As marketers, we are facing increasing scarcity when we try and grab the attention of our customers. We are competing with thousands of other marketers and businesses for that finite resource. This shortage of attention might seem like a problem, however, scarcity is a core principle of economics.

Scarcity is how the prices of goods and services are set, which in turn guides our economy. A scarcity of resources isn’t something to necessarily be afraid of. It just challenges us to fight harder and smarter for our audience’s attention.

The Scarcity of Attention

As the amount of information that is accessible to us continues to increase, so grows the amount of calls on our attention. It has been suggested that the average consumer is exposed to up to 10,000 brand messages a day, and that number is only likely to increase.

Unfortunately, that scarcity of attention not only comes from the continuously increasing demands on our attention but also a declining supply in attention spans themselves. The average attention span of your customers has dropped to just 8 seconds, which is lower than the 9-second attention span of a goldfish.

In our modern, information overloaded world, there is so much content trying to grab our attention that it’s easy to become distracted. Faced by this constant bombardment of adverts and messages, consumers are likely to switch between screens up to 21 times an hour.

Marketing to these conditions might seem impossible, but that’s not the case. After all, someone will have an infinite attention span, as long as you are entertaining them.

The Wrong Approach to the Attention Scarcity

Unfortunately, marketers are approaching this scarcity of attention in the wrong way. They are trying to grab the attention of their audience by screaming louder, or more frequently and are actually making the situation worse.

Email marketing is a good example; the average marketing email campaign has a click-through rate of 1.5%, so 10,000 marketing emails are sent out to your audience and on average 150 clicks through. Of course, we want more than 150 interactions from our campaigns, so we compensate by sending more emails with the hope of engaging with more potential customers.

This is where the problem begins. The more emails we send, the more calls on our audience’s attention. This leads to a shorter attention span, which in turn leads to a lower conversion rate and the cycle starts again.

Competing messages and advertisements will continue to grow, and sending more emails or adverts isn’t helping the situation. So how do you market your business, service or products to your ever increasingly distracted customer base?

How to Market to the Attention Scarcity

Despite the old saying ‘quantity is a quality of its own’, when it comes to marketing to the attention scarcity it’s all about getting the most out of each contact with your audience, rather than getting lots of contacts. Indeed, quality has a quality all of its own.

Imagine if, similar to the above example, you still sent out 10,000 marketing emails but had a click-through rate of 15% instead. You would have had to send 100,000 emails to reach that many of conversions in the above example, and it’s more than likely that the increased volume of emails would have had a negative impact on your click-through rate.

The key is to find new ways to compete by producing high-impact communications that grab your audience’s attention and interest. This doesn’t mean you should be using marketing gimmicks like “re:…” or “FWD:…” in the subject lines, or ALL CAPS emails. You are reaching for that quality and attention-grabbing communications that will increase your click-through rates.

The ideal attention-grabbing marketing email or communication pattern:

However, due to the shortage of attention in our audiences and the all-time high demand on our attention, many marketers are struggling to achieve the first part of this pattern, which is what brings down our conversion rates.

How to grab your audience’s attention

The answer lies in making your marketing communications personally relevant to your audience. Gone are the days of marketing to personas. Just because something grabs and hold one person’s attention, doesn’t mean it would do the same for another person. The key to grabbing your audience’s attention and holding it is personalised marketing communications that treat them as individuals.

Change your Marketing Focus

One of the biggest mistakes you can make is focusing your marketing campaign on what you or your business wants to achieve. Of course, it’s important to have targets and goals that you want to reach, however, thinking of your marketing campaign in terms of what you, and your company, wants at the expense of what your audience and customers want is bad practice.

By making the effort to understand who your customers are, you are far better equipped to create attention-grabbing marketing communications that also add value to your audience.

Personalised Emails

Personalised marketing originated with the ability to add individual names in emails. I’m sure you can recall what a novelty it was to use “Hi <firstname>”.

Personalised marketing was incredibly successful due to people’s need to feel personal connections and recognition. Personalised emails are still far more successful than generic marketing communications. The positive feeling from personalised emails also seems to positively effect on-page conversions.

However, there is more to personalisation than just merging someone’s name into an email or even tailoring your marketing communications to their job title, location or other demographics. This tactic generally fails to offer any real value once the user has clicked through, which reduces the overall impact of the communication.

Remember to serve your customer before yourself and avoid this kind of shallow engagement. Instead, you should be moving towards individualisation, or hyper-personalisation, in your marketing communications and consistently offering relevant and engaging content.

Hyper-personalisation

Hyper-personalisation, or individualisation, in marketing communications is where the content is truly customised with each individual member of your audience in mind. This method brings your audience into the story that you are trying to tell.

The entire experience with your brand should feel like you are truly getting to know your potential customers and are building a one-to-one relationship with them. This is how you retain your audience’s attention and increase conversions and sales.

