Prioritizing in the attention economy Jul 1, 2007 12:00 PM
, LARRY BECKER
JobZone
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Why are you reading this article? How did it win even a few seconds of your attention? Will it give you some useful ideas for improving your company's Website? Could it help make your business more profitable? Perhaps even advance your career? Maybe it will entertain you…but that's not enough. How much time do I have left before I lose the right to your attention?
Are you already tempted to:
Start another article?
Check your e-mail?
Check your voice-mail?
Fiddle with your Netflix queue? Read your favorite blog? Download a new track from iTunes? Check your e-mail (again)? Watch that weird robot dance on YouTube?
Here's rule number one of the attention economy: if I want to communicate with you (or market to you) I need to capture your attention and earn the right to keep it. You are also a marketer. Do you want your visitors to take action on your Website? Buy something? Sign up for your e-mail? Request a catalog? Your user also has a Netflix queue. You, too, are competing for some very scarce attention.
So why keep reading? If you do, you'll learn how putting first things first and leveraging prominence and prioritization can help your site win a few points in the competition for online attention.
To increase the odds of my message gaining your attention, I'll restate it in an easily-scanned bulleted list.
Here's exactly what you get if you continue reading:
Some of the history and ideas behind the attention economy and putting first things first when you market online.
A list of formatting tips to make your Web copy more readable and more likely to pull people further into your site.
A pair of “first things first” tactics to make your Web pages more visible to search engine spiders.
A modest “a-ha” about your e-mail that could stop you from emphasizing a dated metric and prevent your most important offer from remaining invisible to someone looking right at it.
First things first
Remember that “motivational” speech Alec Baldwin delivers in the film Glengarry Glenn Ross? Between the four-letter words and death threats to a slumped sales team, he tosses out an acronym — AIDA — that suggests he's a student of early 20th century advertising.
In the 1925 edition of the Journal of Applied Psychology, E.K. Strong described the process of attention, interest, desire, action — AIDA — as key to successfully courting consumers, or as we might put it, turning browsers into buyers.
Attention is the first prerequisite to conversion. Capture your prospect's attention with an offer strong enough to gain his interest, and he may then desire your product enough to take action.
The challenge is that there's a whole lot of competition for that crucial moment of attention. More than two decades before the launch of the Web as we know it, the computer scientist Hebert Simon pointed out that the rapid growth of information causes scarcity of attention. This scarcity increases the value of this attention.
In the early days of the Web, mainstream marketers were forced to compete for attention with the new upstart channel. Today, the Web itself is mainstream, but the proliferation of blogs, RSS feeds, pod casts, and other hallmarks of Web 2.0 -increases the competition for attention exponentially. Just one example: in three years the number of blogs increased 100-fold, doubling every six months!
In today's attention economy your user:
Understands she will be marketed to constantly.
Knows this competition makes her attention valuable.
Expects to gain value in exchange for it.
What does that mean for you, the online merchant and marketer? How can your site cut through the clutter and not just add to it?
Well for one thing, your message can't be boring. It needs to be relevant. Does that mean your site should master personalization, offer a fine-tuned recommendation engine, stand out from the crowd with a remarkable video that gets forwarded around the 'Net? Maybe. But unless your new features are built on a solid foundation, they're unlikely to satisfy. For many online retailers, mastering the fundamentals is where the most valuable ground can be gained.
When we work with our clients to improve their site strategy and design, we emphasize prioritization and front-loading. These are active processes that hone your message and help you design your site to lead with what's most important.
Once you start to look for it, you'll see front-loading everywhere. It's an underlying structure that can be found in most successful messaging and content online.
First things first is a mantra that benefits your site at the strategic level and at the tactical, too. What exactly should you be doing? Let's look at five strategies.
