What's Attention Marketing, & Should You Use It?
Did you know that the cost of acquiring consumer attention has increased dramatically (seven- to nine-fold) in the past two decades?
It might not be surprising to hear, but overall our collective attention span has been narrowing.
You might be wondering, “What does this mean for marketers?”
As marketers, it’s our job to attract people to our brand. We need to deliver almost magnetic-like messaging to grab our audience’s attention. But when you only have seconds to do this, it might seem like an insurmountable task (hint: it’s not, we have some ideas).
In this post, let’s review what attention marketing is and how you can use it to grab your audience’s attention.
The term attention marketing was coined by Steve Jelley and popularized by Seth Godin, as a way to describe a business model that focuses on capturing users’ attention through non-invasive content rather than interrupting users’ attention with something like a pop-up ad. With attention marketing, once you have your audience’s attention, you can then engage with and convince them to purchase your product or service when the opportunity presents itself.
Before this concept was introduced, around the beginning of social media, the marketing landscape looked a lot different. Brands would usually market themselves on a massive scale, using TV ads, billboards, or radio spots. This means that they weren’t able to target individuals, but instead had to focus on appealing to a broader audience.
With social media, brands can now figure out what interests individual customers and then market to them individually. Ultimately, it’s important to consider using attention marketing because you want your marketing assets to engage customers and pull them in.
Marketing Attention Span
Now that you’re thinking about capturing your audience’s attention instead of interrupting it, let’s focus on some logistics. To start, you don’t have as much time as you think.
Years ago, Microsoft reported that the average person’s attention span was 8 seconds. A more recent study shows that our collective attention span is narrowing.
Essentially, you only have seconds to capture your audience’s attention before they continue scrolling or click through to something else.
So, how should you capture your audience’s attention? Let’s go over some ideas below.
Marketing Attention Grabbers
1. Be platform-specific.
A great way to grab your audience’s attention is for your content to show up natively in your audience’s feed (if we’re talking social media).
For example, if your video shows up as recommended on YouTube and they click the video and it’s clearly in sync with what your title was and what they were expecting, then you’ll probably be able to keep them watching.
But, if they click through and the content is a photo montage instead of a video (a vast difference from what they might expect), then you might lose them.
In that same vein, when brands repost content from Instagram on Twitter, instead of making a separate Twitter post, people are less likely to click on the …read more
Source:: HubSpot Blog
