May I Have Your Attention, Please?

(She taps the mic and clears her throat.)   

There has been a lot of chatter in the research industry lately about fame…“who comes to mind when you think about [fill in the blank]?”

Now this is going to be a different challenge depending on whether you have been an old and venerable brand, what we call in the trade a “market leader”, versus an “start-up” disrupter.

But for both types of agencies, I would argue that we are in an age where is it increasingly difficult to get the most important pre-requisite to fame: Attention!

I asked my friend “claude.ai” about the conundrum of breaking through in the attention age and “he” (is claude a “he”?) generated some interesting stats: 

“We operate in an economy where attention is both scarce and fleeting. The average B2B buyer is bombarded with over 4,000 marketing messages daily. They've developed sophisticated filtering mechanisms—both technological and psychological—designed specifically to ignore you.”

Not sure Claude’s numbers are accurate or merely metaphorical. But the last “factoid” is chillingly significant, especially for those relatively new brands in the business of disrupting the norm, but equally for mature brands that are known but not sufficiently differentiated.

Your target audience is inundated with messages. Some they need to pay attention to, some just cluttering up their information feeds, and some that could be mission critical from voices they are less familiar with, if at all. To survive the firehose of incoming messages, your prospects have developed mechanisms to filter you out!

“Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!” (If you know, you know!)

But let’s say for argument’s sake, as a B2B services brand (like a market research agency) you do manage to nab the gold ring of attention, what do you do with it? 

Again, Claude gave me a snappy sub head: 

“The Critical Conversion: From Attention to Awareness”

Now I am fond of Claude. “He” is quick to help me, pretty thorough and often annoyingly clever.  And if I ask him to, he can sharpen and shorten most of what I write, or at least give me a good first draft. But in this case, I would argue that Claude missed the things I think are critical beyond simply the conversion to awareness. 

In my view “awareness” is kind of like “base camp”.

The summit of Everest is a full 11,431 feet higher in the oxygen thin atmosphere than the base camp (which is at 17,598 feet), and it is damn treacherous and icy to get there!

In the expedition to revenue growth, you have got to go a long way past “awareness”, so in that golden but fleeting moment of attention, what must you do next?

You’ve Got Their Attention, But What Do You Say? 

I don’t know about you, but over the last few years in those critical moments where an agency actually has my “attention”, more and more I struggle with messaging that taps all the buzz words, (AI, anyone?) but leaves me wondering “what is it you actually do?” 

I am a big fan of behavioral experts who have espoused the following: “Your brand story must be Accessible, Memorable and Referable.” (Shout out to the person who first turned me on to this:  Michael Roderick of Small Pond Enterprises, who has made a business out of helping companies do just that!) 

For sure in the fleeting moment of “attention” you have a very finite amount of time to tell your audience, clearly, who you are and what you do, in a memorable way, so that listeners can do the heavy lifting of telling others about you.  Michael calls it the Referability Effect, and my friend claude (clever chap) suggested you might call it the “Awareness Multiplier.”

Why is “Referability” So Important? 

Two things actually:  And they won’t be new to most of you who have stuck with me so far in this post.

One thing is something that the Ehrenberg Bass institute has been telling us for a while now: At any given moment in time, 95% of your prospects are NOT in the market for your services. But you have to keep grabbing their attention for that precious moment when they are, so you can be top of mind. 

Second thing is that prospects can be an extension of your sales effort, but they need ammunition to advocate on your behalf. No gimmicky slogans, but a real story around how you can help their company achieve critical goals better than anyone else.

True story! I was chatting with a client of mine about a call he had with a prospect. The great thing is that this agency had captured the prospect’s attention, because he had tuned into a webinar in which my client participated. They had a great chat, my client’s product is truly disruptive, and they are getting really good at the clear messaging around why it is better. 

The prospect indicated that my client’s product fills a gap, an unmet need, and gave clear signals like he is sold.

But then he asked for the thing that would tun a “maybe” to a “yes”:  he wanted a narrative that he could articulate well enough to socialize amongst his stakeholders. Why? Because decisions at his organization are never made be one person, but often by lots of decision makers with different priorities and perspectives. 

(Funny enough, “Claude” told me that too about B2B decisions in general, but I loved hearing it from a real live person tasked with growing revenue for a terrific brand.)

Attention, if you get good at getting it, leads to awareness and then the real “Mountaineering” of revenue growth begins. 

• How many times do you have to convey the brand story once you have moved from Attention to Awareness?
• How do you shape the variations on the theme of your brand story to increase the possibility of grabbing someone’s attention?
• What are the complementary mechanisms for grabbing “attention”, that augment and amplify awareness?
• How do you garner enough credibility, after the awareness phase, to achieve trials?
• How do you turn trials into repeat business?
• How do you keep grabbing attention and converting to awareness? Attention from more prospects or to the same prospects, but hitting the sweet spot of when they actually might be in the market for your services?

In other words: “Rinse and repeat”?

(Of course, that presumes that you really have built the killer app that is truly differentiated and delights clients and keeps them coming back for more. But that will be the subject for another post.)

Thanks for your attention! If you want to discuss ways to grab and convert attention to awareness and plant the flag on the true summit of sales, I would be happy to have a chat.