Consumers’ lives are becoming increasingly digital – at work, home and everywhere in between – with news reduced to a few hundred characters or a sound bite and conversations condensed to emojis. All this loud, fast-paced and sometimes scary content means that consumer attention is becoming a scarce resource. But, all is not lost; people do still pay attention – under the right conditions. To get their attention, marketing must evolve, and brands need to find different, more creative and increasingly immersive ways to market themselves and engage consumers who are increasingly hungry for something new. So how can brands hijack consumer attention and keep it. According to a study by Microsoft, they can do this by being clear, personal and relevant and getting to the point quickly. They could use rich media and movement to defy expectations and grab attention. Embedding calls to action, being interactive, using sequential messaging, and building cohesive, immersive experiences across screens could also capture people’s interest.
Did you know?
According to the same study by Microsoft, people generally lose concentration after 8 seconds, compared to 12 seconds only a few years ago; in other words, our attention span is less than the notoriously ill-focused goldfish’s 9 seconds.