Face to Face Marketing

One way to work with your audience in a personalised way is to actually engage with them as individuals through a face to face marketing campaign.

Face to face marketing is when you promote your business, service or product to another person or to a group of people in person, rather than through digital or traditional marketing. The effectiveness of face to face marketing comes from the ability to connect with your customers on a personal level.

There is a wide variety of ways to approach face-to-face marketing, such as local trade shows, conventions or sampling campaigns. With so many options available to you, it’s easy to see why face-to-face marketing should be part of your business’s marketing plan.

Why is face to face marketing important?

Face to face marketing is still important because it has shown to be very resilient in this digital age. The ability to connect to your customers on a personal and emotional level will always be an essential part of marketing and is something that is hard to achieve within the digital marketing space.

Experiential Marketing

Experiential marketing builds on the connection that face to face marketing creates by forming experiences between your brand and consumers through product sampling, immersive experiences, stunts and events.

If it suits the type of product that you offer, a sampling campaign can be a great way to get a customer’s attention and engage with them. If, for example, you are selling breakfast bars then organising some promotional staff to offer samples outside your local train station during the morning commute, is a great way to let people try your product and recognise your brand identity.

If your promotional team are engaging and knowledgeable about the product, then your potential customers will form a positive opinion of your brand and product, which might impact them the next time they see your product on the shelves.

Marketing to Entertain your Audience

Entertainment, emotion and engagement all go together, and the same can be the case for your marketing campaigns. Effective marketing will stand out and grab your audience’s attention if it elicits the right emotions for your target market.

After all, the Comedian Jerry Seinfeld once said “This whole idea of an attention span is, I think, a misnomer. People have an infinite attention span if you are entertaining them.”

Be Flexible and Persistent

The average consumer will need to see your message seven times before they will take action. So you will need to be persistent. Your marketing campaign may not succeed on the first try, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t working on a different level.

Strategies such as drip marketing will keep your audience exposed to consistent marketing communications. However, remember that this doesn’t mean that you should be churning out mediocre marketing content and effectively spamming your customers. Instead, keep it relevant and personal to your audience and your brand.

Treat your audience as individuals and make your content relevant to them and their needs. Be aware of the attention scarcity and treat it as the valuable resource that it is. Be persistent in your campaigns but be flexible to your audience’s preferences. This is how you market to the attention scarcity and earn yourself a larger slice of the attention pie.

If you’d like to find out more about Eventeem, get in touch with ceri@eventeem.co.uk / 02921 676 501

The post The Attention Economy and your business’ scarcest resource in 2019 appeared first on IPM Bitesize.

Alastair Lockhart, Insight Director at Savvy, reveals new survey findings on UK consumers and the types of activity that appeal to them. 

A new survey (of 1,000 UK consumers) from leading retail and shopper marketing agency, Savvy, has been launched today. The research takes a closer look at how UK consumers have been getting involved in live brand experiences, the different types of activity that appeal to them and it also assesses the building blocks of great live campaigns.

Alastair Lockhart, Insight Director at Savvy, said: “The way people consume media has fragmented as new digital touch points have proliferated. As a result, the reality is that it’s never been so difficult for brands to be heard through the constant buzz of communication, to get their message across and to tell their brand stories.

In large part this explains the rise of experiential marketing in recent years. Increasingly brands see it as a powerful platform to be heard and, more importantly, to engage directly with their target audience without constraints on creativity.

A major finding of the research is the considerable importance that younger consumers attach to experience. As well as being the group most likely to engage with brand experiences, we find that a remarkable 73 percent of 18-34s rate experiences over physical products.”

Key research findings:

Are consumers getting involved?

• In the past 12 months, 57 percent of UK consumers have engaged in some way with experiential activity, with younger people getting involved more deeply and in a broader range of events.
• 60 percent of consumers said they feel more loyal to brands that they can interact with.
• 64 percent perceive experiences as being more important than products, while 63 percent say that experiences are more important to them now than they were two years ago. These numbers are substantially higher amongst the younger generation – 73 percent and 79 percent among 18-34 year olds respectively.
• Consumers are more likely to expect to see experiential activity from certain types of businesses than others – with drink (1^st) and food (2^nd) brands topping the list, where experiential activity is ideally suited to tasting. Make-up and cosmetics brands feature third, followed by technology and gadgets. 

Which types of brand experiences UK consumers have engaged with in the past 12 months?

• Product sampling has reached the most consumers, with 47 percent of UK consumers having engaged with this type of activity in the past year.
• In second place with 37 percent is a brand demonstrating product features and in third place with 36 percent are consumers who have visited a pop-up shop.
• 32 percent of consumers have taken part in an activity for a chance to win something and 30 percent have engaged with activity to speak to an expert.

What kinds of activities and features of experiential events do consumers find appealing?

