How to make sure your content grabs attention
So how can you best tackle grabbing your audience’s attention within those few crucial seconds.
Visual stimuli will pull them in fastest. It’s how we see the world and our brains are naturally wired to process information via this route, at speed.
So immediately grab your readers attention with strong imagery. Aside from the numerous photo stock libraries out there today there are a growing number of rights free images that are easily accessible and visually powerful. Among some good sites are Unsplash, Pixabay, Picjumbo, Gratisography, Freeimages, Public Domain Archive, Picography.
Next – punchy titles and / or soundbites to give a flavour of what the content holds. Draw your audience in. Just go and take a look at the Economist digital media advertising linking through to articles – punchy, intriguing, simple, attention grabbing. Likewise all major news channels, newspapers and magazines understand the power of a good headline – think BBC or Sky News on screen soundbites.
Then find a way to give your audience choice. Let them select what they wish to delve into rather than forcing them to read through content that may not have relevance to them.
Deliver a top level highly visual menu that indicates what content lies below. No one wants to be scrolling through an endless pdf to get to the relevant stuff. Otherwise ... poof, that fragile attention span will already be half way round that goldfish bowl.
Once you have the reader hooked then make sure that you include devices to keep them there. Video, polls, further imagery, ways in which to easily share items on with others, games, infographics, charts.
Whatever it takes to keep that waning attention span focused. Anything that keeps people pressing, clicking, flipping and engaging.
And finally measure what content works and what doesn’t. And in this way you’ll be able to ensure that the content you deliver will have half a chance to grab that elusive attention span.