What do you want?
Or, rather, what does your content aim to achieve?
Sell more stuff, probably.
And to do that, you need clicks, leads, meetings booked, inquiries, demos… and then sales.
But you can’t do any of those things without first getting this one thing right.
Demanding attention.
And B2B marketers are getting attention wrong.
As a metric, attention is used widely (and to great success) in our industry. The problem is, by the time we come to measure it, we’re often too late.
Why does this happen?
It’s all well and good knowing how much attention an ad received. But a focus on attention needs to be part of the briefing, strategy, and goal-setting process. Not just insights discovered in a review.
So, first, you’ve got to make attention a priority.
Then you can start asking questions like “Will this work turn heads?”, “Will it be memorable — long-term?”, and “How much mental real estate can we achieve with this?”.
For marketing teams looking to answer these questions, here are four ways your next campaign can make your audience stand to attention.
Step 1: Make it about your audience.
The B2B industry has a tendency to come across as that one person at a party who only ever talks about themselves (yawn).
To overcome that, and to get your audience on board, you’ve got to make them the center of the story. Your content has to shout “Hey, you! You’re in this story!” — otherwise your “industry-leading solutions” will be met with a big, fat “meh”.
Step 2: Ensure your content gets to the point.
It seems like you only hear people talk about attention when they’re saying, “Everyone’s attention spans are getting shorter”.
While the accuracy of that rhetoric is highly contested, the universal truth remains: No one’s got time for you to tell them things they already know.
“In today’s evolving digital landscape…” — yuck.
If you’ve got something exciting and novel to say, then get out there and say it.
Cut to the chase.
And please, focus on one message at a time. You might want to share 100 different facts about your product and show the wealth of knowledge your team has cultivated. But focusing on one clear message will always be more powerful than 100 unclear ones.
Communicating one idea with clarity and precision takes bravery. But, when it comes to marketing, bravery usually pays off.
Step 3: Focus on an emotional truth.
Even our unfeeling overlord, ChatGPT, will tell you that people buy with emotion and justify that purchase with facts.
Yes, even in the world of B2B. We don’t just shed our human skin when we walk into the office. We’re still driven by a fear of being left behind, the desire for a promotion, or a longing to get home to our families sooner.
By creating work with real human emotion at its heart— focusing on your audience’s desires and fears — you can get their attention. That’s far more effective than leading with the fact that your solution is 0.001% faster than the competition (a great feature, but you can get to it later).
Step 4: Make it surprising.
So much of today’s B2B content looks and feels the same. Similar creative direction, tone of voice… and even content type.
And this sameness risks a huge portion of your audience automatically switching off as soon as they see it.
When you make your work surprising, you’ll stop your audience in their tracks. Surprise demands attention. Surprising doesn’t have to be silly — it just has to be a bit different. Whether that’s an unusual word in a headline, a creative direction that subverts an industry convention — it’s up to you and your brand!
Start by making them stop.
When you set out to capture your audience’s attention, everything else — website traffic, brand recognition, revenue targets — tends to fall into place.
It doesn’t work the other way around.
And remember, attention isn’t something you buy. It’s something you earn.