• Tried and tested sales incentives perform well in terms of appeal, with 82 percent of respondents mentioning ‘money off purchase’ and 75 percent liking the idea of entering a free prize draw.
• 70 percent stated ‘entering a competition’ – a substantially higher proportion than we see in sales promotions more generally.
• It’s clear from the findings in particular that experiential has a key role to play for food and drink brands – 81 percent of respondents find ‘trying food/dining experience’ appealing, while 68 percent mentioned a ‘drink at a bar’.
• Personalisation is popular with consumers and is especially suitable for experiential events – in large part because personalised messages and gifts can be created at the event itself allowing immediate gratification for the visitors. 73 percent of respondents in the research said they found ‘a personalised gift’ appealing.
• Certain features are more appealing among younger consumers, particularly those experiences that are more physically engaging.  Make-overs, virtual reality and playing competitive games all significantly over-index among 18-34s and they welcome more innovative activities that they can share on social media. 

How connected are UK consumers?

• Growth in digital technology, particularly social media, has done much to improve the effectiveness of experiential events since it provides a platform to continue the conversation with consumers long after the activity has concluded.
• 77 percent of consumers use Facebook – even among over 45s, 72 percent use this social media platform.
• Younger audiences require a social strategy with other platforms. 54 percent of millennials are active on Instagram, 32 percent use Snapchat and 67 percent view content on YouTube. These consumers use social media actively, with 68 percent saying they have shared a photo in the past month. This group are substantially more likely to look for and share content at experiential events.

Lockhart concludes: “Experiential marketing is helping to cut through the constant noise created by social media and always on news – as such it’s forecast to grow in popularity significantly over the next few years. Allowing brands to bring their products to life, we find it can help foster genuine loyalty, create great social media content and establish longer-term emotional connections with target audiences.

It is however really important to underpin a campaign, from initial planning through implementation and evaluation, with solid insight. Fully understand who the target is, how they behave and what they respond to in order to shape the user experience. A well thought out social strategy is also critical as a means to drive footfall to events, to share content at the event and to maintain a conversation after it’s taken place. Measurement is the final cornerstone for success – due to the temporary and live nature of experiential activity it is essential to collect data during the event itself as well as through evaluation.”

 For more information on how Savvy can help your company, contact Alastair Lockhart at Alastair.Lockhart@getsavvy.com

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Get a promotional marketing campaign right, says Mel Sheldon, Commercial Director at MRM, and it has the potential to take your brand to the next level; driving awareness, reaching new audiences, generating sales, creating appeal and building loyalty across your customer base.

There are lots of moving parts to a campaign, and to deliver on time and on budget whilst hitting your objective takes real skill. The risks involved when things don’t go to plan reach further than just missed sales or lower revenue figures; think dissatisfied customers and the potential damage this may cause to the brand.

The Q2 2018 IPA Bellwether Report shows that in a market of slow increase in overall marketing spend, promotional marketing is showing a 4 point upward revision in spend; meaning that it’s more important than ever for brand owners and Shopper marketing teams to give due consideration to their promotional marketing strategy above & beyond price cuts.

Here we’ve distilled the key considerations to help you plan and perfectly execute your next promotional marketing campaign.

What are we here for?

Starting at the top – ask yourself what are we trying to achieve and what does success look like?

If you don’t understand this from the get-go, it’s likely to be only heading one way.

On a macro level there can be a range of different objectives; are we looking to drive trial, encourage repeat purchase, gather consumer data or reward customer loyalty.

However, promotions needn’t just be about volume generation. Whilst this is a common goal the positive impact on brand equity can sometimes be overlooked. Understand all of the goals or the real challenge that we’re trying to solve, and then what are the potential limitations that may hinder success.

Retail sectors can be used cleverly to work for you in amplifying your promotional campaign. Rather than ticking the box for every retailer where you have listings, give consideration to whether you want to run the campaign in grocery multiples, or target independent retailers – but be aware that each of these has its own intricacies of operation and limitations in terms of what promotional support can be planned.

Once you’ve got a clear perspective on objectives, then comes a mission critical step; briefing your partner.

Getting the briefing right

The success of any campaign hinges on getting the brief right; being clear on what you want to achieve, how it will be measured, timings, volume requirements and budgets.Provide as much detail as possible in the brief and share this with your chosen fulfilment partner as soon as possible, not as an afterthought when the campaign is about to launch (yes, it does happen!).

This is the first opportunity for your fulfilment partner to be able to understand the plans you’ve been working on for weeks/months and to come up ways to add value and to deliver a joined up consumer experience so give them an opportunity to ask questions.

Listen to the recommendations given by your fulfilment partner because whilst you are the expert on your brand, they really understand how to engage consumers in a cost effective, measurable way. Speak to your creative agency; they will be able to help develop a strong call to action and visuals to support.

