Digital Attention Spans
How much time does it take for someone to lose interest in your website? Popular digital marketing lore says you already have lost interest and are no longer reading this article.
The 8-second rule and goldfish attention spans dominate the scary tales of how you must instantly capture the attention of your users or lose them forever. You are not competing against your competitors. You are competing against the time it takes the synapse of a media-overwhelmed brain to fire off the message, “Enough seen. Click. Swipe.”
Relax. It’s not true.
A few years ago I was at a conference for web professionals and attended a vendor track session. The presenter owned a small digital marketing firm. His topic was the radically short online attention span of teenagers.
The presenter brought in a ringer to prove his point. He invited his teenaged daughter to join him on stage. She was of college age and had stories to tell of wordy university websites that none of her friends liked.
There were some quotes from research that showed people, especially younger people, spend only seconds on a web page. There were some findings about how much people, especially younger people, never read website content and instead prefer to watch videos.
Then the presentation left the world of pseudo anecdote and entered the world of actual human story. The atmosphere changed. In the room we went from phone survey “facts” to campfire story time.
The college-aged woman told about a recent trip the family took to visit schools. It was a whirlwind outing, traveling across multiple state lines and visiting a half-dozen institutions. By the end of it, they were exhausted. That’s why they considered skipping the last visit and driving through the night to just get home and rest. Besides, the final school was the least interesting to her.
They opted out of a delirious drive through the night. Instead, they kept their motel reservation and, after dinner, the daughter sat down to look over the university’s website. She wanted to take one more quick look to determine if a visit the next morning was worth it. An 8-second look, right? Um, no.
She proceeded to explain how she dug through the website, reading about the programs that interested her. She read all about the student life experience. She read about the school’s policies. Can freshmen have cars? She read about cross cultural experiences. Do most students study abroad? She texted her friends and asked them to get on the website and read what she was reading in order to give her their opinion. She said it was 10 p.m. and she kept on going, for a couple more hours.
Has the Internet diminished our attention spans? Probably. It is harder to capture the attention of a user casually browsing your website? Yes. Does that matter? Not so much.
If it take words and more than 8-seconds to tell the story of your product, go ahead and write as much as you need to write. Trust that the person who wants what you have to offer is human enough to pay closer attention to you than a goldfish. Besides, do you really want customers who are more flighty than fish? If you do and your business model depends on such mindlessness, you are screwing up the world and should be ashamed of yourself. Get in another line of business.
I am not bashing catchy headlines or great videography. Be excellent at the craft of marketing. Firstly, be passionate about what you have to offer. Don’t tell a one-liner about it; tell a story about it. Keep going on and on so that instead of people reacting, “That was witty marketing,” they respond, “That company means business!”
And also, trust in the dignity of the people who are interested in your products.
