Attention is now a scarce commodity – becoming scarcer by the day – and according to research, the average human attention span in the last few years has reduced from twelve seconds to just eight seconds. Eight Seconds. So, the question marketers now ask is, how do I grab attention in 8 seconds?
To help out, researchers have taken a scientific approach to answering the question, and creating great content is the first step towards grabbing attention in 8 seconds. The second step is the effective distribution of content, with segmentation in mind.
Below are a few ways to ensure that your marketing content grabs attention in 8 seconds and translates to sales for your product.
How to Grab Attention in 8 Seconds
- Subtle branding
Unconsciously, overly branded content puts off people. It comes across as “too much advert,” and can often make your content lose the much-needed attention. Your content should be branded – but as subtly as possible.
Consumers are averse to persuasive content and prefer to think that they chose you themselves not because they were”‘pushed” into buying or doing whatever it is you want them to do.
- Value
Does your content create value? Think about your audience first. The truth is, you are more concerned about their reaction to your content, which is probably visiting your website, calling your sales line, subscribing to your service or walking into your store.
The problem with having this at the top of your mind when creating content is that your audience does not derive any value from your content whether educational or entertaining, and you lose their attention. Grabbing attention in 8 seconds requires that you put your consumers’ interest first.
- Create Emotions
Emotions are a big part of the marketing game. To grab people’s attention, you need to create emotions, especially positive emotions. Play to the emotional side of your audience, give them joy, love and so on in the first five seconds. Then you grabbed their attention for the next eight seconds.
- Do not give it all out at once
So, you have ten sweets. Give a child one sweet, and he is happy. Give him two, and he is happier. The progression continues like that until you give out all ten. On the other hand, give him all ten at once, and he is just happy once and loses interest in you after.
This illustration has some relationship with the law of diminishing returns in economics, the more you get, the less your satisfaction. When delivering your content, give them some positive emotion, take it away, give them. Take them on an exciting journey.
- Target the right persons
With the right kind of message that will hit your audience and hold their attention, you are almost good. However, there is one more thing left: the right audience. The right audience is those who can relate to the content you are sharing. You cannot grab the attention of people who do not care about the environment with “green evangelism” (unless you use something else they are interested in pushing the message).
Advertising and marketing are changing rapidly because of the evolution of man. Man’s attention span is one of the things that is evolving; so for you to grab attention in 8 seconds (that is the current average attention span of we human), you have to research your audience, analyse the information you have and use it to strategise.
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