The information age is dead.
That’s right, in a world where everyone has information at their fingertips customer attention is harder to capture and keep more than ever before.
Marketing through sheer volume of content simply doesn’t work towards building a successful business anymore.
Everyone, including your customers, are being bombarded by tons of media trying to capture their attention, the attention economy is here.
How do you get people’s attention anymore?
What I’m going to share with you is going to separate you from the crowd of people who are still stuck in the mindset of the information age and bring you up to speed into the new world of attention marketing.
It’s time to step away from the information age approach and move into the new realm of the attention marketing where successful marketing has shifted to. I’m going to reveal to you what it takes to get your customers attention and how to keep it for life.
Let’s dive in!
Why the Information Age Used to Be Successful
If you'd prefer to listen to this content from the video above, play it or download it from the podcast episode below.
The information age was an incredible world to step into.
Never before have we had libraries of information at our fingertips with unlimited potentials for learning and connecting with the world.
It didn’t take long for online content to proliferate at the rate it is today.
When there weren’t the vast numbers of content creators and business entrepreneurs, the world wide web held nothing but opportunities. When people put out content, it was readily picked up and people were able to easily find it.
Now, there are hundreds of new eBooks coming in, thousands of YouTube videos being uploaded, and an endless supply of photos and status updates on every social media platform you can think of.
With information being so ubiquitous a phenomena is occurring, impacting the lives of countless people across the globe.
People are glued to their phones.
This phenomena is so wide spread that laws have been created against being on your phone while driving and signs put up in cities where people have literally fallen into manholes because they were looking at their phones while walking.
Your audience is more distracted than ever and the information age isn’t actually capturing customer attention at all. It’s just a quick scroll, a like, short read and then people move on. There’s really not much attention going on.
This is why the information age no longer rules because there’s SO much information out there, capturing customer attention is extremely difficult.
It’s time to ask yourself, what is my marketing strategy? Because staying in this realm of the information age means you’ll lose... winning in the online business game means understanding where your customers are going, what they’re really after and what you have to offer to bring solutions to what they’re searching for.
Attention Marketing Moment of Truth
You have to ask yourself, are you stuck in the information age as an internet marketer?
Whether you’re building a business brand or a personal brand let’s have a moment of truth.
Are you churning out personal content because you’ve heard content is the fuel that drives the internet engine?
Or, are you assigning virtual assistants or another team tasks to create content because you think you just need more content to gain customer attention?
You have to understand that in order to make this shift to attention marketing that the information is already there, what your customers are looking for is something entirely different.
The Attention Marketing Definition
So what’s attention marketing all about then? How can you meet your audience’s needs and get the customer attention you’ve been wanting?
Attention marketing is a marketing approach that shows that you as an entrepreneur honor and value your customers time and see it as the commodity it is.
It’s also referenced to as the attention economy because real customer attention is the new success strategy.
"Attention economics treats a potential consumer's attention as a resource." [1]
So if more content isn’t the answer, then how do you attract and hold attention from such a distracted audience?
By using my three fundamentals below... check em out.
The Perfect Formula to Attract and Keep Customer Attention
Through this transition from the information age to attention marketing, you’re going to find yourself in a completely different position.
There are three fundamental phases of attracting and maintaining customer attention and with the ever growing plethora of information out there, there’s no other way to do it my friend.
They are grab, hold, and maintain your customers attention.
1. Attract Customer Attention Fast
First, you have to actually capture customer attention and this might be a surprise but you have 2 seconds to do it.
When your audience is scrolling through a search engine, scrolling their Facebook feed they’re looking for words that stand out to them. This is selective attention, where your audience is only going to have their radar on for certain words and images.
So where exactly are your customers looking?
They’re looking directly at your headlines.
Your words matter in attracting customer attention, big time. Now the cool thing about making up your headlines is that old school headlines repurposed for today’s topics still work to grab customer attention like gangbusters.
That’s because core human needs haven’t changed.
Kathy wants to lose weight, Joe wants to gain weight, Sarah doesn’t feel pretty enough, Mark can’t sleep at night, Ryan wants a better connection during sex, Jamie wants to look younger…
It’s the same basic needs as 20, 60, 100 years ago...
The difference between then and now is, distraction are everywhere!
So make your headlines powerful and thoughtful and take the time to understand how human psychology works because you only have 2 seconds to capture customer attention.
It’s a marketers job to learn about your audience’s wants, needs and desires.
2. Hold Your Customer’s Attention
After you’ve sparked someone’s curiosity and gained customer attention with your awesome headlines, you’re not in the clear yet. It only takes 2 seconds to hook your audience in with your idea but that doesn’t mean they’ve decided to stick around throughout your whole piece of content.
You have 20 seconds to get them engaged with your piece content, engaged in your fantastic opt-in page, and hold your customers attention.
It doesn’t take very long at all for your audience to decide whether they’re going to get value by consuming the rest of your content or going through your sales funnel.
When you capture your customers attention past the 20 second mark, they’re less likely to bounce off the page.
You need to start your content out strong, communicating the value of what you have to offer right off the bat, that goes for written content, video marketing, and all other types of content.
This is why you need to keep your optin pages clean and super concise.
