However, that doesn’t just mean providing useful or interesting content—this isn’t a content marketing promotion. Most of the useful, interesting content in the world gets practically no attention.
When people actually want to pay attention, you can persuade them much more effectively. And at the same time, they’ll be happy that they found out about you.
What makes people pay attention?
So many things fight for our attention all the time that we’ve gotten very selective of what we notice. We’d end up in a mental asylum by the end of the day if we tried to pay attention to everything.
So, your marketing needs to stand out from the mass of potential things people could pay attention to.
To do that, you need to do something unusual. If you don’t, your message gets buried under everything else people see around them.
But it’s not enough to be different or unusual. People notice difference. But they don’t automatically pay attention to it.
Only meaningfully different things hold our attention. That is, something that we consider unusual and meaningful (=important) to us is worth our time and concentration.
All marketers believe that their messages are different than the competitors’ messages. And all marketers believe that their messages are important.
But you don’t decide what’s important. You don’t even decide what’s unusual.
Your target customers decide if your marketing is interesting or not. So, if you don’t know how your target customers perceive your marketing, you can’t predict how well your marketing will work.
You need to know what they perceive as unusual. And you need to know what’s important to them.
And then you have to focus your marketing on those things.
All that said, you shouldn’t be only after your target customers’ attention; you should focus on moving them toward buying from you.
What makes people buy?
The question might seem complicated. But it really isn’t.
People buy when they feel they have good reasons to do it. Those reasons can be emotional and/or logical.
The more compelling the reasons, the more likely people are to act. The most persuasive reasons to pay attention to you and buy from you form your value proposition.
So, you should figure out your value proposition. And then focus your marketing on it.
Marketing can seem like a complicated, confusing mess.
But the basics are quite straightforward: make people see compelling reasons to pay attention to what you’re saying and buy what you sell, and they’ll be happy to do both.
If you’d like to quickly identify which of your ideas are the most persuasive, try this simple 5-step exercise. It let’s you evaluate your ideas with perhaps uncomfortable honesty.
And if you have any questions about what makes people pay attention and buy, the comments are open below. I’m happy to help.
Peter Sandeen dreams of sailing with his wife and dogs when he’s not helping businesses stand out from the competition with value proposition marketing. Find out what makes people want to pay attention to you and buy your products and services—download the quick 5-step exercise that shows the core of your value proposition.