Ensure you have a clear and well thought through budget with contingency factored in – consider fixed fee insurance to ring fence your budget. MRM can support in this regard and has an established relationship with a fixed fee provider so we know what information is required to analyse the risk.

It’s worth remembering that promotions don’t just have to be about volume generation; get them right and they can have a significant impact in building a brand.

Know your crowd

Consider your target audience; make sure you understand who they are and what makes them tick. Where are they likely to be found and when? How do they behave? How do they like to be addressed? And then work out which channels they like to be reached across; in store, on pack, digital, social…

Which brings us to retailers. Grocery retail in particular is a cluttered environment with retailers conducting regular reviews of listings and asking for budget to support their category management plans, and not specifically working to your own promotional plans. So how do you create stand out of your campaign?

There are some obvious routes to consider from an on pack flash, in store POS, on pack codes – through to creating a retailer-specific campaign that can be supported with greater in-store marketing collateral.

Then create the message – what is your offer to them? Ask yourself, will it resonate with the target audience? And how best is it to convey your message across your chosen channels? An important point to consider here is your competitors. If everyone else is offering a coupon, why not try a taste guarantee or prize draw as these are perfect opportunities to gain insight into who’s buying your product and to create a marketing database whilst standing out from your competitors.

Another area to consider is your brand’s context in the wider world; is there anything topical that you can align to or a hot new trend that your target demographic is going nuts for? There could be a seasonal event or new craze that fits perfectly with your brand and audience – obvious but think what the World Cup generates for a beer brand. Or a certain baking themed TV programme generates for an ingredients brand.

Depending on your budget, message and objectives you may also be able to dial in to other media channels to market your campaign – VOD, social media, TV, radio, digital, CRM.

These should be carefully selected, because the correct combination can deliver the multiplier effect of amplifying the impact of your promotion way beyond your expectations.

The nuts and bolts

The mechanics of your campaign are important to ensure it incentivises the right behaviours and drives the right actions. If the offer is too convoluted to redeem, takes too much effort on the consumers’ part, or sets itself up for difficulties in the fulfilment phase it’s unlikely your campaign will be a success.

Amplification will be key to the success of your campaign. Going back to the previous point on where your target audience spends their time will influence which media channels you consider to promote your campaign but it’s likely that it will involve an integrated approach.

Ultimately the key question is “Is the campaign engaging, easy to understand and relevant to your audience?”

Be compliant

Time to dot the ‘I’s and cross the Ts’ – seek expert advice and make sure your promotional campaign is compliant with the CAP Code and that your Terms & Conditions are sufficiently detailed and clear. The IPM offers a legal service designed to do exactly that – and you can even use their IPM Seal to demonstrate compliance.

Don’t forget to use positive opt ins for any capture of consumer data – and be specific in how you will be using their data i.e. email, post, telephone. If you’re using a digital channel i.e. a promotional microsite, you must also show a privacy notice to this effect as well as providing a link to the promotion’s T&Cs.

On a final point re data – consider how long you will retain the data and how this will be used post-campaign. Why not create a customer database for marketing purposes (as long as you’ve got positive opt ins) as a way to engage? You may also get requests from consumers wanting to know what data you’re holding on them, so make sure you’ve got a defined process with your digital and/or fulfilment partner on how to handle such request as GDPR legislation means these must be responded to within one calendar month (see Subject Access Requests on the ICO website).

Before the campaign starts, it’s vital to make sure there is a Data Processing Agreement in place with any partner who will be processing customer data. This should define what data is to be processed, its purpose and classes of data and will also cover the agreed data retention period. More importantly, it will place responsibility on each Data Processor (remember, you as the client are the Data Controller) in terms of their liability to hold that data securely.

While it’s live

Using your clearly defined objectives, monitor the campaign performance and ROI throughout the campaign as there’s nothing worse than getting to the final week and looking at the redemptions, as there’s little that can be done at that stage! Agree reporting frequency with your fulfilment partner and give them access to as much data as possible; Google Analytics can be shared with agencies to help them understand customer engagement, as well as actual redemptions.

If you have any concerns that the campaign isn’t performing as expected, speak up as quickly as possible. If you’re running a digital campaign, it’s easy to make tweaks to the customer journey or to use social media to drive your target market to the website. It’s better to do it sooner, rather than later though!

Job done

So, your campaign has gone without a hitch, thousands of your target audience have engaged, responded and bought into your brand. Job done right? Wrong. Now is the time to measure, review and evaluate. Place your results against the original objectives and measure ROI. On a more practical level, talk to your fulfilment partner and your creative agency together to discuss what worked, what didn’t and importantly, what have you learned for next time?

MRM works in partnership with a wide range of clients to understand campaign objectives and help design the best solution to achieve them. They draw not only on a wealth of experience and expertise in digital and fulfilment, but also on our efficient purchasing power to add value.

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