Marketing Must #3

You Must Get - And Hold - Your Viewers' Attention

The cardinal rule in direct mail marketing is that unopened letters don't convert into sales. Your marketing materials could consist of the most brilliantly-written copy and eye-catching images ever produced, but they won't amount to anything if your letters are thrown away without being opened. Perhaps the most important aspect of marketing is grabbing the reader's attention in the first place - poorly written advertising materials can still produce revenue if they're read, but unread advertising will never yield results. Period. The same rules apply to web-based advertising.

An e-mail advertisement that's deleted before being opened or a website that's navigated away from before being read won't produce results. You've got to grab your readers and entice them into your advertising materials before you can convince them to use your services or buy your products. Fortunately for internet marketers, the web provides far more mediums for grabbing a reader's attention than traditional print advertising. The interactive nature of the internet has the ability to blur the line between advertising and entertainment, providing the end-user with more incentives to initially pay attention to an advertisement than interest in the product. Some tools that an adept marketing manager might use in grabbing a user's attention: adding eye-popping stylistic attributes to lead text interactive media such as audio, video, or flash that engages the end-user community-oriented tools such as comments or feedback that make the end-user feel like part of a community geographically relevant data that makes the user feel specifically targeted an aesthetically pleasing, engaging website design

The web presents almost an infinite number of ways to grab a user's attention. Some of the best web advertisements are the ones that feel more like an experience than a piece of marketing material: they elicit participation from the end-user and make them feel like a contributor to the site as opposed to a member of an audience. The important thing to keep in mind when grabbing your readers' attention is that they will give you only a few seconds to prove to them that your website is worth reading. After the threshold of 3 or 4 seconds has passed, a user will simply click away - most likely to one of your competitor's sites. You must grab - and hold - your readers' attention in order to effectively market your products. Without engaging, relevant marketing material, you run the risk of alienating your viewers and losing out on sales. Many marketing managers forget that the fundamental tenets of advertising apply to internet campaigns as well. If you don't grab your readers from the start, any additional effort will be wasted.

 About The Author:  MyWebGuyTaylor is an ebusiness SEO consultant from Santa Barbara, CA, specializing in seo cms solutions, e-business automation, joomla seo, web marketing, Small business website marketing and seo campaign management, Joomla Search Engine Optimization, Social Bookmarking, Link Building, SEO Article Writing. 

Trackback(0)

Comments (1)

...

Great to read about some new and innovative approaches with offline media. Pretty cool. Especially considering that a recent InfoTrends study noted that direct mail performance improved significantly with personalization.

Stan , September 23, 2009

• 
• +0
• 
• 

Write comment