What’s Driving Consumer Attention?

The era of interruption based marketing has passed. All hail the new king, Content Marketing!

Creating interest, awareness, and ultimately adoption before someone even knows they want your product or service is the new marketing process. Sounds a little big brother-ish but bear with me here because getting consumer attention is different now.

The idea of making your audience stop what they’re doing, concentrate/look at a screen, and then listen to and process your pitch in this day-and-age is almost laughable. Customers, no check that, people, in general, are just too busy, they’re on compressed schedules, and they’re pulled in so many different directions the hackneyed analogy of an octopus is trite.

So if you want to interrupt them and demand consumer attention to your pitch in order for them to buy you widget? Just doesn’t work. Worse, it means that you’re starting out with a mark against you, and that is hard to recover from in sales. Think dinner time phone calls. New marketers know that putting content out for a potential customer to find is the way to win the day since it will ultimately bring them back to your site and convert them into a sale.

I am not trying to trivialize the buying process but think about how you buy anything now-a-days and you’ll wind up seeing things for what they are. A companies offerings are being bought/adopted on the customers/consumers timeline. If you’re smart you’ll have your selling points out there already and waiting to be picked-up and studied and used in the decision making process. Content Marketing is about curating knowledge, anticipating desire, allowing the customer time to adopt, and then become a brand champion.

Stop for a moment, how do you buy any major product (something over a few hundred dollars) now-a-days, what are the steps you take? If you’re like most people here’s those steps:

1. You do a search engine query
2. You identify all the different brands for the item
3. Locate the stores where they’re sold
4. Read the spec’s on the item via store pages or the manufacturers web site
5. Digest the reviews and take note of the ratings both positive and negative
6. Talk to your friends who own one of the items you’re considering via social media
7. Compare price points on a SERP
8. Narrow the list and… Tah-dah! You buy the item.

You are an informed consumer who bought the best possible item for you or your companies needs. All of these steps can be done in the space of a few hours facilitated by browsers, blogs, social, and micro-sites… AKA Content Marketing.

Interruption based marketing is about brutal time sapping rudeness that eventually wears the viewer down through repetition. Resulting sometimes in a sale, they buy the brand but don’t know why, “klaatu barada nikto” anyone? Content Marketing is about curating a desire, allowing the customer time to understand, decide, and then adopt. Your customers become brand champions, loyal to your product and defenders of it. I don’t know about you but that outcome is far more desirable than mindless adoption.

I firmly believe in this new approach, in my opinion print is only for very specific situations and will, in a very short period of time, vanish.  Broadcast quality is no longer the arbiter of what appears on a screen, if cat videos are what people want to watch filmed on a cell phone then we’re all Louis B. Mayer.

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