Numero Uno for digital success
and 5 ways to get to that
Every brand or business now has a digital presence — active or not. Also, the amount spent on digital promotion is only increasing. Year on Year, more and more brands are utilising the digital space to target netizens.
The graphs indicate nothing but a steady growth in digital spending in almost every industry and increasingly towards mobile devices — includes mobiles and tablets.
Digital media has enabled companies to reach customers directly and create an impact at a personal level. With tailored content for every demographic brands are now able to divide and conquer. Earlier, generic ads — made for all — impacted only a few.
Now, thousands of brands, from different industries, compete in the same space at the same time to grow their customer base.
What is the key differentiating factor?
One of the most important aspects of communication design is engaging a person with the content — can be an Ad, piece of writing, picture, data or such.
Simply put, the answer to the title of this story, and the key differentiating factor is,
Attention
With sufficient attention from the intended (and unintended) audience, a campaign or a piece of communication can achieve its intended heights and an unprecedented more. Attention here can simply be defined as the time spent by the user in absorbing that piece of content and if possible, pondering over it. As it can be obvious, the longer you can keep one’s attention, the more information can be transferred and the likeliness of converting him to a customer increases.
In this article, we shall see five important aspects, in no specific order, of attention and how it can help drive growth.
It is a two-way street
The best way to grab someone’s attention is by giving them something they want. Identifying and understanding what they want and how they want it should be one of the core aspects of doing market research.
Marketing and advertising done wrong can lead to a development of huge negative reputation let alone a significant amount of financial losses. Any money put into marketing is not an expense, its essentially an investment. And, any investment without returns is useless.
So, paying close attention to the market needs or the end-user needs is the best way to get their attention.
Embrace good design
No matter how good the content is, it will invariably fail to achieve its goal if it is not communicated properly. And, the most important step to ensure your message is palatable by someone is to present it well.
For this, following a good design practice is essential. A good brand language can make boring things sound good and vice-versa. Paying attention to graphics, fonts and colours can be the key to winning the communication aspect of the campaign.
For example, one of the reasons why a brand like Nike has been able to reach so many people is because of its ability to maintain a great brand language. Great brand language is also essential to set you apart in the market space.
Stay relevant
Focusing on current trends, necessities and immediate needs is the most effective way a brand or business can talk to a customer. To stay on someone’s mind, giving them content which aligns with their thoughts at that time is essential.
Example, for a food delivery service company, its important for it understand what its demographic is interested in — impressing the youth with pubs, older people with home-style cooking, night-owls with midnight deliveres — and with it, it can improve the brand’s relevance in their customer’s life.
Nobody likes to have something that doesn’t serve a purpose. One other great example — with the introduction of Instagram stories, Snapchat, unable to innovate, has now become very irrelevant with many of its users.
Initiate Action
Unless you’re a news channel, even they try to incite action these days, every digital campaign’s goal should be create an action. The scrolling is your enemy and clicking is your win.
As the proverb goes — actions speak louder than words — engaging a user onto a brand these days has gone to become as simple as making them click. Put a call-to-action button here doesn’t solve the purpose. For example, rather than just supplying information give a fact and ask them to give their thoughts, polls are a great way to do this. Even making them follow your social media handles is an action. Action is different from a goal. The goal of a brand will be to make someone a customer but a goal can be as simple as making someone like, share or comment on a post.
Of course, trying to go beyond the action on the campaign should be the goal. Trying to become a part of their conversations with others, their posts or their hashtags is how their actions can help a brand grow.
Be everywhere. But don’t annoy.
One of the best examples for this in the recent times, in India, are the Airtel 4G girl and Trivago guy. The great thing with these digital campaigns was that they created a buzz, and a conversation. But, was it entirely positive? — No.
Unfortunately, beyond a certain limit, being present everywhere and all the time can be a huge negative for a brand. It only creates irritation amongst the people. Now, some may call this sticky campaigning — which basically means creating content that makes no sense but sticks — but it is not entirely that. There are some great sticky campaigns over the years which didn’t try this hard but stuck on — for example, the incredible campaigns of Feviquik from the early 2000s.
The successful way to beat this is to morph according to a place or demographic and this doesn’t mean to change language in a ad or attack their stereotypes but has more to do with understanding the local needs.
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Hope these pointers help you understand the importance of garnering attention. Do you think there are better ways this could be done? Let’s discuss!
