All affiliate marketers know (or at least should know) the power of good content marketing strategies. The right content can attract thousands of viewers and generate significant sales. Bad content, on the other hand, can actually repel users and cause a business to have some very serious problems. Not everyone, however, likes the same types of content and they don’t all like consuming it in the same way.
That’s why a new study by Buzzstream was recently conducted where they looked at some of the content consumption habits of people of a diverse set of ages. When broken up by generation (Millennials, Generation x and baby boomers) it is easy to see that some things work well across all ages, while others don’t. If you know the age of your target audience, you can use this information to dramatically improve the results of any content marketing campaign.
Types of Content
The study looked at a wide range of different types of content and how different generations liked them. The different options were blog articles, images, comments, eBooks, audio books, quizzes, webinars, slide shares, white papers, memes, flip books, case studies, and reviews.
Across all age groups everyone liked to consume content in blog articles the most followed by images, comments and eBooks. This shows that age doesn’t have too much influence on how people like to consume their content, which may surprise some. On the opposite end, all three generations least liked reading white papers. Baby boomers liked slideshares second least while the other two generations put webinars in second place. You can see the full breakdown here, provided by BuzzStream:
Length of Content
The next area that was looked at was the length of the content. Here too the three generations had a lot in common, but not everything. For all three groups, content that was about 300 words in length was ideal. Baby boomers seemed to be much less picky about length than the other two generations though, as can be seen here:
Time Spent Consuming Content
The final area that the study looked at was how much time people in different generations are spending consuming content. Of course, the longer they are on a page the more opportunity there is for them to make a purchase, sign up for your list, or take some other action you want them to. About 25% of baby boomers spend 20+ hours per week engaged with online content. This is quite a bit more than many would expect, and more than other generations. Both generation x and millennials have about 22% of people spending 20+ hours on content. You can see the full chart on this here:
As you can see, while there are a lot of similarities in how different generations are consuming content, the differences are quite important too. Taking this type of information into account when planning your content strategy can help you to improve your engagement rate with your sites quite significantly.
