12 Strategies for Capturing Customer Attention in Marketing

It’s no shocker that the modern-day consumer sees a lot of ads.

The actual number of ads the average consumer is exposed to —  5,000 ads a day. — is alarming, to say the least. This data includes everything from emails and social media posts. With all of this content, it’s easy for potential customers to forget and move on from any brand they see online. That means if you don’t hook people with your message or content in seconds, you’ll lose them. 

It’s no wonder smart marketers are hyper-focusing on captivating their audience’s attention at all costs. Consistent, quality marketing results are unlikely to happen without it. 

Let’s take a closer look at strategies that will help you capture customer attention and keep it. 

1. Understand Your Customers With Detailed Research

The first step in getting your customers’ attention is understanding every aspect of their identity, their behavior, and what they’re drawn to. When you understand what captures their attention, you can provide it. 

Start with Detailed Research 

Demographic information is just the start of what you need to know about your customers to capture their attention. You need to dig deep into their behaviors, personality, and how they think. You need to understand what kind of content they’re attracted to and the brands they’re loyal to — among other information. 

You can research your customers in various ways. Start with any data you’ve collected on your customers through your digital marketing channels. 

Organize it in a central system so that it’s easier for you to analyze. If you’ve set up your analytics tools to pull insights for you, even better. Create a folder specifically for data about how to capture customer attention and add to it as you learn. 

Social media is another good place to learn about people. You can look at brands with a similar target audience and see how they’re conducting themselves on these platforms. Make notes about their comments, the content they share, and which messages they’re resonating with most. 

It’s also important to talk to your customers. Get information about them from them. You could send out surveys and polls to make this happen. Focus groups can be effective, and so can one-to-one conversations via email or phone. 

Continuous customer research is the key to understanding what your customers want and what captures their attention. 

2. Create Customer Personas

Customer personas are fictional representations of different kinds of people in your target audience. These detailed profiles help you organize and comprehend the customer data you’ve collected. You can also refer to them when you're creating content and other marketing materials to ensure you’re creating something that would appeal to your ideal customers. 

Your customer personas should include the following details:

• A fictional name

• Buyer motivations

• The pain points they’re dealing with

• Demographic information like age, gender, marital status, and income

• Intimate details about the persona, like their personality, behaviors, lifestyle, and passions

Fill in customer persona details almost like you would a dating profile. Having this information on hand helps because you can create content that speaks to who they are and what they’re going through, increasing the chances of getting their attention and keeping it. 

3. Map Out the Customer Journey 

Even if you’re wanting to improve your attention-grabbing tactics, you most likely have had successful strategies in the past. To find which ones worked the best and which ones may have warded off potential customers, you must look at the customer journey. 

Pinpoint every touchpoint a customer has with your brand up until they make a purchase. For instance, maybe they’re introduced to your business through a video ad on social media. Then, they click the link in your bio to go to your website. They visit your blog and product pages and sign up for your email list. After a few personalized emails, they finally make a purchase. 

Along with the path a customer takes to purchase, you also want to note which marketing campaigns or content they came into contact with that persuaded them to move forward in their journey. Keeping with the above example, that would be your video ad, your blog content, a landing page for your email list, and an email marketing campaign. 

The customer journey coupled with continuous research and customer personas will give you a well-rounded picture of who your customers are and how to best reach them. 

4. Define A Distinctive Brand Story

A huge part of getting your customers’ attention is how solid your brand is. Great content may be enough to get a person’s attention. However, your brand will keep that person’s attention and turn them into a loyal advocate. 

What’s the reason you created your brand in the first place? What’s your mission? How do you want to help customers? Answering questions like these will help you develop your brand’s story. 

People want to know the who, what, when, where, and why behind your brand to see if it aligns with their core values. If it does, you’re more likely to get their attention and keep it. 

5. Carve Out Your Brand’s Visual identity 

Your brand’s visual identity is a huge factor in capturing customer attention. Before they ever come across your content, it could be your logo that gets them or your bold color scheme. Address the following to pull together a captivating visual brand identity:

• The typography you’ll use; 

• A logo and slogan that portray your brand’s values and personality; 

• The overall color scheme that you’ll use across your marketing channels and content; 

• How you’ll ensure your visual identity is consistent across all platforms.

Make sure your visual identity isn’t just something you like, but something that your customers will deem compelling. 

6. Work On Your Brand’s Personality as Well

You’ve got your brand story and visual identity defined. But what about your brand’s personality? 

While your brand story is the narrative of how your business came to be and your visual identity focuses on how your brand is visually displayed, your brand’s personality is the set of characteristics that make your brand more human. Being quirky and funny or controversial and bold are good examples of the characteristics used to define a brand’s personality. 

