By Nancy Harhut (Chief Creative Officer)
Goldfish. My most important marketing lesson of the past year came to me from goldfish. Well, more accurately, through the National Center for Biotechnology Information’s (NCBI) study of goldfish.
Indeed, the NCBI reported that the attention span of goldfish came in at nine seconds in 2015, eclipsing the human attention span by .75 seconds.
That’s right. The human attention span is merely 8.25 seconds, while the goldfish is nine. And, honestly, I’m not sure how the NCBI measures the attention span of goldfish. But that wasn’t the lesson that I learned from obtaining this information.
What I learned is that it’s increasingly challenging to capture and maintain the attention of the people that we target with our marketing messages. Consider that the human attention span was a whopping 12 seconds in the year 2000, i.e. human’s need more immediate stimulation to stay engaged today.
As such, if we don’t have our target’s attention, how will we ever get them to do what we want them to do?
It’s true we use data-driven strategies, create personalized experiences and reach out to our targets in the channels of their choice. But reaching out to them and actually resonating with them are two very different, well, kettles of fish.
The latter requires an understanding of how people make decisions. How they decide what to read, what to buy, and who to trust. A good deal of scientific research shows these decisions often happen reflexively. People cruise along on auto-pilot, defaulting to certain hard-wired behaviors that get them through the day.
Scientists say humans developed these hardwired behaviors as a way to conserve mental energy. Essentially our brains don’t like the work of rational, conscious thinking.
So capturing and maintaining a target’s attention means taking into account these hardwired behaviors.
It means understanding fundamental facts about humans such as that they are more motivated to avoid pain than to achieve gain, that they usually prefer middle options to those at either extreme or that their eyes are drawn to faces over anything else.
As well, people are more likely to trust messages which contain phrases that rhyme, text accompanied by a chart, and information they think isn’t widely available.
These are just some of the findings from the emerging field of decision science. And what I’ve discovered is that applying them to my marketing strategy increases the likelihood of my target audience engaging with my brand.
This piece was originally published on The Mad Marketer.
Learn how to get your target’s attention (and keep it) in our white paper, Harnessing Human Behavior To Increase Marketing Effectiveness.
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