How to capture an audience with decreasing attention span

Do you think people's attention span is decreasing? If you answered yes, maybe because of watching other people or possibly due to self-insight into your own habits, you are on the right track. Here are some high level stats:

• Our attention span has decreased from 12 seconds to 8.25 seconds (a goldfish has about 9 seconds of focus).
• People only watch an average of 2.7 minutes of a video.
• An average knowledge worker will check their email 30 times per hour and pick up her phone more than 1500 times per week.

Though the stats are bleak, instead of looking at it as our attention span decreasing, we should look at it as their consideration span is decreasing, which would be a normal adaptation to being exposed to more and more content. If something is interesting, we stay and learn more. If it isn't, we leave and look for something that we're interested in that captures our attention.

Instead of looking at it as decreasing attention spans, we should look at it as decreasing consideration spans

So how can you leverage this to your advantage? How can you get through to your customers better than your competitors?

You have to learn how to capture. How to draw people in. How to tell stories. How to provide value without necessarily expecting anything in return. How to lay the content bread crumbs leading to the gingerbread house (if you've ever read Hansel and Gretel). Because let's face it, most content produced today does the exact opposite of that!

Start with putting yourself in your audience shoes. What would they like to see? My guess is they don't care about your features. They don't want to watch long boring presentations. They want you to solve their problems for them. They want you to show them what life will look like after working with you. They want to know you understand the pains and challenges they are going through right now.

Next is the format - you now know you need to capture their attention quickly, or else you're lost to the scroll. In the good old days, we had time to slowly build a story to finally hit the crescendo at the end. To be successful today you need to reverse it. Give away the goods as early on as you can, then build from there. You need to land your point within the first couple of seconds, since you may not get more time than that.

Lastly, test, test, test. In a world of data, you have all the opportunity to test different formats to different audiences and relatively quickly. The speed at which you adapt is going to be a key determining factor in your success.

How are you capturing your audiences' attention?