4 Simple Ways To Market To Short Attention Spans Online
Marketing to any audience requires grabbing (and holding) their attention long enough to get your message across. The problem is, today’s internet users have a short attention span and even shorter patience. If you don’t capture attention fast, you risk losing potential customers before you’ve had a chance to deliver your message.
Infographics have become a popular form of marketing in recent years because graphics make it easy to absorb a large amount of information at once. However, you can’t rely on infographics for everything.
Here are two ways to bring your A-game to your digital marketing strategy and capture your market’s attention:
1. Refine your attention-grabbing methods
According to an article on cellphone addiction, 95% of U.S. teens have access to a smartphone, and 45% of teenagers claim they’re “online constantly.” While the majority of your market probably has a smartphone in their pocket, that doesn’t mean they’re easy to reach.
The problem with smartphone addiction is that people mindlessly jump from one thing to the next, and they’re not always paying attention to what they’re looking at. It’s not enough to simply capture a user’s interest. They need a reason to abandon all other distractions and give you their full attention.
The easiest way to accomplish this is by offering a significant discount in your ad. Free shipping might not be enough, but a 20% off code might just do the trick. Even if they don’t know what you’re selling, they’ll check out a good deal.
2. Avoid gimmicky attention-grabbing
It’s easy to grab attention with shocking images or titles, but that won’t last long. Unless your content is pure entertainment, this is a bad idea.
Make sure your attention-grabbing ads are related to the content on the ad’s target page. Don’t post Facebook ads with images of cats being silly and send people to a page selling a course on affiliate marketing.
3. Make your ads memorable
Your ads should be memorable so that when a person puts their phone away, they’ll remember your brand and look for you again.
4. Focus on website performance
Multiple studies have confirmed the connection between slow websites and bounce rates. One Google study found 53% of mobile visitors leave a page that takes more than three seconds to load. If your website doesn’t load fast enough, you can’t even get your message in front of your audience.
What makes a website load fast depends on multiple factors, some of which you can control.
The factors within your control
Your website will load differently for each user, depending on a variety of factors like their internet speed, their device hardware and software, the speed of your web server resources, and how your site is built.
Let’s start with the factors on the user’s side:
- The user’s device. You can’t control this factor directly, but you can adjust your website to accommodate less powerful devices.
When a user’s device is limited by its software and hardware, you can create multiple versions of your website that will automatically load based on the user’s device. Although, if you need to go to great lengths to make your site work for mobile users, your entire website probably needs an overhaul.
- Your web server resources. A web server is a computer just like the one you’re using to read this article. A web server uses standard resources like a processor, memory, and bandwidth to deliver your website to your visitors. Too much traffic can cause your site to load slowly or go down.
Dedicated cloud hosting is more suitable for high volume e-commerce sites because it will scale resources on demand as needed. A shared hosting plan won’t, and when your traffic spikes, your site will just crash.
- How your site is built. Unoptimized content – specifically images – are the primary culprit for slow loading pages. Uploading full sized images and then resizing them with HTML forces the user to load the entire image. Images should be resized and optimized before being uploaded to your server.
Attention is everything
You can’t market a message if you can’t get someone’s attention first. These four simple strategies will help you grab and hold your market’s attention so you can deliver your brand’s message.