If you’ve captured their attention in those few seconds, you now need to honor it. Because grabbing attention is just that and alone, it will not keep their attention.
This is the time to deliver the goods.
3. Earn And Keep Customer Attention For Life
Content is not king if it carries no value for your audience.
If you want to keep customer attention they need to know, like and trust you, this is key to successful marketing online.
Joseph Campbell presented this concept called The Hero’s Journey, and Russell Brunson calls it building an “Attractive Character”.
After you capture and keep customer attention through one piece of content, or they opt in to your email list, here are two fundamentals to continue to earn customer attention and make money from your customers for life.
A. Build a Relationship You Can Be Proud Of
You need to BUILD A RELATIONSHIP with your audience and that’s best done when it’s coming from you personally with authenticity.
Communicate with your audience.
Give them your personal story, step up your email marketing game giving them updates and content that has value.
“You need to really work your tail off to build a relationship with every single subscriber with your attractive character.”
This is what my wife has been doing since day one in her business.
She sends personalized emails and updates, shares helpful tips…
Her Facebook page is one of the few pages that still get great engagement without boosting posts.
Her email list is conditioned to open her emails giving her the opportunity to offer her many niche products.
She sends valuable pieces of advice to people in her list on how to use meditation in this day and age to maintain peace of mind and stay centered when the things around them aren’t going well.
B. Keep Up With What Your Audience Wants
Make sure you take the time to find out what your audience wants.
Doing the market research will help to guide you with what you’re going to present to your audience next. Long term success requires you to grow with your audience.
Ask them directly what kind of content they’d like to see next.
Or, you can use Google trends to project what direction you should be moving your content towards in the future.
Sustaining customer attention is about continuing to provide value to them.
Three Places to Implement Attention Marketing and Keeping Customer Attention
Let’s look at 3 ways you can implement attention marketing.
Sales funnel
You don’t need anything fancy to capture your customers attention with your funnel.
Cut the flair and the non-essentials and make it simple.
You want to design it in such a way that your target audience sees your free gift, free course, free eBook or whatever you’re giving away right away.
Through years of testing my sales funnel template, simple clear and concise is the way to make them successful.
You need to show them you value their time so get in get out, done. Show them what you’re offering and then deliver.
Make it worth them giving you their email address or they’ll just shrug and bounce.
Like these million dollar optin pages.
Whatever your free offer is, put you into it. Put thought and heart in it and give them something valuable. This is the first moment of attention you will deliver to them, make it a lead magnet that provides an experience!
Email marketing
When it comes to email marketing, it’s 100% about giving so much more than what you’re asking for in return.
You don't want to be that guy that people dread seeing in their inbox or gets put into the spam folder because you’re poking people and it’s obvious you don’t care about what they want at all.
Capture your customers attention with a great headline then give your audience tips, tricks, and updates that connect you on that relational level.
Implement the give, give, give, ask formula, the true success of email marketing.
Throughout the week, they’ll be happy to open your emails if you have something to give them that makes their day or lives better.
Then will be conditioned to opening your emails, even ones that have offers in them!
They’ll be on open autopilot.
That’s the kind of marketer you want to be.
Here’s a deep dive in establishing this in your automated email campaigns.
Content marketing
This is where you get to connect with the perfect customer for you.
That’s the beauty of creating content online, you’re putting out what you have to offer, and those that vibe with you, stay. Those that don’t won’t and that’s okay, because you can’t be someone you’re not.
If you’re blogging, give your content substance, and satisfy every major question they might have ruminating in their minds in regards to your blog post topic.
If you’re doing YouTube videos, deliver what you say you will deliver in your video titles while honoring the time (attention) they are giving you.
Whether you’re creating videos, blogging or doing a podcast (here’s the easier content marketing strategy to do all 3!) the most important thing is that your content is authentically you and helps your perfect avatars day.
How to Know When You’re Nailing It
When you receive comments that say things like…
“I know this gets old me saying this, but you are a reference to me. If I need help with some marketing I always search something like "Miles Beckler google analytics" or something similar. I'm sure you know you have an AMAZING content-enriched library on YouTube.”
This is a real comment from a person I’ve built a reputation and relationship with over time. And I can’t tell you how rewarding it is to know that I can be of service to help people.
Here’s a free 7-step course to crush this attention game.
When people do a site search for a question, a youtube search with your name and a couple of keywords, a google search, things will be a little different for you. And that’s where you will be when you dial in this successful attention marketing strategy.
It doesn’t happen overnight and you need to work hard, but it’s real and it’s long term success.
Make The Shift To Attention Marketing and Create Customers For Life
By shifting your approach to attention marketing, you’re grabbing customer attention, holding customer attention, and sustaining customer attention.
Consistent content definitely makes sense but instead of just creating content to fill up your Facebook page or feed the google spiders, you give something of value that is worthy of your customers attention and their time.
Get and keep your customers attention by understanding the Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs, the 2 second rule, and offer value that carries them through the 20 second rule.
Maintain customer attention by building and establishing a trustworthy character, and strengthening your relationship with them.
Attention marketing is the strategic shift you need to implement to go from the dead information age to the new era, the attention economy.