How exactly do you want to come across to customers?

For example, if you’re in the business-to-business (B2B) sector, selling to high-profile business people, a professional, straightforward brand personality would be a good direction to go. Or, if your audience is young consumers who are in creative careers, a fun, bold brand personality might be the way to go. 

At the end of the day, your brand’s personality should be built based on what your ideal customers would be attracted to. 

7. Give Your Customers What They Want In Terms of Content

You’ve heard it before and you’ll most likely hear the phrase, “Content is king” again. After all, it points to what customers gravitate toward the most. In addition, content creation is so vast that it presents plenty of opportunities for you to captivate your customers. 

If you really want to get someone’s attention, you’ve got to give them what they want. In this case, you need to give your customers the marketing content they want, not the marketing content you want to give them. 

You’ll know what kind of content they want through the data you collected on them. The data from your digital marketing channels, in particular, will give you insight into which pieces of content, topics, and types your customers are engaging with the most. 

Their needs and interests will evolve. So, make sure you’re staying up to date with what your customers want content-wise. 

8. Choose the Right Distribution Channels for Your Content 

You can make incredible content. But you’ll never get your customers' attention with it if you aren’t putting it where they are. 

Make a list of the marketing channels your audience frequents the most. Social media should be on your list no matter the target audience you have. Then, see about email, website, paid ads, influencers, and search engine optimization (SEO). 

You don’t have to use all of these channels. But you should at least have a presence in your target audience’s top three. 

9. Get Away From the Ordinary With Your Content

It’s so difficult to capture customer attention these days because of content saturation. Even the best pieces of content get buried in the hundreds of thousands of search results on search engines or the constant uploading of content on social media. 

Because people are so over-exposed to marketing ads and content, many experience banner blindness, where they involuntarily tune out ads and content. They’re conditioned to ignore it because they’ve seen it time and time again, and that absolutely interferes with their engagement. 

If you want to get around banner blindness, you must avoid the ordinary. Adopting an overstimulated branding style is a solid step in this direction. You use bright colors, distorted fonts, unusual icons, dispersed graphics, and animation to draw your customers in. 

With these choices, you’re using elements most people won’t expect. That, in turn, grabs their attention and keeps them engaged. 

10. Rely On Visual Content

According to a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) study, a person can extract the meaning of an image in 13 milliseconds, even when it’s mixed up with other images. A statistic like this makes relying on visual content to capture customer attention that much more important. 

It is more engaging and entertaining, and people absorb visual content easier and faster.  After all, it’s much easier to pack a punch in the first eight seconds of a video than it is in the first paragraph of a written blog post. 

Feel free to weave in written and audio content into your strategy. For the most part, however, create short-form videos, utilize user-generated content (UGC), live stream, and experiment with shoppable videos and augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) content. 

Using this modern technology is a smart idea because it allows a customer to immerse themselves in content and interact with it in a way they weren’t able to before. For example, instead of just watching a video about new clothing products, customers can try the pieces on virtually and make a purchase right from that video if it’s shoppable. 

Visual content must be a part of your arsenal if you want to capture and keep customer attention in marketing. 

11. Embrace Diverse Perspectives and Representation 

In an Adobe study, 61% of respondents agreed that diversity was important in advertising. The study also revealed that 38% of consumers have more trust in a brand that displays diversity in its ads. Representing a wide range of people in advertisements and content is important to consumers and a way to draw them in. 

When people see themselves in an advertisement or another piece of marketing content, they’re more likely to relate to it. People are drawn to the content they can relate to and are likelier to view or read the entire piece because of it. 

Embrace diverse perspectives and representation in your ads and other marketing content to inspire engagement and brand loyalty. Identify the different groups of people in your customer base, better understand them, and then include them and their perspectives in the content you create. 

Having a diverse and inclusive marketing team can help ensure you’re authentically representing the wide range of people in your target audience. Having a diverse focus group on-call can help too. 

12. Engage With Your Customers 

So many marketers neglect to simply talk back to their customers, whether replying to a comment or direct message on social media, responding to a negative review, or answering an inquiry promptly. 

Whether you’d like to admit it or not, your actions with customers directly reflect on your company. For example, positive interactions with customers may make them feel cared for. In addition, when other people see you responding to customers, it leaves a positive impression on them. Customers may leave the interaction with more inspiration to learn more about your brand and start a relationship with you. 

Therefore, answer everything that comes your way. It’s also a good idea to actively solicit feedback from customers. Hosting events and activities can enhance engagement as well. 

Conclusion 

Capturing customer attention and keeping it is a challenge all marketing teams are facing right now. What will set you apart is intention. Make a plan for captivating customers using the strategies above, and you’ll be on your way to an audience that can’t keep its eyes off you.