4-Minute Read
How to Get (and Keep) Your Audience's Attention
Poor goldfish used to get such a bad rap for having short attention spans but it turns out we humans may have just been deflecting what we knew was inevitable … the decrease of our own attention spans. In fact, a recent study shows the length of our attention spans surpassed the goldfish’s 9 seconds to 8 seconds in just a few years. It really shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone as the majority of us have gravitated towards instant answers at any given moment, food deliveries at all hours of the day and “double-dipping” entertainment, i.e., watching a movie or tv show while scrolling on your phone.
With these behaviors becoming the norm, how can you manage to capture and maintain the attention of your audience, especially when presenting to prospective customers in a highly-competitive market?
Start Off With a Bang
With just 8 seconds to work with before attention wavers, the last thing you want to do is make your audience wait while your content loads.
If most of your content lives on your website, be sure to regularly check the page speed. Google’s PageSpeed Insights is a quick, easy and free program that will run diagnostics on your site and outline what elements are helping or hurting your page speed.
If you rely on presentations, think about what lives on that first slide. Is it just static text and a logo or two? How could you ramp it up to include movement or personalization? Or better yet, a way for your audience to engage with you or your brand while they wait for you to start? Even if your presentation or video only takes a few seconds to get going, you have to make those seconds count!
Show Rather Than Tell Stories
Some people are natural-born storytellers. Others can’t tell a joke without messing up the punchline. If words aren’t your things but your company has a compelling story, how can you share it in the most effective way possible?
In the last few years, the use of video content has significantly increased and has become the consumer’s favorite type of content to see from a brand on social media. And lucky for us, video production has gotten easier to execute, partially because overproduced videos are out and amateur, casual shots are in.
If you’ve never produced any video content, here are a few tips to consider before diving in:
- Especially when posting to social media, shorter is always better. Try to stay under 30 seconds for the best engagement.
- With that timeframe in mind, decide what your main objective is and get to it within the first 8 seconds
- Always include captions. How often are you scrolling with your volume off? Don’t lose viewers because you didn’t want to take this extra step
Don't Bait and Switch
Just because you now have your audience’s attention doesn’t mean you should take advantage of that time and pitch more than what was initially promised. The last thing you want to do is make them feel like they were lied to because you barely even touched on what they were expecting.
Stick to the point. You’ve only got a short period of time with them. Maximize that with as much information as possible in the most engaging way possible. We’ve all seen overcrowded Powerpoint slides with way too much text on them. How can you condense that information and focus on what’s really going to drive a decision?
Pop-ups and hover elements are two great ways to involve the audience AND include supplemental information that’s important but not necessarily the most important. These features are typically pretty easy to implement on most website platforms and in a select few presentation platforms.
If you’re still following along, we must have done something right to steal your attention for this long. Connect with us to see how DIGIDECK helps our clients capture and retain their audience’s attention.
P.S. DIGIDECK Interactive Sales Presentations:
- Entertain audiences immediately with customizable Loader Pages
- Allow for unlimited multimedia such as videos, immersive backgrounds, voiceovers, etc.
- Provide a quick and easy solution to overcrowded slides with Layout Manager
