How to Catch Your Customers’ Attention Without Adding Frustrating Distractions to Their Day

The following is adapted from The Seventh Level.

Marketing to today’s busy customer is a delicate balancing act between catching their attention and frustrating them with distractions. If you’re not careful, your outreach efforts can easily slide into the frustrating category, leading to customers shutting your brand out entirely. 

In this article, I’ll explain how to navigate this balance and ensure that you’re leaving a positive impression that will further engage your audience rather than push them away.

The World Is Distracting Enough

Ever watch a video on your phone or tablet and an annoying ad pops up?

Personally, I hate when platforms do that. I recently watched a video on Facebook when suddenly an irrelevant ad began playing midway through that had no association with the content I was watching. “What the…? I didn’t want to see this!”

This is what I call frustrated engagement—when a customer wants to engage with your brand further, but something pulls their attention away.

This is the furthest thing away from connecting with a customer. It was a forced interaction and left me frustrated and annoyed instead of interested in learning more about the product. 

Advertisers think they’re being clever by forcing people to watch their ads, but instead they’re only irritating people and leaving a bad taste in their mouths. I ended up exiting out of the ad, which means I exited out of the video and never finished watching it.

Value Your Customers’ Attention and Time

To create effective and engaging content, you need to respect your customers’ time. My attention is valuable—as is yours and that of your audience. I am open to content that is relevant and connected to what I believe in and value. 

To get the best marketing results and connect with your audience in a meaningful way, you need to do three things:

• communicate with your customers in a way that makes sense
• don’t distract from what they’re trying to achieve (e.g. watch a video)
• stay consistent to your brand’s core values while aligning your content to speak to theirs

Following these guidelines might seem like a lot of work, but the other option is that customers constantly fall off because they’re frustrated. As media properties, it is crucial to think about a proper advertising strategy. Do not pop up something in the middle of content that is irrelevant and annoying to the wrong audience.

Hitting the Right Attention-Catching Notes

In addition to following the guidelines above, you can take several other practical steps to make your media more appealing to customers. 

When a customer gets to your website, make sure it doesn’t take too long to load. Or when a customer is asked to go to a landing page, make sure the pop-up you add to that page is relevant to what you’re asking them to do and why they’re there.

Social media, in general, leaves us distracted. You’re building an audience in the sense of creating your own user funnel, but it’s important to use the tools instead of letting the tools use you. If social media isn’t employed in a way that pushes your customer base to a higher level of engagement by encouraging a specific targeted action, you’re only hurting your messaging efforts.

Lastly, pay attention to the visual design of your website and other media properties. Ever find yourself falling asleep during a presentation? Chances are the deck has tons of words and very few visuals. These types of presentations don’t speak to anyone and herein lies the importance of branding. 

Thoughtful, appropriate design, iconography, and visuals can help get your message across in a way that is easily digestible, which will help you combat frustrated engagement brought on by tedious, text-heavy slides.

Approach everything you put in front of customers and ask, “Is this frustrating?” If the answer is yes, take steps to reduce pop-ups, clarify your messaging, and clean up your designs. The world is distracting enough, and by being a positive, engaging presence in your audience’s day, you’ll turn frustrated consumers into fans of your brand. 

For more advice on marketing your brand, you can find The Seventh Level on Amazon.

Amanda Slavin is the founder and CEO of the award-winning brand consulting firm CatalystCreativ. Amanda guides brands like Coca-Cola, Google, and Hubspot to do good for the world without having to sacrifice their bottom line. To do this, she utilizes her proprietary method for quantifying and scaling engagement known as the Seventh Level Engagement Framework. She’s spoken at events like SXSW and TED about how this framework is the future of meaningful connection, and had her work featured in Inc. magazine, Forbes, Fast Company, Wall Street Journal, and Time magazine.