Humans now have a shorter attention span than goldfish, how can you capture your markets attention a

With the overcrowding of the world, comes an overcrowded space for entrepreneurs and businesses. Almost every market is taken, saturated and most have a clear market leader. 

So as a new business or new market entry, how do you get noticed? You need to be different. You need to be disruptive. You need to set yourself aside from everyone else.

A lot of industries today are in a red ocean, few blue oceans exist today and the ones that do appear, soon turn into red ocean's when competitors follow suit. It is a cut throat, dog eat dog world out there, and if you are not doing something original, if you are not adapting, someone is and they are ready to take your market. So how do you set yourself aside, how do you get noticed in your red ocean?

You need to clearly stand out from your competitors, have a look at everything your competitor is doing and do something different. Don’t imitate or try and follow suit, it’s all about distinguishing yourself as something different, something unique and most importantly something that will make you stand out from the rest. Of course, area's they are succeeding in, don't imitate but adapt and improve. It’s not as much about the marketing you do today but the stories you tell, the way you tell them and where you tell them. 

Marketing has changed for ever with the Internet boom, the technological boom and now the social boom. There are new business popping up left right and centre. 

So how do you stand out? How do you be disruptive? You need to portray your unique message and benefits in an unthought-of way. You need to think out of the box and you need to be the purple cow, you need to try and create that blue ocean.  

It’s just not good enough to be the same. You need to, Think BIG. Think Different. You need to be excelling in all forms of media and regularly, you need to be remembered and first, if not someone else will be. You need to catch attention before even thinking that your customers are going to listen to your message. The world is noisy and you need to be the loudest, you need to be the clearest and your message needs to be remembered. 

Good marketing is no accident. Marketing today is both an art and a science, it is the result of planning, execution and state-of-the-art tools and techniques.

So how do you catch attention, be remembered and first? You need a creative content strategy, content so good, so clearly defined, branded with a unique message that it’s hard not to remember or shared. You need to clearly define what it is the general percentage of you market is currently doing and do the compete opposite, this is the only way you are ever going to truly separate yourself from the norm and stand out.  

Marketing is about identifying and meeting human and social needs. Once you have done this, you need attention grabbing content, video, photo and blogs, so much highly developed content that it spreads itself, marketing that spreads, it's marketing that's essentially free. 

Grab the attention of your market before you even portray any information about what it is you do. This is key. The attention span is at the lowest it’s ever been and it’s only going to get lower. It current stands at 8 seconds. If you can captivate audience’s attention within 3 seconds and keep it for the next 5. You are already half way there. Grab the attention and keep it. 

At present, on social media especially, video is the best way to portray your message quickly and effectively. Video drives engagement and encourages users to buy, as we seen in the past 6 months alone Facebook video views went up by over 600% and now there are now 8 billion video views daily on Facebook. Most of these views happen on mobile devices, because the mobile has become the consumers preferred way to access the internet. It is easy to scroll past video’s and content on Facebook, as we all know, a flick of the finger and it is gone. So, it is about the initial capturing of attention that needs to occur to stop your material being missed. As soon as the user has scrolled past and not fully listened or watched the message your portraying, it is basically a complete waste of resources, time and there literally no point in doing it in the first place.

So, what capture’s attention? What makes a consumer stop, pay attention and potential share? The most highly shared and engaged content at the moment on social media platforms such as Facebook is Food, lifestyle, home, business, tech and humour with Food snapping 52% and second lifestyle at 17%. From our initial research, what take's hold of the attention and then leads to shares; it is emotion, it is knowledge, it’s shock and its awe. If you hit each (or most) of these criteria in your video’s and portray your message in more of an educational way rather than telling someone or trying to persuade them it is more likely to succeed, be listened to and remembered. 

Another one to catch attention is playing on curiosity, curiosity is what made the human race what it is today, people are naturally curious, if you play on this in the first instance you will get someone’s attention. Let their brain do the work. Let them search out for the rest, there is a fine line between knowing and wanting to know. Hit the wanting to know and people will activley search for the answers. Try and think about the last video you shared, or the last one you remembered, what made this special, why did you share it?

Attention spans are getting lower, the world’s content production is getting higher, what can you do differently to be noticed? What can you do to stop your message being missed? Find out how we can help with creative direction, strategy and production to make you stand out from your competitors.