How to Get 10 x more Buyer Attention and Sell more online now

 

• The global Attention industry – from Netflix to sport to porn to business- has been falsely built on 8-second segments since 2015. The view – humans are saturated with excessive marketing content. We, therefore, only have an attention span of less than a goldfish of eight seconds – so worried was the NBA it considered shortening the game due to the shortening attention span of viewers.

• Now the most valuable asset in the world today is attention. Capturing more of your ideal buyer’s attention and engaging with them online is critical to selling more – critical now as most buyers no longer want to deal with humans in person when buying.

According to Natural Science, humans have considerably longer attention spans than goldfish.

 

Witness 1) Netflix tracks almost everything its viewers do. The global tracking tells Netflix that people pay attention to good movies and, on average, get to episode 4 in the first viewing ( nearly four hours of viewing)

Witness 2) Deloitte released a report saying that 73% of people binge-watched a show, meaning they consumed 5 hours of content in a single sitting. 

The following are the changes on how best to win more attention and engage with and sell more online due to the new research findings. 

There are different levels of attention:

 

Humans operate best when there is one action – sharing attention drops the brain’s ability to cope. 

We miss vital details with selective attention – sharing attention between different activities – driving and listening to a podcast, or browsing social media while watching TV in the background. 

Sustained attention – some things can inspire us. Or need us to focus and get into a deep work – a state of creative flow. Studying for exams or understanding complex issues can hold one’s attention for long periods.

Storytelling is the most reliable mechanism for maintaining attention — according to actual science.

Have you been watching a great movie – suddenly, noise in your house snaps you back to reality? You forgot you were sitting on your sofa watching a movie.

That feeling of being completely infatuated is called Immersion.

Scientists have observed that when more parts of our brains are active in particular ways, we pay more attention and encode more in memory. Immersive storytelling releases empathy-related chemicals, oxytocin, in our minds – a powerful drug. 

We remember, on average, 22x more when we tell a story than just traditional advertising. 

• A great story triggers the emotional centres of our brains so that we care enough to keep going. 
• Novelty triggers surprise, delight, and fascination.
• Stress triggers anxiety, curiosity, and longing.
• Relativity triggers empathy, nostalgia, and joy.
• Weave those things together; you capture attention for a long time.

When you tell your advertising like a great story, you increase the odds you are – memory encoding. 

Strategic narratives for business – a business’s strategic story – tell your strategy – your reason your ideal buyers should only buy from your business -like the best movies and books of all time. 

It is a simple formula – if you are going to the effort and cost to get your ideal buyer’s attention, you try to hold that attention for as long as possible. 

It puts your ideal buyers at the centre – the hero in their story. 

The purpose of a strategic narrative is not to tell your ideal buyers they are – doing it wrong (not considering buying from your business). It helps them make sense of a broader change – a suspicion they have that they need to do it differently. 

The best way to achieve this is to frame your offers as winners and losers – a business life and death event. It is about the new strategy that winners are adopting now. 

There are critical steps when constructing a strategic narrative and pitch for a business. 

 

1) A significant change in your buyer’s world – is going on now – from faint signals to an undeniable shift. It requires to Name the Shift or Name the Enemy. To achieve this, paint a picture of how the world currently sucks for your buyer, what is to blame, and why. 

Framing this as staying with the status quo (your competitors), you are on the road to nowhere – or worse, ruin. Other ways to frame this are 

• Winners and losers – there is an old game, now a new game, 
• Life and death – stick with your current providers; there is no future. 

2) Answer – why now: framed as a critical point – if you don’t act now – things will get — worse. 

3) Tease their promised land – to win now requires your business to play the new game. Ultimately every business is selling change. When announcing his new batteries, Elon Musk said we will now be a civilisation powered by “this handy fusion reactor in the sky, called the Sun.” 

4) Identify the obstacles and how your business overcomes them – having shared your businesses vision of the future with your ideal buyers shows how you will overcome their obstacles

5) Present evidence it works

The reason – Apple, Salesforce, Nike, Zuora and millions of highly successful businesses use strategic narratives is 

Online selling is selling to groups of people. B2C + DTC high-value products and services, its family, friends and online reviews. 

B2B includes diverse individuals with diverse problems and responsibilities. The only way to close a deal is to unite everyone in a common cause, a new shared mission or purpose that resonates with all of them and turns their problems into shared obstacles to winning. 

When you tell your advertising like a great story, you increase the odds you are – memory encoding. Less advertising repetition is needed – remembered by your ideal buyers 22x more on average. 

It works: because it captures your ideal buyer’s attention – immerses them in the same framework as the best-selling books and movies of all time. 

It replaces missions and vision statements that no one ever acted upon and replaces them with a new north star for the entire business that tells a bigger story than just your products and services. 

It is the CEO (sometimes board), not a marketing role: defining, championing and overseeing the build of a strategic narrative is a CEO role. It is the business’s strategy – its story. It gets everyone on your team aligned with your north star. Everyone tells the story – to investors, ideal buyers, new hires – it powers your business. 

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Regards 

David