to read it. Also, don’t forget to tag me @hayleykosborne over on Instagram and share this post with your audience so they can get learning too. Sharing is caring. If you want more, head over to hayleyosborne.com/category/podcast for today’s show notes and links, catch you next week for another episode of The Hayley Osborne show you.
