4 Tips to Captivate Attention in a Crowded Market
Thanuj Gunawardana
B2B Sales | SaaS Marketing. Exploring the beauty of marketing and human psychology.
ATTENTION is the most precious thing you seek online for your business spending millions on advertising.
Keeping your viewer for 5 seconds to watch the video you made, spending a hundred thousand – or getting a like – a comment for your post on social media is becoming more and more difficult.
I heard someone says "the attention span of people online is shortening". Is it?
The same audience you thought was difficult to keep for 3 seconds, is watching "How to build a mud villa house in 100 days" at 2.00 AM on YouTube.
Do you still think the problem is with your audience?
The problem could be with your content.
What does your audience want to see?
In general, people like to watch and engage in the following things online:
These three types of content create the most engagement on social media on almost every platform. They are liked, commented on, and even shared by many. People tend to share this content publically on their social media or within friend circles in groups creating snowball effects. Most educational and inspirational content tends to be saved for future reference.
Now, if your business's Instagram account has 5000 followers and you got only 10 likes for the last video you uploaded – no comments – no saves – no social shares, don't scold the audience.
Check the Breaks
Do this exercise the next time you post something online.
I call this "check the breaks".
Before you post, check whether your video thumbnail or the post can stop the people who scroll down – test a couple of variations – ask your team and others.
Check the breaks before publishing every paid campaign – anything that you spend $s to create or promote should pass this test.
If you can't stop the scrolling of your audience and keep them interested in the first 3 seconds, the amount of money and effort you put into creating the rest of the content would be futile.
How important is the creative?
Most advertisers think the critical part of an online campaign is targeting or the keywords.
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It could be, for Google ads where you create ads for hot traffic – for people already actively searching for your product or the service.
But the priority on more visual platforms like Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok is different. Your ad creative plays a major role in attracting and keeping the viewers.
Not like in previous days, Meta's algorithm works really well in identifying the right audience even on autopilot – so focus on your creatives.
How to make noise in a crowded market
Though you get leads, if they don't know who you are when you call them, you're in a crowded market. You should remember, that your customer becomes a lead not only to you but to many other competitors at the same time.
To stand out in such a market, you need to create content that resonates with the audience who are in different stages of their buyer's journey.
I will take a simple example with Dubai's Real Estate market as I was analyzing it for the last couple of months – this is a great example of a crowded market.
The time you clicked your first ad on Facebook or did your first search on Google about real estate in Dubai, you'll start seeing many similar ads everywhere you go on the internet.
Here's the problem:
You searched for the keyword "Is Dubai a good place to live" on Google. Although this is a cold audience search, all the content and ads are geared toward getting your contact number and email – everyone is busy collecting leads.
However, you haven't even decided to invest in Dubai.
The right approach would have been to serve you content that answers your questions in the awareness stage:
These are the questions you should answer with your content and serve the audience at their awareness stage.
Follow up and gradually serve them the content relevant to the consideration and decision stage to convert them into customers.
Make them remember your brand by serving them CORRECT and AUTHENTIC content – develop a strong relationship throughout their buyer's journey.
Focus on brand awareness if you're building a BRAND – focus only on leads if you're just making a living out of your business.
Once, I attended an interview which was conducted by an owner of a luxury vehicle service business in Dubai. He said, "we need leads – brand awareness is BS". Such statements make us easy to draw a line between a business and a brand.