Grabbing the attention of your readers should be considered among one of the most important aspects of any successful content marketing strategy.
Now, you may ask, why?
If you do, then let us help you.
So, first things first, to lure your prospects to buy your products, you need to plan a great offer than is capable enough of convincing them.
But, for that, you first need to make them look in the same direction. Right?
So, it is quite clear that before turning your prospects in to your readers, you need to make sure that you have their complete attention.
But there is a catch, today the attention span of any individual is of a gnat. So, your effort should not only be quite effective, but quick as well.
Let’s get started with your example. Before going through this blog, how many other websites have you gone through? Maybe a couple or even more.
There are internet users who surf through thousands of websites every month, so, clearly that’s a vast amount of noise that you need to tackle.
But for the time being as we already have your complete attention, let us tell you how to get the attention of your audience too.
Give Them a Reason to Be Attentive
You cannot expect your audience to pay attention to every detail. Yes, that is how the human brain works.
You need to make it focus on specific pieces of information in order to make it understand the same.
When a human mind focuses on a particular information, it just screens out all the other pieces of irrelevant information and choose the piece of information that will enter the brain and increase our awareness about the same.
Now, as the ability to focus of a human mind is limited, it is not possible to make them stay focused on anything and everything, like we mentioned before.
Consider the fact that the human mind is very selective in terms of grabbing information.
So, to make them fall for you, you need to give them a strong reason which will make them focus just on you instead of everything that is going around them.
Address the Obstacles
No matter how good your product, service or piece of information that you are providing is, grabbing the attention of your prospect is not that easy.
Yes, you might be providing a ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ type of a thing, or possibly the best in your niche, but that would not do unless they choose to listen to you.
So, to help you with the same, here are a few points, or rather we should say obstacles that you need to get past.
- Numerous products, services and pieces of information are available on the Internet.
- Competition has increased and will be increasing in the future.
- Means of distributing products have also increased in manifolds.
- Buyers have become much sophisticated.
- There is a lot of information already available, which is also known as information overload.
- Instant gratification is what audience get attracted to a lot.
So, as far as the attention-grabbing game is concerned, these are the obstacles that you need to take care of if you really want your readers to give you the privilege of giving all of their limited attention.
The Best Attention-Grabbing Techniques
Churn out robust pieces of information with these sure-fire techniques.
It is time to supercharge your creativity and get started with what needs to be done in order to make sure that prospects find your content worthy enough of their time.
1. Create the Best Impression with Your First Sentence
You can rightfully consider the first sentence of your piece of content as a second headline of the same.
And that is because it kind of has the same purpose.
So, no matter how hard you try to create a great headline for your content, if the first line of the same is dull, you might lose out some of your chances there.
Say suppose, you have crafted a great headline which seems to be capable of gaining much interest of your reader. Here, you need to make sure that your headline is robust enough to keep up with the same.
So, how can you do that?
Do you have a good understanding of the pain points that your readers are going through?
If yes, then you can simply consider to incorporating them in not just the headline of your content, but in the opening paragraphs too.
People often come across dozens of articles and blogs every day, but they get interested in a very few of them.
Hence, to stand out of the majority here, you need to highlight this aspect of your write up to make your audience understand that your content is different, and rather unusual.
You can start by promising something to your readers in the headline and carry it forward with the first paragraph of the content without dropping a single beat.
2. Help Them Focus on Your Message
A typical writer is focused more on the business while delivering a brand message through their content.
This is because they often assume that everyone considers seeing things through their eyes.
However, that thought process is perhaps the main reason behind your content not being able to grab the attention of your reader.
Yes, and to rectify this, you need to understand that people do not relate to your message until they can relate to your perception.
You can use the simple but effective trick of storytelling for the same.
Let’s help you understand this better.
For this what you can do is starting your interesting content with complete energy, followed by leaving them in the middle of the story without giving them enough clues about the context.
This trick will help generating queries about the context and they will keep on reading to understand it all, focusing entirely on your message.
This technique is called medias res in literary terms. It is a technique that is used to generate intrigue in the minds of readers.
Besides this, there is another way that is quite effective in generating interest in the minds of your audience and help them focus on the message that you are trying to deliver.
That is, non-linear writing. It is also quite effective a style that often writers use to generate interest in the minds of readers.
3. Make It Seem Personal
Making a brand message seem personal is directly proportional to the importance factor.
Did you get that?
Well, in simple words it means, the most personal touch a brand message has higher level of importance it will have in the eyes and minds of your readers.
A brand message that contains perpetually meaningful information yet seeming personal enough can really help you in grabbing the attention of your readers really quick.
And, because of this high importance factor, it will also gain more focus, which means it will bring more clarity to the reader and get fixed in their brains.
For instance, if someone’s house is on fire, to deliver this information, you do not need to put in a lot of effort. And the reason is nothing, but it is personal, hence, the person will immediately give you all their focus.
Moreover, the more personal your message will seem, the easier it would be for you to get them through the first page, creating a strong sense of empathy and desire for further thrills.
This technique makes the reader curious about the aftermath of the message, and helps you set a strong hook.
You can make use of a great storytelling which the reader might feel personal. This works as a great hook in informative pieces of content.
