Is keeping audience attention more important than grabbing audience attention?
|
The average human attention span is eight seconds long, which is shorter than that of a goldfish. This has proved itself to be a major challenge for marketing professionals everywhere. Show
You have an eight-second window to attract and deliver value to readers before they become disinterested. And since we aren’t marketing to goldfish, we have to adjust our strategies in order to hook our audience. Whether you sell healthcare solutions, technology products, manufacturing services, or anything in between, it is critical to make people want to read what you have to say (and keep coming back for more!).  Determine the motivation behind why someone needs what you sell. If you can understand that, then you can create content that is valuable to them. This is easier said than done. In this blog, we discuss ways to excite your audience and keep them around for the long haul. Getting Their Attention The internet is saturated with blogs, articles, and videos—especially in competitive B2B markets. So, how do you get readers to choose your company over others? Here are some of our top tips for grabbing your readers’ attention:
Keeping Their Attention Now, for the tough part. You hooked your audience. How do you retain their interest? Add Value to Their Experience Getting attention will not matter unless the user lands on content that is valuable to them. This could be in the form of a perfectly-crafted blog post, FAQ, or demo video, for starters. Evolve your content over time to continuously address the concerns and curiosities of your ever-changing audience. Your company will be recognized for its expertise and considered a thought leader, so people will return to your resources to grow their knowledge and continue doing business with you. Stay Top-of-Mind With millions of good ideas on the internet, it can be tough to stay top-of-mind. Commit to enhancing your social media presence with new and improved strategies for success. This is a quick way for your audience to digest snippets of information and get familiar with your company. Plus, any opportunity to promote content and the solutions you offer is a good opportunity. Craft and Tell Your Brand Story Another way to stay at the forefront of your target audience’s mind is staying consistent with branding. People know the Nike swoosh and Coca-Cola’s script anywhere. To stay top-of-mind, you will want to establish a strong and consistent brand story so your audience begins to recognize and trust you. Establish A One-to-One Relationship Thanks to technology, there are more ways to engage in conversation online than ever before. Through chatbots, emails, and social media, one-to-one customer service ensures the satisfaction of individual purchases and creates a foundation for long-term relationships with everyone who engages with your brand. Use Empathy You need to market and sell stuff but the best way to do this is through a solid focus on your prospects’ needs first. That is the best way to meet marketing and revenue goals. Being empathetic shows your audience you care about them. Wrapping Up Whether your company is a start-up looking to gain traction or a company that has dominated the market for generations, getting and keeping attention is an objective that can never be overlooked. Determine the value you bring to the table that no other company brings, and then produce clear, concise, and creative content for the people who benefit the most from what you offer. Need help attracting and retaining your audience’s attention? We can help! Get in touch with us today to discover marketing strategies for building relationships with long-term value. Hamilton is one of only three top liberal arts colleges with an independent Oral Communication Center. In fact, students requested such a center. Recently, the faculty adopted a “speaking intensive” designation for courses that help students develop their oral presentation skills. At one level these may seem like ‘how long is a piece of string?’ questions, but, truth is: They’re really “I wouldn’t start from here’ questions. Before casting a thought to whether any talk is too long, always start by asking this: ‘What do you want to achieve with your speech?’ Just because you could hold the stage for a longer period of time doesn’t mean you should. Day in and day out, millions of potentially super presentations are wrecked by speakers who went on and on…And in the process, vital audience attention was squandered. And who can blame any audience if their attention wanders in the face of being bored out of their gourd? As John Andrew Holmes put it so nicely years ago: “When a sermon at length comes to an end, people rise and praise God, and they feel the same way after many other speeches!” True that. So, what should you do instead? Forget speech length calculations, think about this firstDon’t worry about how many words you can share in 10 minutes, 30 minutes, etc. Instead, devote serious energy to figuring out how you plan to engage your audiences emotionally at the outset of your speech, again and again during your talk, and in your closing. Why? Because every decision you make as a human – including when you choose to pay attention – is triggered by an emotional reaction. And without winning and keeping audience attention, your chances of inspiring engagement, recall, and action from your talks will fall off a cliff! But there’s a snag here. How do you strike a balance between emotional resonance and the facts/information you feel you need to share during any given talk…especially if you have plenty to say? What’s the 10-minute rule and how does it affect audience attention?While there’s no hard and fast rule on how long a speaker can hold an audience’s attention… …You can learn something from the reason TEDx talks are so popular on YouTube. It because each talk is focused on a single, interesting idea and is delivered in a succinct and very story-centric fashion. But even the TEDx talks – reflecting the fact it’s getting harder and harder to hold anyone’s attention for a long time online – have been reduced from an average of 18 minutes when they started 10 years ago to closer to 10 minutes today. And, interestingly, that 10 minutes also happens to be the sweet-spot video length for the most popular ‘how-to’ tutorial videos on YouTube today too. So that’s instructive, right? But what happens if 10 minutes won’t cut it for you and you’re expected to speak for 20, 30, 40 or even 60 minutes? Now what? How do you keep your audience engaged? Enter some really sage advice from academic and author of Brain Rules John Medina who argues that it pays to break any speech into a collection of discrete 10-minute segments while keeping the following in mind: “Each segment covers a single core concept – always large, always general, always filled with ‘gist’, and always explainable in one minute.” Use emotional jump leads to keep audiences at the edges of their seatsHe quite rightly says he has to recapture his audience’s attention after every ten minutes and earn the right to be heard for another 600 seconds. How? With emotional jump leads. Come up with new hooks for each segment of your speech – which you use to jump-start your audience by tapping afresh into their emotions and helping them to feel something. Keep reinvigorating your audience. Stories that have a point are a great way to accomplish this. FYI – Without emotional jump leads every now and then, there’s a good chance your audience will check out and as a peer in the US likes to say ‘take a mental voyage on which you, the speaker, are not invited’. And the longer your audience is not focused on what you say, the more likely they won’t remember what they heard before they zoned out. No matter how long you speak, don’t ask audiences to multi-taskBut beware – as mentioned in previous articles – limit yourself to just one central theme for a speech, regardless of how long you speak for. Don’t ask your audience to multi-task by remembering too many things. They can’t and won’t remember multiple messages. So, if you’re speaking for more than 10 minutes… …make sure each segment to your speech is related and builds logically from what you’ve said before – reinforcing, developing and complementing what you want your audience to take from your speech. Why is it important to keep your audience attention?You must gain the audience's attention and interest the moment you walk on the stage. Without that attention, you won't get your message across, you'll have trouble sustaining whatever interest there is, and you won't have established your leadership and control - the keys to being a powerful speaker.
What is the most important factor when connecting with an audience?If you're going to connect with your audience, then you need to have a good, rough idea of who they are. Typically, it might be a great idea to learn the demographics of your target audience and update that information frequently. This way, you can develop marketing strategies to help you connect with your audience.
Why is knowing your audience an important part of capturing and maintaining their attention?Why is it important to know your audience? Knowing your audience helps you figure out what content and messages people care about. Once you have an idea of what to say, knowing your audience also tells you the appropriate tone and voice for your message.
What is the most direct method of getting audience attention?The first attention-getting method to consider is to tell your audience the subject of your speech. This device is probably the most direct, but it may also be the least interesting of the possible attention-getters.
|