And, that emotional appeal will make your readers feel more connected compared to a regular old school write up.
4. Make Good Use of Emotion
And, that brings us to a deeper level of utilising emotional benefit to get in the heads of your readers.
As we mentioned in our previous point, you need to create a great emotional impact through your write up to make sure that your reader relates to the piece of content and can easily grasp the entire message that you are intending to deliver.
And, this impact intensifies when you can give it a personal touch, as our previous point says.
A brand message that can connect to your target audience on an emotional level is capable of bringing you three bonuses. These are,
Adding clarity about your message in the minds of your target audience.
Giving your potential buyers a strong reason to think ad talk about your brand increasing the chances of generating word-of-mouth traffic to your website.
Triggering areas and circuits of the brains of your readers which can effectively activate behaviour and an urge to take a decision.
Clearly, an emotional push is a lot better and much more effective than throwing thousands of logics towards your target audience.
And that is because logic challenges the understanding of one’s brain urging them to throw a logic back at you, whereas an emotional push is more empathetic which helps penetrating the initial barriers of one’s mind.
5. Don’t Risk It, Instead Get Them by Surprise
Grabbing the attention of your readers is perhaps one of the most important tricks to understand, learn, and implement.
But you need to be very sure of your approach. You only have a few mere seconds to get your job done with grabbing attention and you have to cash on that.
So, it is better to not risk it and take any chances with ever-failing tricks of using clever, teary-eyed language or similar visuals.
This is because, in this fast-paced life, people tend to overlook those, as they have more important things to do.
It is better not to use industry jargons or inside jokes as they might drive away your audience.
Here you may ask, why? Well, your audience might be a layman who is trying to solve a query and when finds an answer useful, they might even convert.
So, to make them understand you need to step down to their level of understanding, rather than throwing complex words at them and lose all the scope that you have got.
Instead, you can get started with a controversial yet unexpected statement that will catch your reader in surprise, increase their interest quotient and make them look for more.
Yes, they will keep on reading in order to understand how you can prove your point.
You can try making your thematic statement into a lens, through which your audience will perceive the rest of your writeup.
6. Make A Great Follow Up
So, does it all end with a single article? All this effort that you had put in to grab the attention of your readers.
If not, then what’s the use of performing so many brainstorming tactics and putting in all this effort?
Well, not to waste all the attention that you earned, you can simply channelise it by bouncing back with a great and robust follow up.
Yes, grabbing the attention of your reader is more or less like striking a couple of strong punches. But you need to understand that there is an entire match left.
So, if you just rest after the first endeavour, you cannot win the match.
The second part does play a crucial role in making sure that the match is going in your favour and you end up with a successful purchase.
So, make sure that you indulge enough time and effort to create your brand message that you would send as the follow up.
This is the actual message for which you grabbed the attention of your audience in the first place. So, it is better not to waste it with something petty.
Now, if you are capable enough to make sure that your audience find it valuable and worth their time, they will surely feel free to indulge in future conversation or any type of further communication with your brand.
Unfortunately, if you fail to deliver the needful, you or anyone of your brand will face a lot more difficulty in gaining their attention back as your potential buyer already has an idea of how you function or about your approach.
And that would be enough to mark your brand as “not worth my time” tag in their brain.
7. Use Pictures Too
Google does not consider images just like that.
Images do play a vital role in grabbing the attention of your target audience and that is why they deserve your complete attention here too.
Shape your approach of using images as visual marketing tactic.
In simpler words, in order to make sure that you are not dragging your audience constantly through lots and lots of textual content, utilise images in order to make sure that they can relieve their brain a bit and enjoy content that is delivered through interesting and colorful images.
So, when you create and insert images in your content that is engaging enough and is yet contains important information, you will create a vague image of freedom from textual information but, will keep on feeding them with what is necessary.
Hence, that further brings down the chances of losing their attention.
You can also use this trick in the very beginning of your content.
For that, all you have to do is putting an engaging, interesting yet information image on the very beginning of your content.
This will help making your writeup even more dynamic.
Not only that, but this tactic also paves the way to adding even more images in your text and your audience will happily accept them too as they already have been quite fascinated with the cover image of your content.
Bonus: Respond to Your Readers
An effectively crafted thought-provoking content is quite capable of making your readers come back to your website for more.
So, it is better to expect that questions will be coming from your readers whose heads are filled with any unanswered or unaddressed queries.
No matter how comprehensive your writeup is, there will always be questions that your readers will find unanswered. And these questions are the proof that you are going towards the right direction with your endeavour.
Use these questions as opportunities to dig deeper into a given topic which intrigue your readers and that will make them love you even more as they will feel more connected to your brand.
You can also opt for hinting at topics that you would be covering in your future writeups or questions that your readers will find already answered in the Q&A content that you post.
So, it is quite understandable that when you respond to your readers, they will surely keep on coming back to you to get enriched with information with all their attention.
What’s Your Take?
This blog did tell you about how to grab the attention of your readers, but make sure that you do not miss out on the hints that will help you keep up with that focus that you earned and cash on it later on.
So, make sure you utilise all these points wisely in your content and get the most out of what you deliver, by standing out of the crowd.
What are you waiting for?
